In theory you can burn a book and the information isn’t “lost”, just scattered in the form of smoke, ash and heat and light. I think in practical terms you’d have to consider the ratio of the information processing needed to recover the data vs. what the entropy of the data is. Anything beyond a billion to one is effectively random. (Unless the premise of the Omega Point is that it becomes proportionately cheaper to restore lost information en mass, with the limit being using the entire universe to restore an entire universe’s worth of data).
We will probably never recover anyone who was frozen today, but more advanced preservation techniques may be available in the future.
And frankly, the more we learn about the brain, the more we realize just how very little we know about the brain. Every little step forward just raises more and more and more questions.
I try to keep up with the semi-educated person’s version of the current state of the art by visiting my alma mater’s Mind/Brain institute website. But despite studying perception and cognition there in the late 1970’s, and later at the neuro wards at the hospital (a fun fused neuropsychiatric rotation), I’m ridiculously, hopelessly behind on the topic, sadly. However, when these folks tell me that freezing and otherwise preserving brains to facilitate mind to machine upload is still a century or three away, I’ll tend to give their opinion more weight than the opinion of those folks proclaiming that “many now living will never die!”
If the alternative is oblivion, then cryopreservation to wake up in a society with vastly advanced problem solving abilities sounds like a good deal. Whats the worst that can happen, you die forever? that’ll happen anyway.
I do wonder if, in the far far future it’ll be possible to resurrect the consciousness of the dead. I don’t know how it’d work, but I don’t know if it can be ruled out as impossible either.
The connectome (a comprehensive map of neural connections) is no more than whole brain than a road atlas is the United States, and you can no more read someone’s mind or reproduce their consciousness in simulation of the connectome than you could visit the Grand Canyon by turning to the page with northern Arizona. Understanding how neurons are connected and where different areas show levels of activity during specific types of cognition is useful in the sense of being able to identify gross functions of cognition, but the really interesting phenomena pertaining to memory, affect, and association appear to occur due to activation at the level of individual neurons, and specifically, the potentiation of neurons which then leads to activating whole networks of associated neurons.
Any estimate that this capability will be available in “hundreds of years” is purely guesswork as the requisite capability to involves some means of reproducing molecular structure and state that is beyond anything we can even technically conceive of today, even at the level of a single neuron, much less 89 billion of them. It is likely impossible to reproduce human-like cognition in anything signficantly less complex than a brain, and copying the state of someone’s brain with sufficient fidelity to recreate actual cognitive processes is as magical as the “transporter” of Star Trek. You often see transhuman enthusiasts talk of “scanning the brain” but virtually none of them can actually explain what they mean by that at any useful level of detail notwithstanding the mechanics of how to go about it. If we someday are able to reproduce or simulate neural structures of the brain it’ll probably look far more like cloning than notions of “uploading”, and being able to reproduce the cognition of a cryopreserved brain are about as likely as being able to reverse combustion of a bonfire by turning smoke and ash back into logs.
Except…uhh…for thispractical experiment MIT is doing on rat cortex that has all of the elements you claim are impossible. Sure, it’s a many orders of magnitude difference in scale…
But in the rocket science industry, you’d be an utter idiot if you’d just put a sounding rocket into suborbital flight and then turned around and blathered about how flights to nearby planets were hundreds of years away. Yeah, sure, it’s not going to be easy, and you’ll need several orders of magnitude more resources, but it’s definitely feasible.
I mean, ok, maybe we just got a liquid fueled rocket to leave the test stand and ascend a few hundred feet. Still, even if you were a rocket scientist in that scenario, you’d be an utter moron if you just blithely decided a mission to another planet was hundreds of years away.
Also, Stranger, you are missing something really, really, really important. Who says someone has to work out how to copy a brain from just 1 sample? We can’t do that when we reverse engineer computer chips, it typically takes dozens to hundreds of instances of the chip. 99% of the information an “uploading” effort would be getting would come from other people’s brains. All the mechanistic details, all the dynamic behavior. The last 1% that gets taken from the frozen sample is which synapse types are used, roughly what the weight is for each link, and of course the complete connection map. Everything else would have come from previous test subjects or experiments on living tissue that was genetically modified to mimic the sample of interest…
Did you honestly think even for a second that nature can build something as complex as a brain and use completely unique parts every time?
Abstract neural networks, as well as the study (including numerical simulation) of bits of cerebral cortex and other system are a fruitful field of research, but none of these seem like they are going to help one resurrect a frozen corpse. You seem to be claiming that a totally dead and/or frozen brain is in fact OK, with all the information still there, just needing a jump-start or artificial neurons or whatever, but that is a bold claim that requires some experimental evidence, and the neurologist quoted above has hinted at no such thing. What about all the electrical and chemical potentials involved (which, if were they still there, the patient would be conscious)? The famous freezing wood frogs are cold-tolerant but not to cryogenic temperatures nor for centuries.
We aren’t at the “suborbital sounding rocket stage” yet–we are barely at the “combining charcoal and sulfur and stale piss and watching it fizzle” stage.
“A desperate man will grasp even the point of a sword.” Some people feel that maybe, just maybe, they will develop a technology that will make it possible, so why not give it a shot?
Seems to me the only people that a future society might want to revive from the past are great artists/composers/poets/writers/etc.
All the rest of us? Why? There are already billions of humans around, likely to be more than we ever have need of again, if automation continues as it has. What would be the point of adding more people with obsolete skills and knowledge and no social network?
And even with the super-creative-talented people, wouldn’t you only want them if they happened to die when their mind and talents were still healthy and functional?
So Mozart (dead at 35 from some fever) sure!
Norman Rockwell (dead at 84 from Alzheimer’s) nope.
Again though, if we could unfreeze some no-name peon from the 13th century would we?
Yes, actually, to learn something of how people lived if nothing else.
A handful for scientific curiosity? Okay. (I vote for reviving one of the architects-in-charge of building the pyramids, so we can do settle those theories one and for all.)
But that post above about people demanding that the government sponsor and pay for the revival of EVERYBODY? Insane.
Ok. So let’s say, again, revival is possible and the cost is affordable by your country. One of your loved ones is about to die. You don’t have the money for the process available right now.
You are going to not demand such a universal right?
Not the claim I am making actually. I am positing a society with a general ability to produce working brains from scratch. (Most likely digitally only, they can’t make them from meat). They don’t need the information from the frozen sample at all to make a working brain, just they would end up with one with a random personality and no starting knowledge.
The frozen sample is constraining that model from a random selection from the possibility space of all valid brains to a narrower sample of possibilities more like the original person. The more data recovered the closer the constraints and the more like the original the ‘clone’ is like.
Due to redundancy in the brain I think under the best case there would be no difference from the original a test could measure because the brain has so much redundancy but I can’t prove this until the first real results.
Note that in this scenario even a badly damaged sample gives some information. All the cryopreserved can be brought back just many of them would be missing some or all memories, have very different personalities, etc.
Also stranger I am disappointed in you. Nothing I just wrote isn’t something you couldn’t have worked out first.
Sometimes you can’t even tell the difference. These are brand-new, f’rinstance. (image courtesy of Forever 21)
Heh. “Forever” 21, get it? I crack me up.
I once read an account of how a certain fashion designer gave a pair of stock blue jeans to a biker and had him wear them every day for a year. Subsequently every rip, fray, and stain was painstakingly reconstructed in a limited edition of designer jeans.
There’s a difference between “being able to scan brains in the future” and “being able to take brains frozen now and scan them in the future”, although it’s possible that if you can solve the brain scanning problem (and I agree with Stranger on the likelihood of this) then sorting out the mess that freezing will make of your brain will be a lesser issue.
You can’t freeze charges cryogenically. So you can’t capture a true copy of anyone’s personality that way.
And “bringing back” someone who is “missing […] all memories” or having “very different personalities” is an odd use of the term “bringing back”. So idiosyncratic as to be essentially meaningless.
