Forget the problem of repairing the brain. Think of it in uploading
terms. The theoretical question is: "If you know where every single
atom in a frozen brain lies, could you extract an model of the brain's
operation with such high resolution that the informational damage caused
by freezing would not be significant (on a damage scale calibrated by
the effects of neural death and quantum/thermal randomness in day-to-day
operation)?" I think this sounds reasonable; damage to structure on the
>10^6-atom-scale may appear to destroy the information contained on that
level of abstraction, but the same information should still be
obtainable from the internal structure of the mostly-untouched inner
volumes of the 10^6-atom units being shoved around. If so, then the
practical question is extracting the information without causing exactly
the sort of atomic-scale disruption that would destroy that level of
abstraction as well.
--
sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
http://pobox.com/~sentience/beyond.html
Typing in Dvorak Programming with Patterns Writing in Gender-neutral
Voting for Libertarians Heading for Singularity There Is A Better Way
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:03:30 MDT