Re: Cryonics and information theory

From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Mon Jul 07 2003 - 03:57:17 MDT

  • Next message: Giu1i0 Pri5c0: "Creating transhumanist-friendly mainstream big media"

    Brett Paatsch wrote:
    >
    > What it the state of the art currently in scanning? Its been my
    > impression that the atomic level granularity of a scan that I
    > imagine to be necessary can only be done by destroying each
    > layer in reading it. Is this the case currently?

    It *makes no difference*. The universe doesn't *care* which particles you
    use. The product equivalency notice is guaranteed by the basic structure
    of quantum physics. Two states with two bosons interchanged are not just
    similar states but IDENTICAL states - their complex amplitudes add, just
    like cases where the same photon takes two different paths to arrive at
    the same final point.

    > It would seem to be a relatively simple exercise to drop a
    > sheeps brain (comparable in size to the human brain into liquid
    > nitrogen) and then see what sort of freezing damage arises
    > givin an indication as to whether the information can be
    > extracted once we have something approaching the scanning
    > technology required. Obviously the data storage requirements
    > are going to be a challenge could we now scan non destructively
    > say any 5 millimetre cube within a frozen sheep brain and
    > store the data?

    If you are doing a cryonics revival, you are doing it after the
    Singularity. This is what I meant when I spoke of people being killed by
    underestimating post-Singularity capabilities.

    -- 
    Eliezer S. Yudkowsky                          http://singinst.org/
    Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
    


    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Mon Jul 07 2003 - 04:06:25 MDT