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A Startup is Pitching a Mind-Uploading Service That is '100 Percent Fatal' (technologyreview.com)
The startup accelerator Y Combinator is known for supporting audacious companies in its popular three-month boot camp. There's never been anything quite like Nectome, though. From a report: Next week, at YC's "demo days," Nectome's cofounder, Robert McIntyre, is going to describe his technology for exquisitely preserving brains in microscopic detail using a high-tech embalming process. Then the MIT graduate will make his business pitch. As it says on his website: "What if we told you we could back up your mind?" So yeah. Nectome is a preserve-your-brain-and-upload-it company. Its chemical solution can keep a body intact for hundreds of years, maybe thousands, as a statue of frozen glass. The idea is that someday in the future scientists will scan your bricked brain and turn it into a computer simulation. That way, someone a lot like you, though not exactly you, will smell the flowers again in a data server somewhere.
This story has a grisly twist, though. For Nectome's procedure to work, it's essential that the brain be fresh. The company says its plan is to connect people with terminal illnesses to a heart-lung machine in order to pump its mix of scientific embalming chemicals into the big carotid arteries in their necks while they are still alive (though anesthetized). The company has consulted with lawyers familiar with California's two-year-old End of Life Option Act, which permits doctor-assisted suicide for terminal patients, and believes its service will be legal. The product is "100 percent fatal," says McIntyre. "That is why we are uniquely situated among the Y Combinator companies."
This story has a grisly twist, though. For Nectome's procedure to work, it's essential that the brain be fresh. The company says its plan is to connect people with terminal illnesses to a heart-lung machine in order to pump its mix of scientific embalming chemicals into the big carotid arteries in their necks while they are still alive (though anesthetized). The company has consulted with lawyers familiar with California's two-year-old End of Life Option Act, which permits doctor-assisted suicide for terminal patients, and believes its service will be legal. The product is "100 percent fatal," says McIntyre. "That is why we are uniquely situated among the Y Combinator companies."
These preserved brains will at some point just be recognized as what they are (medical trash) and be disposed off. It is far to easy to make more humans, nobody will care to revive some fossils that have fallen out of time. That is if the possibility is even there in the first place.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
So we are to capture and freeze the state of mind right before death. Often from a slow painful process. We keep this state constant for extended period of time.
This doesn't sound appealing.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Does death sound appealing?
A person frozen in this state is clearly not conscious. So, you won't be experiencing anything at all. There is no way to see the future, so there is no way to know whether or not the technology to resurrect you from this meat Popsicle will ever exist, let alone will actually be used on you. And assuming that all happens, there is no way to know what your existence will be like.
But.......the alternative is to just die.
As I understand, death by natural causes is usually pretty slow and horrible.
If that were true, everytime someone on Star Trek stepped through a transporter they would be dead too.
The problem is that this may happen when you fall asleep. We don't know. I've always called it the "transporter problem" because I came to it from thinking about the transporter in Star Trek. Like you have.
The issue is that if I made an absolutely perfect replica of me at the molecular level, and assuming consciousness fully resides in the physical flesh (which I believe), then the replica would think he's me. He would not think he's a replica. Therefore, I can be a replica and not know it. I know I'm not because what I just described isn't possible.
But the issue is that when I go to sleep at night, I lose consciousness. When I awake, it's me again.
Or is it?
"I" don't have to survive that. Whoever I am tomorrow will think they're the same person that I am now because they will remember all my experiences (including this one), so there's no reason for the consciousness residing in my brain tomorrow to be the same as today. We literally have no way of knowing how that works.
This was also very well explored by the movie "Multiplicity", although they added some great comic elements that took it in a different direction.
Do you have ESP?