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."

Comments

And why would anybody in the future care?

[gweihir]

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.

Re:And why would anybody in the future care?

[TWX]

You might find some historians or anthropologists that would have interest, but I could see them opting to 'resurrect' either brains from people that they can establish documentation-on for being interesting, or else they would only perform the procedure on a few subjects that their budget allows-for in order to see if it's worthwhile.

Results will either be messed up due to records corruption so they'll get the importance of a given subject wrong and mistakenly resurrect Jonathan Goldsmith, or else the end-result will be something like those failed Robocop II examples where the subjects immediately kill themselves in-horror at what they've become.

Re:And why would anybody in the future care?

[RatBastard]

Now, some future civilization may need interstellar ramship pilots to seed distant planets with teraforming algae.

Re:And why would anybody in the future care?

[clovis]

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.

I don't doubt that our descendants will want to revive some of us for an annual punishment ceremony.

Re:And why would anybody in the future care?

[CrimsonAvenger]

Pretty much exactly what I was thinking when I read TFS. Checker Peersa, eh?

Re:And why would anybody in the future care?

[Swave An deBwoner]

Via the fuck() system call of course.

Re:And why would anybody in the future care?

[gnick]

One question I ask when picking ANY service provider is, "Will they be able to provide this service?" If the answer is, "No," I cease to consider them a service provider. I don't think these guys even have a road map on going from "brain pickling" to "mind uploading."

Re:And why would anybody in the future care?

[bugs2squash]

It will work perfectly and in 30 years time the brains will be revived for sale as childrens' toys. Maybe placed inside some kind of earthenware container so the kids can grow chia on top, or set up with an audio output and made to tell stories like a kind of damp version of alexa.

Maybe it will come with a range of colored hermit-crab like shells or as the controller for a special lego kit with motors and lights.

It can wonder how long it will be before it winds up where the goldfish went.

There may not be a heaven. But we engineered hell.

[jellomizer]

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.

Re:There may not be a heaven. But we engineered he

[wonkey_monkey]

If the state doesn't change, it can't experience anything.

What's the point?

[RatBastard]

What's the point? You (the person being "backed up") is still dead. There might someday be a copy of you, but you, the you alive right now, the one reading this, is dead. You won't wake up in the future. You won't come back. You will be dead.

Re:What's the point?

[110010001000]

If that were true, everytime someone on Star Trek stepped through a transporter they would be dead too.

Re:What's the point?

[mysidia]

That may very well be true... Who is to say the person who stepped out is not a brand new person?

The person who was beamed away suffered a death though instant and painless from the dematerialization.

Then an imposter was materialized who has all the same bodily molecules, but NOT the same immortal soul.....

Re:What's the point?

[hey!]

Well, I actually value my memories, apart from any issue of qualia. I'd certainly give up a few minutes of conscious life, particularly painful conscious life, in return for my memories being preserved.

That said, consider the Star Trek transporter. It converts your body to energy, transmits that energy to a different place, and reassembles it. Would you use a machine that did that? Before you answer, note that it's just as reasonable to describe the operation of the device this way: it destroys you and then creates an exact duplicate of you in a different place. There is in fact no material, observable way to choose between these characterizations; it's just quibbling over terminology.

Given that, if you'd be willing to use a transporter at all, you should be willing to use a perfect copying mechanism, even if it kills one of your copies.

In Clifford Simak's Hugo-winning 1963 novel, Way Station, he posits a method if interstellar travel that works precisely that way. An exact duplicate of the traveler is created at the destination, after which the copy at the origin is unceremoniously killed and dumped.

Re:What's the point?

[mark-t]

The star trek transporter works by measuring a target's impression on spacetime at a subatomic level, and then creating a 4-dimensional hologram of that impression at the destination point. The inverse of that hologram is then applied to the source point, cancelling out the probability of the target being at the source location, while the probability of it being at the destination rises to certainty.

No disintegration required.

Re:What's the point?

[Trailer Trash]

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.

Re:What's the point?

[mea2214]

Is any of this going to be on the test?

Bobiverse!

[s_p_oneil]

I for one welcome our new clones of Bob overlords...

http://bobiverse.wikia.com/wik...

Re:There may not be a heaven. But we engineered he

[Anonymous Coward]

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.
 

I will be first in line

[110010001000]

Fortunately for them, my brain can be contained in just 640k of memory.

Re:I will be first in line

[Falos]

I tried to make this double as a hex color joke. It was a while before I admitted it can't.

Gift certificates

[OrangeTide]

Do you offer gift certificates? I have a few "special" people on my Christmas list this year.

See through scheme

[AnotherAnonymousUser]

Nice try, zombies. We're on to your business model.

What is old is new

[dyfet]

Ancient Egypt also had high priests that made a somewhat similar sales pitch...

That's were the hook comes in

[SuperKendall]

I want to be entombed in my glass block, holding a note that says "I know where 100lbs of gold is buried".

Of course, this means you have to guess what kind of thing will be valuable enough 100 or 1000 years from now for someone to extract your consciousness. You could also try some reverse psychology along the lines of a sign that read "I was frozen believing that God is real. Change my mind".

Re:Great VC Pitch?

[Khashishi]

That's not really all that unique (cf. Blackwater or xe or whatever they call themselves nowadays).