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: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.

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".