New startup Nectome will back up your mind, but you will have to die in the process.
Nectome wants to preserve your brain until it can be uploaded into a cloud where you can live forever.
MIT graduate and cofounder Robert McIntyre will be describing his technology at YC's Demo Days next week. which This technology should preserve your brain in a way that will allow it to be uploaded to a computer once the technology arrives. It involves undertaking a new embalming process while the brain is fresh. Meaning you have to be alive, and this process will kill you! Stephen Hawking just missed the boat, it would have been great if he would have been the first correctly preserved brain.
Nectome was recently rewarded with an 80,000$ prize for preserving a pig’s brain so well that every single synapse inside it could be seen with an electron microscope. They are now collaborating with Edward Boyden, a lead neuroscientist at MIT. The company feels its service will be legal and in compliance with California’s End of Life Option Act. They say it will feel just like assisted suicide.
Currently 25 people have already paid 10,000$ to be among the first on the waiting list. A first to market competitor Alcor Life Extension Foundation already has 150 bodies and head in liquid nitrogen. There is debate whether the technique Alcor uses damages the brain beyond repair or readability. Alcorwill try to bring the people back to life, where as Nectome will perfectly preserve your web of synapses to recreate it in a computer eventually.
The next goal for Nectome will be to see if they can read memories from the dead tissue of a preserved brain. This will prove that the information is there and may be copy pasted onto a neural operating system someday. The planned protocol needs to be published in medical journals. To give the communities time to discuss the medical process and the ethics surrounding it.
You can check out Nectome's website to learn more here
What do you think? Will they find and store 'consciousness'? Can it be found and stored? Do you think Ancor has a better chance of success preserving the entire body to bring the dead tissue back to life? Or do you think cloud brains will be more possible?
I often think about living forever. Mostly because religion says that we will in fact live forever. I don't particularly like the thought. They say too much of anything can be bad, I don't think time is an exception.
Woot woot,
Uploading thoughts, and memories may be an achievable feat, uploading consciousness, I'm not so sure. Let's say both are possible, it's still a simulated version, and there will still be some form of cellular degradation.
Our brains weren't meant to be preserved. This isn't even a question of ethics. It's really an inarguable fact. I believe, this is not something that will never be perfected, even if it's achieved. This is only my opinion. I could be totally wrong..
I suppose if all that's being extracted is the data within, then cellular degradation wouldn't even matter as long as the data remained in tact..Man this is really interesting.
It would just be accounting for all 6 billion signals and connecting them right. It can be done on worms and small things who's brains have smaller sets of inputs and reflexes.
I'm not so sure what the consciousness is myself yet. Say this didn't kill you in the future. You would keep living and your new experiences would create new connections, you would be different. Where as the cloud ai you would have different, digital experiences. Eventually your ai consiousness and your self that has kept living in the physical world, would become more and more different.
I'm not sure where it will go. I think the Brian holds the keys to all of that though and supposing we can keep learning more, we will find out how to do it. Redimentarilly at first maybe, but it would only get better and better. Like the first attempt by Alcor compared to this attempt.
I trust that you have seen the movie Transcendence? If you have not, I would highly recommend checking it out.
My memories and work are already being uploaded to the Blockchain.... where I will live forever and ever amen.
So my new steemit name would be (at)Frankenstein?
Seriously, I don't think either of these methods are for me, even if I could afford it.
Interesting, I think the question would be will this retain the individual, or will this just be a set of data effectively creating an artificial intelligence based of your memories
I am so okay not uploading my mind, relive high school? I think not :P
I think that it will happen eventually. But, I didn't realize we were this close. If the spirit is willing then there is a chance of transfer. If the spirit would rather move on to another body, where it can still appreciate things like sex and chocolate, then it will sabotage the transfer. But this is probably for people who don't know they are spirit anyway.
@Lahvista
I would not trust this tech, mostly since I think the current running in our brain are rather significant, I might not know a lot of brain science, but I thought that the current running in the brain is the significant part, not so much the shape of the synapses (well might be they are equally important), which would leave this technology dead on arrival.
Brain connectome's are inconceivably complex; a single nerve can connect to 8,000 others, and the brain contains millions of cells. Today, imaging the connections in even a square millimeter of mouse brain is an overwhelming task. This technology as opposed to Ancor is claiming to capture all of the 'current' you are describing, that's what scientists call the connectome. That is why the process happens while you are alive. By the time you die, that current has already shut down. Nectome captures it and freezes it while it is still going. Still no proof that it works yet, only that in theory all the information is there, and preserved.
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