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Well, it seems reasonable to postulate about the future since we're talking about living forever. The potential impacts include whatever might be happening befo

Well, it seems reasonable to postulate about the future since we're talking about living forever. The potential impacts include whatever might be happening before you die. And, like the first link I included, it's interesting to consider the possibility that you consciousness could be recreated sometime even after you die based upon a recording of your activity, whether a blog post, a 'brain dump', or something else entirely. I guess stepping back from the details, the questions is: why shut down the sense of wonder and possibility?

jacquesm 17y ago
> And, like the first link I included, it's interesting to consider the possibility that you consciousness could be recreated sometime even after you die based upon a recording of your activity, whether a blog post, a 'brain dump', or something else entirely. It's very interesting, that's why it makes for great science fiction. Science fiction can be an awesome inspiration for real science and plenty of things in real life today were science fiction not that long ago. But the link between knowing that our brains store and process information and storing a copy of that state and bringing it back to life again in some other substrate (another brain or a digital simulation of one) is a very large distance away from our current capabilities. > why shut down the sense of wonder and possibility? That's not my intention. The thing that bothers me is that it seems as though a fairly large number of people are living under the impression that these things are 'just around the corner'. I'm all for trying to achieve some or all of this, but I think we should be realistic about our expectations. The 'anti aging' market is the modern equivalent of snake oil and there are plenty of salesmen and more than a few of the gullible. And 'uploading/storing/downloading' is another order of magnitude more complicated than simple preservation of what we have.

jacquesm 17y ago

> And, like the first link I included, it's interesting to consider the possibility that you consciousness could be recreated sometime even after you die based upon a recording of your activity, whether a blog post, a 'brain dump', or something else entirely. It's very interesting, that's why it makes for great science fiction. Science fiction can be an awesome inspiration for real science and plenty of things in real life today were science fiction not that long ago. But the link between knowing that our brains store and process information and storing a copy of that state and bringing it back to life again in some other substrate (another brain or a digital simulation of one) is a very large distance away from our current capabilities. > why shut down the sense of wonder and possibility? That's not my intention. The thing that bothers me is that it seems as though a fairly large number of people are living under the impression that these things are 'just around the corner'. I'm all for trying to achieve some or all of this, but I think we should be realistic about our expectations. The 'anti aging' market is the modern equivalent of snake oil and there are plenty of salesmen and more than a few of the gullible. And 'uploading/storing/downloading' is another order of magnitude more complicated than simple preservation of what we have.