If cryonics is physically/mathematically possible, then it is
technologically possible, and barring a return to the dark ages, will be
technologically feasible. What I mean by physically/mathematically possible
is that there may not be enough information in a frozen brain to interpolate
what the corresponding working brain looked like. Suppose my brain is
frozen, it changes from (unfrozen) state Z to (frozen) state Z'. If for all
(frozen) x', there is one-and-only-one corresponding (unfrozen) x, then a
few billion nanocomputers running in parallel and given a 3D scan of my
frozen brain (Z') should be able to figure out how to put everything back
together into Z. However, it may be that too much information is lost,
perhaps there are several different possible states that can result in a
frozen Z'.
I toyed with the idea of proving that it's possible, today, using AI
computer vision techniques. The idea would be to come up with a computer
vision program which can look at microscopic slides of groups of cells that
had been frozen and are suffering ice damage, and return a picture of what
the group of cells looked like before being frozen. Use a neural net, and
train it on several (thousand) examples, where you have photos of the cell
group both before and after freezing, so you can use the correct examples to
train the net. After much learning, if it's possible, and if it's designed
correctly and has enough computing power, it should be able to get it right.
Unfortunately, I know very little about implementing the techniques of
computer vision.
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Zeb Haradon
My personal website:
http://www.inconnect.com/~zharadon/ubunix/
A movie I'm directing:
http://www.elevatormovie.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:03:31 MDT