31 ms·

A startup is pitching a mind-uploading service that is “100 percent fatal”

247 points by sethbannon 9y ago

jaredhansen 9y ago
The original press release from the team has much more detail on the technology itself, and is here: http://www.prweb.com/releases/prweb15276833.htm http://www.prweb.com/releases/prweb15276833.htm
OrganicMSG 9y ago
I guess that's one way of managing customer expectation.
- harryf 9y ago
  Getting to non-fatal is just a future implementation detail
  - prepend 9y ago
    It’s a feature not a bug.
    - acrefoot 9y ago
      Given that an early death is only possibly prescribed in cases where a patient is terminally ill (as determined by two physicians), where a patient is of sound mind, and is often in pain, it can be a reasonable alternative to a lot of the (often expensive) interventions that don't do much more than prolong agony in the last weeks of life.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- tootie 9y ago
  How are they going to compete with Amazon's competing service? https://www.theonion.com/popular-new-amazon-service-just-comes-to-your-house-and-1819917496 https://www.theonion.com/popular-new-amazon-service-just-com...
dontreact 9y ago
Reconstructing a human in silico from a dead brain is likely to be a very expensive process. Why would anyone in the future be interested in going through with it for any more than a few select old brains when there will be plenty of dead brains to go around at that time?
- Talyen42 9y ago
  that's why you bury some treasure and keep the location locked away in your brain!
  - Jeff_Brown 9y ago
    And hope they haven't learned to synthesize it or mine it from asteroids when it's time to wake up.
- cliffy 9y ago
  Would probably start out as being prohibitively expensive and trend towards relatively cheap if it's possible and there's demand. If it's possible then it's hard to imagine there not being demand.
- prepend 9y ago
  You memorize the bitcoin private key before preservation. In a way that requires consciousness to reconstruct. Public key verifies the value and there’s a smart contract with some percentage to the successful recoverer. Depending on the recoverer’s profit margin they will restore whenever there’s enough value to make it worthwhile. Whether bitcoin will exist and whether it will appreciate is a different story. But assuming bitcoin exists, resurrection is a certainty.
  - carbocation 9y ago
    Then they threaten to resurrect you 1000x and torture each of your resurrected selves for 1000 years unless you tell them the private key. Roko's basilisk meets bitcoin.
sarabande 9y ago
In the case when you die, but your brain still exists, and it starts processing it again in a new host (computer or organic), isn't that not you anymore? Why would my former self want that? Is this a solved philosophical problem for which literature exists?
- monitron 9y ago
  I feel the same way. There's a scene in the book Old Man's War by John Scalzi which drives this point home in a way that has really stuck with me.
- aurellem 9y ago
  If you want to get into some of the literature around mind uploading, I'd start with some of Daniel Dennett's work such as "Consciousness Explained". If you think that it's possible for a computer program to have its own sense of self, then it's interesting to think about what it would feel like for that program to be stopped, copied to a new computer, and then started again. There's definitely a lot of literature and debate around these issues!
  - rosser 9y ago
    I'm not sure that a book written by a dude whose position is basically, "the direct experience you have of your own consciousness is an illusion" is necessarily the best choice for exploring what a "sense of self" or "mind" are all about. "Consciousness Explained" should really have been titled "Consciousness Explained Away".
- macintux 9y ago
  This question descends from an ancient philosophical question; see the Ship of Theseus[0]. CGP Grey has a good look at the question wrt Star Trek teleportation[1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus [1] https://youtu.be/nQHBAdShgYI https://youtu.be/nQHBAdShgYI
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
prepend 9y ago
“What if we told you we can backup your mind?” ...and never restore it. As someone who has lived through many backup formats that stop being supported, don’t work, or decay with time this seems monumentally stupid as anything other than basic research. I applaud their goal, digital sentience, but sorry for any of their customers. They need a pitch that works on the recently dead (eg, current cryo companies) as I don’t think there are any countries that allow euthenasia for life extension purposes.
- tlb 9y ago
  What probability of restoration would be high enough to consider it? The future timelines in which restoration does happen are probably extremely interesting to be part of, given how far tech would have progressed. (There are lots of sucky future timelines too, say with nuclear holocausts, where you'd be unlikely to be restored.) No: 100% chance of death. Yes: 100-X% chance of death, X% chance of getting to see a super-interesting future. For me, X wouldn't have to be very high to make it worth trying.
  - prepend 9y ago
    Assuming there is a cost, the trade off is reduced money to your heirs or charity. So while it is non-zero, that doesn’t mean it’s worth the cost. That’s why I brought up backups. Remember Zip drives for backup? Imagine if there was no reader at time of launch. And how likely it was to build the reader without any changes to spec that the existing Zip disk could be used to restore without any problems. Even with read and write available, those things didn’t work well. You could say “0% chance of restore if you don’t buy, but non-zero if you do buy; therefore buy.” But that only works if the cost is zero.
    - tlb 9y ago
      Would you pay 5% of your net worth for a 10% chance of recovery?
      - AstralStorm 9y ago
mead5432 9y ago
I'm not sure I'd want to be the one to test the MVP.
- lev99 9y ago
  I'd probably choose this over other cryo companies. It's a higher quality preserve.
reasonattlm 9y ago
Underneath it all, this is a manifestation of an important split in the cryonics community. One group is (I think overly) critical of present vitrification approaches and the planned future of those approaches. They believe that these approaches are broken, and nothing of value is preserved. I think this is just as ridiculous as saying there is no room for improvement - it is clearly the case that, e.g. nematodes vitrified using the present technologies can be restored and show preserved memory. That group has a strong overlap with pattern identity theorists, who are quite comfortable with a copy of them living in the future, and throwing away the original brain. So the intersection of these two groups is motivated to work on technologies such as aldehyde-stablized cryopreservation (vitrifixation) that are incompatible with the future goal of thawing, restoration, and repair, as they are not reversible short of far distant molecular nanotechnology. Their aim is to produce the best possible record of data of the mind with the intent of reading into a machine environment in the future, then discarding it. To my eyes this is a terrible, terrible, mistaken view on identity, and one that will cause a great deal of existential harm when it is extended from theory to action. The rest of the cryonics community is interested in a technology path that leads to reversible vitrification in the near future, and some kind of union with the tissue engineering / organ engineering community. They want the flesh restored and repaired, and the end goal of cryopreservation is some form of advanced cell/bio/nanotechnology that can achieve that end. This is why Alcor, etc, is not adopting vitrifixation. So on the one hand, great to see progress, and vitrifixation is an excellent advance in tissue preservation in the general sense. It will be of use in many areas of research. On the other hand, pattern identity theory seems to have many of the aspects of religion. A copy of you is clearly not you, and no amount of handwaving is going to make that the case.
- CryptoPunk 9y ago
  The philosophical difference between the two groups is very interesting. I tend to agree with your take, and would greatly prefer to see advances made in reversible vitrification so it can be widely used.
- jiggunjer 9y ago
  "A copy of you is clearly not you, and no amount of handwaving is going to make that the case." What an unnuanced way of stating your opinion. Views on what "identity" is differ, clearly.
kaizendad 9y ago
Seems like a big bet on the concept that the physical structure of the brain preserves enough information to resurrect a consciousness. If electrical transmissions are at all required, then this would render a brain nothing more than an amusing curio. Although, given that their target market is already those planning to be euthanized, I suppose the tradeoff of one's brain being an amusing curio vs. one's brain being worm food is not a reason to avoid this service. If they are correct, it brings up an interesting question: given that the technology requires a slow, planned process to preserve the brain, at what point should a uniquely brilliant person be euthanized, in order to preserve them, rather than allowing them to die by sudden misadventure, e.g. not paying attention and getting hit by a car crossing the street. Given that the output of so many brilliant people is skewed to when they are young, do we just start proactively euthanizing the top 0.05% of the population when they reach 50, to preserve our best for the future?
- prepend 9y ago
  Clearly, morality and the greater good of humanity requires that we proactively euthanize any genius who hits 60. Even against their will. All assets should go to the euthanasia team to cover costs.
  - manmal 9y ago
    Do you refer to a certain Star Trek episode? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half_a_Life_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half_a_Life_(Star_Trek:_The_... (Ritual suicide at age 60 embedded in culture)
    - prepend 9y ago
      I had forgotten about this. I bet I subsciously used it. I was actually thinking of Logan’s Run when writing my comment.
    - cpeterso 9y ago
      Or Logan's Run. (Ritual suicide embedded in culture, age 21 in the novel and 30 in the film)
PeanutNore 9y ago
“Burdening future generations with our brain banks is just comically arrogant. Aren’t we leaving them with enough problems?” Hendricks told me this week after reviewing Nectome’s website. “I hope future people are appalled that in the 21st century, the richest and most comfortable people in history spent their money and resources trying to live forever on the backs of their descendants. I mean, it’s a joke, right? They are cartoon bad guys.” Best part of the article for sure
- savanaly 9y ago
  I don't feel too bad about it. If economic growth stays even slightly positive it won't take too many generations for our descendants to be unimaginably more wealthy than we are. They can put up with our brain banks and dry their tears with their one dollar notes that are worth $1,000 in 2018 dollars.
  - kingbirdy 9y ago
    That's not how inflation works - in the future, the value of the dollar will be less, not more.
    - twoodfin 9y ago
      Not universally: The value of $1 (nominal) worth of computing resources and information storage in 2018 is surely thousands of times the value of $1 (nominal) worth of the same in 1958. EDIT: Some quick math on deflation in storage costs. The IBM 305 RAMAC[1] was introduced in 1956, provided 5MB of magnetic storage and cost $3,200/month in 1956 dollars. To pick a random modern storage provider with a similar pricing model, in 2018 Dropbox offers 1TB for $10/month. Putting aside all the other advantages Dropbox gives you over a 305, the pure storage value of $1 (nominal) has gone from 1.6KB/month to 100GB/month, a multiple of over 50 million. [1] https://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/650/650_pr2.html https://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/650/650_pr2.html
      - notahacker 9y ago
Jeff_Brown 9y ago
Although I would not feel immortal knowing that a copy of me would live forever, I would if I could gradually replace each of my neurons with invulnerable* synthetic ones. * which grew and pruned themselves the same as organic ones
omegaworks 9y ago
Michael Hendricks' take is the best: > “Burdening future generations with our brain banks is just comically arrogant. Aren’t we leaving them with enough problems?” Hendricks told me this week after reviewing Nectome’s website. “I hope future people are appalled that in the 21st century, the richest and most comfortable people in history spent their money and resources trying to live forever on the backs of their descendants. I mean, it’s a joke, right? They are cartoon bad guys.” We are on the verge of great shifts in climate and energy resources. Millions of humans are already migrating across continents in search of food security and an escape from perpetual war. We're already seeing climate refugees from vulnerable island nations, consumed by the rising seas. Entire governments have been toppled in the Arab Spring, replaced with authoritarian regimes installed to protect the borders of the west. And a few of the richest people in human history are using their unimaginable resources to try to live forever.
- coldacid 9y ago
  On the upside, it's not like they'll need physical bodies for their immortality. Just a quantum mainframe with an unlimited power supply.
- OscarCunningham 9y ago
  Are you equally outraged by people who spend $10000 on other leisure activities?
- knowThySelfx 9y ago
  Relax, it is not gonna happen. Even if it "happens" in a sense, it won't be "them". Tech dissent is not much appreciated in yc, esp when a yc fellow is backing this.
  - omegaworks 9y ago
    >Relax, it is not gonna happen. It already is happening in some sense. Prices for many drugs people need to cope with chronic disease continue to rise. The price of insulin, for example, has tripled in the past decade.[1] >Tech dissent is not much appreciated in yc, esp when a yc fellow is backing this. If you're accusing me of luddism, you've missed my point entirely. Do you think we should automatically fall in line when marketing materials are posted to this discussion forum? 1. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/whats-behind-skyrocketing-insulin-prices https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/whats-behind-skyrocketin...
rhombocombus 9y ago
This sounds just like the transcardial perfusion that I used to do on hamsters and rats in graduate school. After doing and witnessing hundreds of those I think I will pass, I'd rather rot. What's wrong with dying? I am a huge fan of living and of life, but as cool as it sounds to have my consciousness reconstituted in some server closet, being perfused with formalin (and whatever else) before I'm technically dead is not something I place a high level of confidence in working, and it also makes me viscerally uncomfortable.
paradroid 9y ago
Whether you can get derive function from structure is a big if. This is for the vain.
doorbumper 9y ago
It seems interesting from the perspective of the customer, but the really interesting thing is that if this succeeds, they will have access to brain imaging data that no one else has. You can't normally get such detailed scans of a human brain, because it requires the human to die. It's a business model that allows them to accelerate the pace of research without the human rights violations that come from human experimentation. The real value in this company is in what research arises from the data they gather, while being funded by people paying to donate their brains to research. It's a diabolical everybody wins situation.
- mulmen 9y ago
  It's unclear to me how the euthanized brain donors "win" in the absence of proof that memories can be recovered.
  - vokep 9y ago
    They certainly don't lose. They are all to be patients who are going soon anyways, who opt for the process.
  - Spivak 9y ago
    They're going to die anyway and get to contribute to scientific progress and get the best chance possible today for immortality.
    - mulmen 9y ago
      They could contribute to scientific progress by donating the money to a research university. Depending on your concept of immortality donating sperm or eggs seems to have a higher chance of success.
  - doorbumper 9y ago
    It's not a guaranteed win, no. However, if they are at the point where they wish to be euthanized then their outlook is grim. However, even a minuscule chance is better than zero chance, correct? In addition, by donating their brain structure they're directly fueling the research needed to improve that chance.
noetic_techy 9y ago
Preserve my brain. Liquidate all assets and put them into an index fund. Boot me back up when I'm rich in a new sleeve.
- nooron 9y ago
  Think about the impact this would have on interest rates. Closest thing I can imagine would be this: http://www.standupeconomist.com/pdf/misc/interstellar.pdf http://www.standupeconomist.com/pdf/misc/interstellar.pdf
intrasight 9y ago
Can we see if they can "wake up" a fly? I'd like some proof-of-concept before investing my brain in this.
- kolpa 9y ago
  You're missing the point. The point is to get money and brains for imaging and drug research, not really to clone people.
- mr_toad 9y ago
  We don’t yet have the resources to simulate the brain of even a fruit fly. Even the neural simulation of a flatworm is challenging. https://www.jefftk.com/p/whole-brain-emulation-and-nematodes https://www.jefftk.com/p/whole-brain-emulation-and-nematodes
ai_ia 9y ago
Reading this thread makes me realize how much closer we are going towards Black Mirror Universe. Scary.
davidkuhta 9y ago
Interesting idea. The phrasing on the deposit gave me a lol: > fully refundable if you change your mind
debrisapron 9y ago
"I hope future people are appalled that in the 21st century, the richest and most comfortable people in history spent their money and resources trying to live forever" I hope nobody tells this guy about chemotherapy, he's gonna flip.
- Turing_Machine 9y ago
  > I hope nobody tells this guy about chemotherapy, he's gonna flip. Or about vaccines. Or about antibiotics. Or about sterile surgery procedures. Or about running water and electricity. Or about.... Just about everything that makes up our modern quality of life was only available to a privileged class when it first came on the scene. My bet is that future people won't be appalled in the slightest. Something tells me that Professor Hendricks isn't living a Neanderthal lifestyle (or even a modern Third World lifestyle).
  - anentropic 9y ago
    these are all significantly different from living forever
Invictus0 9y ago
I'm beginning to think that YCombinator will fund anything with MIT on it. Just last month I spoke with a YC founder that was trying to get me to pay $50 to have a 30 minute phone call with people working at Google. Not an interview, not a phone call with some executive--just a phone call with Google's rank and file. I've lost a lot of respect for YC as venture capital firm.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
hartator 9y ago
> It has also won a $960,000 federal grant from the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health I have nothing against the elite trying to live forever. However, I wish they weren’t using our taxes in the process.
- Turing_Machine 9y ago
  You don't think that freezing a brain in this way is likely to produce a lot of generally valuable scientific knowledge, regardless of whether it leads to something like "immortality"? I disagree. I bet they'll learn all kinds of useful stuff from this, however it turns out.
- eggpy 9y ago
  Let's start here: > In 2013, 138.3 million taxpayers reported earning $9.03 trillion in adjusted gross income and paid $1.23 trillion in income taxes. [0] Assuming the taxes collected this year are even remotely similar, and assuming this grant came 100% from income tax, and assuming you pay an equal amount in taxes as everyone else, this grant cost you (960000/1.23 trillion)=1/1281250 of the taxes you paid. I know that's a lot of assumptions, but even if that calculation is off by several orders of magnitude, the tax burden is pretty darn small. If you earned $100,000 last year you paid roughly 8 cents for this. It could open up doors to a lot of interesting research. Maybe nothing will come of it. I'd pay 8 cents to find out though. Also, who says this is "the elite" wanting to live forever and us schlubs footing the bill? [0] https://taxfoundation.org/summary-latest-federal-income-tax-data-2015-update/ https://taxfoundation.org/summary-latest-federal-income-tax-...
  - hartator 9y ago
    > Also, who says this is "the elite" wanting to live forever and us schlubs footing the bill? I think it's reasonable to think that's someone that is ready to put aside $10,000 in the eventually of an accident leading to coma for the small odds that future people will be able and willing to give him a new body is probably part of the elite.
    - 9y ago
noetic_techy 9y ago
This is going to sound a bit out there, but what if your brain is simply an antenna for your consciousness to come through from wherever. Has anyone actually tried to boot up an artificial brain derived from a real organism? I'd like to see a proof of concept that your brain IS indeed the seat of your consciousness, and not just a fancy quantum antenna.
- serans 9y ago
  That's pretty much what Descartes proposed! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactionism_(philosophy_of_mind) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactionism_(philosophy_of_.... My favourite argument against this idea is that it would violate the law of conservation of energy. In any case it looks to me that all these dualist theories of mind are non-falsifiable
  - chronolitus 9y ago
    It's irrelevant anyways, I would argue that what makes you you is not the emergent/transferred via antenna/magic consciousness - a.k.a. sensation of being a aware of your brain's processes. Rather, the brain's processes themselves are probably what makes you you. Regardless of whether they generate consciousness, the biochemical sensory-processing, storage-and-modelling, and decision-making algorithms (which we can detect by looking at synapses) are where you lie. If your brain was somehow modified to take completely different decisions and make different statements ('dumb' magic-less rewiring), with the magic/antenna/emergent/quantum/whatever consciousness part kept intact, I am pretty sure that I would not consider the resulting being 'me'. Of course everyone is free to believe otherwise.
    - imtringued 9y ago
      Your "me" is going to disappear. How do you convince your "me" that it is necessary to disappear? One possible explanation is that you will get another "me".
- mozumder 9y ago
  This is what I've always thought. I think the structure of DNA or proteins themselves is that antenna that interacts with a fifth fundamental force of nature - which is that life spirit.
yters 9y ago
What if they run two identical copies?
- 21 9y ago
  I would say it's still better than 0.
  - yters 9y ago
    Which one is the true consciousness?
    - kolpa 9y ago
      Both, obviously.
      - yters 9y ago
        It seems that way on the surface. Both will wake up with the view that they are the true consciousness. Another variant is the concept that every decision we make we actually split into two universes, one making one decision and the other making the other decision. But, anyway the scenario is set up, the question is why does that particular brain have that particular consciousness? It is easier to see in the splitting scenario. Why do I end up being the consciousness that chose A instead of B? A materialistic view does not have a satisfactory resolution of this issue, whereas the common sense view that I actually am choosing A and not B and there is only one me easily accounts for the perception of such. It is only within a strictly materialistic worldview that common sense accounts run into opposition, which would be a good reason to look beyond materialism.
        dqpb 9y ago
        You sound like you've thoroughly confused yourself. If the mind is software then it can be duplicated. There is no dilemma here, and it's irrelevant what the copies think of it.
mannykannot 9y ago
So, assuming the technical premises are correct here, who will be paying for the uploading? If it is a trust fund established from the initial fee, then the question of who manages the fund becomes an existential matter - it's not like you can switch managers post-(your)-mortem. On the other hand, if the continued operation of this service depends on later recruits, that's quite the pyramid scheme that you are participating in. IIRC, in one of Larry Niven's novels, the funds of the frozen dead had been confiscated because they were monopolizing global wealth, and the living were indebted to the dead.
- myroon5 9y ago
  Do you remember the name of the Larry Niven novel? Sounds interesting
yters 9y ago
Sounds like a perfect scam. Rich guy pays you to kill him. He can't sue cuz he's dead.
pjc50 9y ago
Ah, the Head of Vecna as a service: http://www.blindpanic.com/humor/vecna.htm http://www.blindpanic.com/humor/vecna.htm
pavlov 9y ago
Americans seem to have an obsession with embalming of nearly Egyptian proportions. Apparently it started in the Civil War, and became a nation-wide sensation after Lincoln's corpse did a three-week tour in in a "funeral train": http://theconversation.com/how-lincolns-embrace-of-embalming-birthed-the-american-funeral-industry-86196 http://theconversation.com/how-lincolns-embrace-of-embalming...
anotheryou 9y ago
Do they have any Idea which resolution of what parts you need to capture anything close to the original mind? Do we even know it's just the very material shape, not some quantum or magnetic field magic along with it?
CryptoPunk 9y ago
We should do everything in our power to eliminate death. There is nothing meaningful about it. It is totally meaningless and tragic, and one day we'll look back on the days when millions died every year the same way we look back on the day when three fourths of children died before the age of five. And this criticism of the rich embracing it first totally misses how technology develops. The rich are always the early adopters, and the high prices paid by them enable the industry to scale up which gradually brings the price down. If you look at any technology over the last 50 years, you see this pattern at work: PCs, tablets, smart phones, etc. The first generation was always expensive and only affordable for the rich.
- alonmower 9y ago
  I'm torn about this, I agree that in a world without death we'd view it as meaningless and tragic. I worry about what our path there would look like. Let's say we find a way to eliminate death or aging. It's expensive at first so only the very wealthy can afford it. Now you have a set of rich people in positions of control that won't age out of them. They'll live forever so they'll continue amassing wealth, if they don't give up control then a new generation with new ways of thinking about the world won't be able to take the helm. I mean, lots of people aren't able to really internalize new ideas in their own current lifetimes, let alone these hypothetically endless ones. The people in control get wealthier, inequality increases, new ideas have a harder time taking hold. Even if this life extension eventually trickles down to the rest of humanity would they ever be able to catch up? Would they want to live an eternal life subjugated by the elite? Also, assuming this life extension is biological and not digital all of a sudden we have lots of people. Necessity is the mother of invention and all that so hopefully we figure out a way to move excess people to other planets/space colonies, but what if that takes too much time? What if we increase the number of people faster than we can solve the scaling problems? Food, energy, waste, ways of transporting these excess people elsewhere. If we don't solve all of them we're talking about periods of extreme pain and tumult. What happens if we need to put a cap on the number of people while we figure some of them out? Are some people now not allowed to have children? Are some people not allowed to live forever? Who decides the answer to these questions? Hopefully not the ultra rich & powerful class that's formed - that might not be good for the average folks. Anyways, maybe I'm being pessimistic and on the time scales we're talking about we'd figure out reasonable solutions but it still feels like this whole area feels pretty hand-wavy today when I hear people talk about eliminating death. Death, for better or worse is a sort of equalizer, remove it and a lot of the problems that exist today could get worse. This is even putting aside questions about what happens to a hypothetical brain that lives forever. Do we run out of space for new memories? Do we start forgetting things after enough time? If so, is the person we are 500 years from now that can no longer remember it's first 100 years the same person as us today?
bulletsvshumans 9y ago
If folks really want to make sure they come back from the dead, they might also think about setting up proper incentives for performing the potentially highly laborious process that resurrection might entail even 100+ years from now. It might be helpful to place a sort of back-to-life bounty on yourself, to be held in escrow, and only to be paid out upon successful resurrection. The bigger the bounty, the higher your de-facto priority in the queue. Let it collect interest and fund the ongoing administration of your bounty in the meantime. If you really want to make it stringent, make the bounty require a password that only that (deceased) person knows. Best case scenario they do such a good job resurrecting you that you still remember the password, or at worst there's an incentive to picking the fact out of your brain, which might be only slightly less difficult than doing the full resurrection.
- jjr8 9y ago
  Hmm, interesting. Assuming resurrecting you was easier than picking your brain, there would be the problem of you lying, both when you died and after you were brought back to life. How would they deal with that? I guess they could just kill you again. But would the threat of that happening in the future deter you from lying at time of death, when you have nothing else to lose? It seems like there would need to be system of proving possession of a password that would have to last 100 years. I have not thought through this kind of scenario (sorry!). Perhaps this has been considered before by those studying the problem in detail (e.g. science fiction authors)? What are the solutions?
  - dhimes 9y ago
    Or the conjugate problem: people bringing you back before they really have the capability to do it well, and having you be some sort of invalid/derelict version of yourself. That's terrifying to me.
  - sowbug 9y ago
    You're describing public-key cryptography. Sign a message to prove you know a private key that also authorizes the release of funds. This happens to be exactly the functionality of Bitcoin. It is debatable whether known public-key cryptography systems will survive attack for the amount of time under discussion here. I suspect the hack will be to extract the secret from the brain being resurrected, recover the funds, and toss the brain in the trash.
smaslennikov 9y ago
where do i sign up
bambax 9y ago
There's a company in the US that pitches taking care of your pets after "the rapture" (a once-in-the-history-of-the-world event where, apparently, the righteous will ascend to heaven). It's a kind of insurance, because you won't be able to pay the company after the rapture, so you have to pay now. Also, the company has to be manned by evil people (as a matter of fact and marketing), because if they were good they wouldn't stay behind after the rapture to execute their contractual obligations. The best kind of commerce is when you take money and don't have to deliver anything in return; however sometimes customers feel cheated. The bestest kind of commerce is the same, but the customer is happy. But, SV should be wary of becoming its own caricature.
- colanderman 9y ago
  I suppose you don't get your money back if your pets die pre-rapture?
devgutt 9y ago
I think we need to completely understand every detail of the brain in order to successfully make a cryogenic procedure viable. But at this point, we will not need this procedure anymore.
epiddy 9y ago
Does Nectome sell gift cards yet?
Vadoff 9y ago
Why are there so many people excited to do this? Don't they realize it'll be a copy/digital clone of them? Even if they could upload a digital representation of a person's brain without the person dying, it would still be a copy. This isn't immortality, this is a company killing you then promising to create a clone of you with your memories at a later time.
- projektir 9y ago
  > Why are there so many people excited to do this? Because science doesn't have evidence for the presence of "you"s, and it's fashionable among intellectuals these days to only believe scientific ideas have validity.
dingo_bat 9y ago
> That way, someone a lot like you, though not exactly you, will smell the flowers again in a data server somewhere. Why not exactly me?
yters 9y ago
Proof that Silicon Valley is becoming a religious institution.
mrfusion 9y ago
It seems to me they can image the synapses but I don’t see how they’re going to get the synaptic weights. Take a look at the picture in the article. You’re really just getting the shape of the synapse at best.
whack 9y ago
Any sufficiently advanced technology that is capable of resurrecting your brain/consciousness, is also capable of subjecting your digital consciousness to eternal torture worse than anything experienced by Man thus far. If you haven't already, check out Black Mirror's last episode: Black Museum. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy, even if there's only an infinitesimal chance of it happening. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Museum_(Black_Mirror) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Museum_(Black_Mirror) https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Roko's_basilisk https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Roko's_basilisk
- kevindeasis 9y ago
  There's also a similar scene in Altered Carbon
  - satori99 9y ago
    Iain M Banks' Culture novel, Surface Detail, also deals with the idea of eternal digital heavens and hells. Many of them are run by corporations. Some civilizations even send young sinners on day trips to hell to keep them on the 'right' path. Scary stuff. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_Detail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_Detail
    - pmoriarty 9y ago
      Back in 1965, Stanislaw Lem wrote in his Cyberiad about a sadistic king who was given a virtual world to rule over. The king gleefully proceeded to torture its virtual inhabitants. Lem has a lot to say on the ethics of this. You can read this remarkable story and Douglas Hofstadter's and Daniel Dennett's commentary on it here: https://themindi.blogspot.com/2007/02/chapter-18-seventh-sally-or-how-trurls.html https://themindi.blogspot.com/2007/02/chapter-18-seventh-sal...
  - wavefunction 9y ago
    "What do I care for your suffering? Pain, even agony, is no more than information before the senses, data fed to the computer of the mind. The lesson is simple: you have received the information, now act on it. Take control of the input and you shall become master of the output." Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, "Essays on Mind and Matter"
speby 9y ago
Imagine the ego you could curate when you believe you can upload your mind for eternity. How special you are!
jakecrouch 9y ago
I'm somewhat uncomfortable with brain fixation because there is no way to actually verify that it works. Mind uploading is very far off if we still can't upload C. Elegans. It is more plausible that we would be able to test biological revival within the next couple decades. Going from atoms to bits is much harder than going from atoms to atoms.
mirimir 9y ago
Arguably, this is religion. Because very little of it is testable now. Or will be testable in the foreseeable future.
analog31 9y ago
This leads to an interesting dilemma: Suppose there are multiple immortality technologies, such as mind-uploading, cryo-preservation, and so forth. How do you choose? What if there emerge hundreds of competing processes?
axaxs 9y ago
Maybe I'm a bit jaded...but I don't like this. Or any of the 'anti-aging' initiatives. Natural death is a beautiful thing; it's a part of life. I'll be honored to die a natural death at a normal age. I don't want to live forever - even at my age I feel the world is changing out from underneath me. Friends and family tick off one by one each year. I'm not too old yet, but already appreciative of the time I've been given. Not sure why anyone who values human relationship would want to 'live forever', even if it's just in digital form.
- rorykoehler 9y ago
  What constitutes a natural death? We used to die at 40 now we die at 80. Is that natural? At what point does natural become unnatural?
  - axaxs 9y ago
    Natural in the context of not being murdered or otherwise unlucky. I really feel especially for say, kids who get terminal diseases before they reach their teens, so I'll throw that in. I'm not old yet, but I've gotten to experience a lot of life to the point where I'd accept my fate. Sorry for the nonanswer, but it requires a bit of thinking and opinion.
    - rorykoehler 9y ago
      If medicine advanced to the point of repairing your body to be able to live a healthy life indefinitely would you try stay healthy using the best science has to offer or would you not?
      - axaxs 9y ago
        It would depend on a lot of factors. Can everyone afford it, even my poorer friends and family? Is the population booming? Off the cuff - no. If we all lived forever there'd be no world change, the birth rate would have to drop by a ton to near zero, etc. The older I become, the more set in my ways I become. That's just natural, even if you consciously fight it. Imagine where we'd be as a society if they'd discovered how to live forever in the caveman days...
jackvalentine 9y ago
Surely having your consciousness in some kind of computer/machine will be similar enough to 'locked in' syndrome to be a torture? If they network you with others, it'll be a a true system of narcissists.
knowThySelfx 9y ago
Have got a very bad feeling about this. Makes you wonder what really is "You" or "I". Just a collection of memories in your brain? Do people here approve of the idea of soul? Most probably won't because there's no "scientific" proof for it yet.
sreejithr 9y ago
I wish they could do this to Stephen Hawking's brain.
eggsome 9y ago
I can't believe no one has mentioned MLP - Friendship is Optimal: https://www.fimfiction.net/story/62074/friendship-is-optimal https://www.fimfiction.net/story/62074/friendship-is-optimal An amazing work that had some help from some of the guys at Less Wrong. One of the most enlightening and funny things I've read in ages. Here is a great talk that led me to reading it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7eUomiDaTo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7eUomiDaTo TL;DR: It's a superintelligent AI that just wants to make humans happy... with Frendship and Ponies.
projektir 9y ago
I wonder if, when they do create this technology, it'll be all that great of an idea. I'm not really on Greg Egan's page of things here.
gcb0 9y ago
so, legal euthanasia for the rich?
e12e 9y ago
> “And there is a much larger humanitarian aspect to the whole thing. Right now, when a generation of people die, we lose all their collective wisdom. You can transmit knowledge to the next generation, but it’s harder to transmit wisdom, which is learned. Your children have to learn from the same mistakes.” Books?
ramblerman 9y ago
It's really strange to think it will be someone just like you, but not actually you. You never re-open your eyes so to speak, your copy does. It seems a bit narcissistic to know you will never open your eyes again, but you would still like a copy of you to exist.
camillomiller 9y ago
This seems to be based on the theory of the connectome, which is widely accepted but still fundamentally unproven. The idea that we are but a sum of the electrical interactions between cells in our brain is extremely short-sighted. Our nervous system expands over the physical limit of the brain. How can we be sure that memories are not activated by specific interactions with other departments of our body. And even if it were true that brain equals conscience, how can we ignore the constant interaction with the external world? Would it be possible to recreate a conscience "in sich" and "für sich", to say it with Kant, without connecting it to a simulation of whatever else is there? In any case, I applaud at this trial. It is intriguing and interesting, but it also is a display of scientific hybris that you don't see often. I completely disagree with the assumptions that are moving this operation, but I'm extremely excited to see where this ends up.
rajacombinator 9y ago
This is treading a very thin line between a typical voluntary snake oil (with a hint of reverse Pascal’s wager) transaction and unethical exploitation (and murder for profit, one could easily argue) of the desperately ill and naive. Although I suspect many involved (investors...) may themselves be naive enough to imagine this works. Merging it with a YC/VC “do anything and break any rule to produce growth” mentality - which is great for a business - is wildly unethical. There’s no theoretical basis for “brain uploads” other than middlebrow “tech solves everything” pie-in-the-skyism. There’s no economic basis for getting people in the far future to do you favors. And there’s no medical basis for brain embalming/freezing. If they could do this on pigs and resurrect them after x number of days it would be a different story.
- Veedrac 9y ago
  By the time we can do this on pigs, the ethical disaster of the fact that billions of people will have died preventable deaths will be at holocaust levels. The only ethical action is to do this well before it's possible, roughly at the point where the probability of it happening at some point in the future crosses the cost-benefit threshold. The idea that there is a less than 1-in-10000 chance that in 10,000 years we will be unable to run brains in simulation given over the last ~50y of development we've produced hardware literally nine orders of magnitude faster than that of the brain, done so in a mass-producible fashion, made unbelievable strides in neuroscience, discovered CRISPR and make synthetic biology, gone from AI-as-theory to computers that can talk, describe images, and synthesise photorealistic faces, gone from technology as niche to CPUs on plastic that cost literally a since cent... is frankly an blunt unwillingness to consider the issue.
basementcat 9y ago
Are people in the future going to find bootleg copies of other peoples' consciousness on torrents? When will we be able to check ourselves into Github? After you see that particularly horrifying youtube video, you might be able to roll yourself back to a previous commit and literally unsee what you have seen!

247 points by sethbannon 9y ago

The original press release from the team has much more detail on the technology itself, and is here: http://www.prweb.com/releases/prweb15276833.htm http://www.prweb.com/releases/prweb15276833.htm

OrganicMSG 9y ago

I guess that's one way of managing customer expectation.

harryf 9y ago
Getting to non-fatal is just a future implementation detail
- prepend 9y ago
  It’s a feature not a bug.
  - acrefoot 9y ago
    Given that an early death is only possibly prescribed in cases where a patient is terminally ill (as determined by two physicians), where a patient is of sound mind, and is often in pain, it can be a reasonable alternative to a lot of the (often expensive) interventions that don't do much more than prolong agony in the last weeks of life.
deleted 9y ago
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tootie 9y ago
How are they going to compete with Amazon's competing service? https://www.theonion.com/popular-new-amazon-service-just-comes-to-your-house-and-1819917496 https://www.theonion.com/popular-new-amazon-service-just-com...

dontreact 9y ago

Reconstructing a human in silico from a dead brain is likely to be a very expensive process. Why would anyone in the future be interested in going through with it for any more than a few select old brains when there will be plenty of dead brains to go around at that time?

Talyen42 9y ago
that's why you bury some treasure and keep the location locked away in your brain!
- Jeff_Brown 9y ago
  And hope they haven't learned to synthesize it or mine it from asteroids when it's time to wake up.
cliffy 9y ago
Would probably start out as being prohibitively expensive and trend towards relatively cheap if it's possible and there's demand. If it's possible then it's hard to imagine there not being demand.
prepend 9y ago
You memorize the bitcoin private key before preservation. In a way that requires consciousness to reconstruct. Public key verifies the value and there’s a smart contract with some percentage to the successful recoverer. Depending on the recoverer’s profit margin they will restore whenever there’s enough value to make it worthwhile. Whether bitcoin will exist and whether it will appreciate is a different story. But assuming bitcoin exists, resurrection is a certainty.
- carbocation 9y ago
  Then they threaten to resurrect you 1000x and torture each of your resurrected selves for 1000 years unless you tell them the private key. Roko's basilisk meets bitcoin.

sarabande 9y ago

In the case when you die, but your brain still exists, and it starts processing it again in a new host (computer or organic), isn't that not you anymore? Why would my former self want that? Is this a solved philosophical problem for which literature exists?

monitron 9y ago
I feel the same way. There's a scene in the book Old Man's War by John Scalzi which drives this point home in a way that has really stuck with me.
aurellem 9y ago
If you want to get into some of the literature around mind uploading, I'd start with some of Daniel Dennett's work such as "Consciousness Explained". If you think that it's possible for a computer program to have its own sense of self, then it's interesting to think about what it would feel like for that program to be stopped, copied to a new computer, and then started again. There's definitely a lot of literature and debate around these issues!
- rosser 9y ago
  I'm not sure that a book written by a dude whose position is basically, "the direct experience you have of your own consciousness is an illusion" is necessarily the best choice for exploring what a "sense of self" or "mind" are all about. "Consciousness Explained" should really have been titled "Consciousness Explained Away".
macintux 9y ago
This question descends from an ancient philosophical question; see the Ship of Theseus[0]. CGP Grey has a good look at the question wrt Star Trek teleportation[1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus [1] https://youtu.be/nQHBAdShgYI https://youtu.be/nQHBAdShgYI
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

prepend 9y ago

“What if we told you we can backup your mind?” ...and never restore it. As someone who has lived through many backup formats that stop being supported, don’t work, or decay with time this seems monumentally stupid as anything other than basic research. I applaud their goal, digital sentience, but sorry for any of their customers. They need a pitch that works on the recently dead (eg, current cryo companies) as I don’t think there are any countries that allow euthenasia for life extension purposes.

tlb 9y ago
What probability of restoration would be high enough to consider it? The future timelines in which restoration does happen are probably extremely interesting to be part of, given how far tech would have progressed. (There are lots of sucky future timelines too, say with nuclear holocausts, where you'd be unlikely to be restored.) No: 100% chance of death. Yes: 100-X% chance of death, X% chance of getting to see a super-interesting future. For me, X wouldn't have to be very high to make it worth trying.
- prepend 9y ago
  Assuming there is a cost, the trade off is reduced money to your heirs or charity. So while it is non-zero, that doesn’t mean it’s worth the cost. That’s why I brought up backups. Remember Zip drives for backup? Imagine if there was no reader at time of launch. And how likely it was to build the reader without any changes to spec that the existing Zip disk could be used to restore without any problems. Even with read and write available, those things didn’t work well. You could say “0% chance of restore if you don’t buy, but non-zero if you do buy; therefore buy.” But that only works if the cost is zero.
  - tlb 9y ago
    Would you pay 5% of your net worth for a 10% chance of recovery?
    - AstralStorm 9y ago

mead5432 9y ago

I'm not sure I'd want to be the one to test the MVP.

lev99 9y ago
I'd probably choose this over other cryo companies. It's a higher quality preserve.

reasonattlm 9y ago

Underneath it all, this is a manifestation of an important split in the cryonics community. One group is (I think overly) critical of present vitrification approaches and the planned future of those approaches. They believe that these approaches are broken, and nothing of value is preserved. I think this is just as ridiculous as saying there is no room for improvement - it is clearly the case that, e.g. nematodes vitrified using the present technologies can be restored and show preserved memory. That group has a strong overlap with pattern identity theorists, who are quite comfortable with a copy of them living in the future, and throwing away the original brain. So the intersection of these two groups is motivated to work on technologies such as aldehyde-stablized cryopreservation (vitrifixation) that are incompatible with the future goal of thawing, restoration, and repair, as they are not reversible short of far distant molecular nanotechnology. Their aim is to produce the best possible record of data of the mind with the intent of reading into a machine environment in the future, then discarding it. To my eyes this is a terrible, terrible, mistaken view on identity, and one that will cause a great deal of existential harm when it is extended from theory to action. The rest of the cryonics community is interested in a technology path that leads to reversible vitrification in the near future, and some kind of union with the tissue engineering / organ engineering community. They want the flesh restored and repaired, and the end goal of cryopreservation is some form of advanced cell/bio/nanotechnology that can achieve that end. This is why Alcor, etc, is not adopting vitrifixation. So on the one hand, great to see progress, and vitrifixation is an excellent advance in tissue preservation in the general sense. It will be of use in many areas of research. On the other hand, pattern identity theory seems to have many of the aspects of religion. A copy of you is clearly not you, and no amount of handwaving is going to make that the case.

CryptoPunk 9y ago
The philosophical difference between the two groups is very interesting. I tend to agree with your take, and would greatly prefer to see advances made in reversible vitrification so it can be widely used.
jiggunjer 9y ago
"A copy of you is clearly not you, and no amount of handwaving is going to make that the case." What an unnuanced way of stating your opinion. Views on what "identity" is differ, clearly.

kaizendad 9y ago

Seems like a big bet on the concept that the physical structure of the brain preserves enough information to resurrect a consciousness. If electrical transmissions are at all required, then this would render a brain nothing more than an amusing curio. Although, given that their target market is already those planning to be euthanized, I suppose the tradeoff of one's brain being an amusing curio vs. one's brain being worm food is not a reason to avoid this service. If they are correct, it brings up an interesting question: given that the technology requires a slow, planned process to preserve the brain, at what point should a uniquely brilliant person be euthanized, in order to preserve them, rather than allowing them to die by sudden misadventure, e.g. not paying attention and getting hit by a car crossing the street. Given that the output of so many brilliant people is skewed to when they are young, do we just start proactively euthanizing the top 0.05% of the population when they reach 50, to preserve our best for the future?

prepend 9y ago
Clearly, morality and the greater good of humanity requires that we proactively euthanize any genius who hits 60. Even against their will. All assets should go to the euthanasia team to cover costs.
- manmal 9y ago
  Do you refer to a certain Star Trek episode? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half_a_Life_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half_a_Life_(Star_Trek:_The_... (Ritual suicide at age 60 embedded in culture)
  - prepend 9y ago
    I had forgotten about this. I bet I subsciously used it. I was actually thinking of Logan’s Run when writing my comment.
  - cpeterso 9y ago
    Or Logan's Run. (Ritual suicide embedded in culture, age 21 in the novel and 30 in the film)

PeanutNore 9y ago

“Burdening future generations with our brain banks is just comically arrogant. Aren’t we leaving them with enough problems?” Hendricks told me this week after reviewing Nectome’s website. “I hope future people are appalled that in the 21st century, the richest and most comfortable people in history spent their money and resources trying to live forever on the backs of their descendants. I mean, it’s a joke, right? They are cartoon bad guys.” Best part of the article for sure

savanaly 9y ago
I don't feel too bad about it. If economic growth stays even slightly positive it won't take too many generations for our descendants to be unimaginably more wealthy than we are. They can put up with our brain banks and dry their tears with their one dollar notes that are worth $1,000 in 2018 dollars.
- kingbirdy 9y ago
  That's not how inflation works - in the future, the value of the dollar will be less, not more.
  - twoodfin 9y ago
    Not universally: The value of $1 (nominal) worth of computing resources and information storage in 2018 is surely thousands of times the value of $1 (nominal) worth of the same in 1958. EDIT: Some quick math on deflation in storage costs. The IBM 305 RAMAC[1] was introduced in 1956, provided 5MB of magnetic storage and cost $3,200/month in 1956 dollars. To pick a random modern storage provider with a similar pricing model, in 2018 Dropbox offers 1TB for $10/month. Putting aside all the other advantages Dropbox gives you over a 305, the pure storage value of $1 (nominal) has gone from 1.6KB/month to 100GB/month, a multiple of over 50 million. [1] https://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/650/650_pr2.html https://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/650/650_pr2.html
    - notahacker 9y ago

Jeff_Brown 9y ago

Although I would not feel immortal knowing that a copy of me would live forever, I would if I could gradually replace each of my neurons with invulnerable* synthetic ones. * which grew and pruned themselves the same as organic ones

omegaworks 9y ago

Michael Hendricks' take is the best: > “Burdening future generations with our brain banks is just comically arrogant. Aren’t we leaving them with enough problems?” Hendricks told me this week after reviewing Nectome’s website. “I hope future people are appalled that in the 21st century, the richest and most comfortable people in history spent their money and resources trying to live forever on the backs of their descendants. I mean, it’s a joke, right? They are cartoon bad guys.” We are on the verge of great shifts in climate and energy resources. Millions of humans are already migrating across continents in search of food security and an escape from perpetual war. We're already seeing climate refugees from vulnerable island nations, consumed by the rising seas. Entire governments have been toppled in the Arab Spring, replaced with authoritarian regimes installed to protect the borders of the west. And a few of the richest people in human history are using their unimaginable resources to try to live forever.

coldacid 9y ago
On the upside, it's not like they'll need physical bodies for their immortality. Just a quantum mainframe with an unlimited power supply.
OscarCunningham 9y ago
Are you equally outraged by people who spend $10000 on other leisure activities?
knowThySelfx 9y ago
Relax, it is not gonna happen. Even if it "happens" in a sense, it won't be "them". Tech dissent is not much appreciated in yc, esp when a yc fellow is backing this.
- omegaworks 9y ago
  >Relax, it is not gonna happen. It already is happening in some sense. Prices for many drugs people need to cope with chronic disease continue to rise. The price of insulin, for example, has tripled in the past decade.[1] >Tech dissent is not much appreciated in yc, esp when a yc fellow is backing this. If you're accusing me of luddism, you've missed my point entirely. Do you think we should automatically fall in line when marketing materials are posted to this discussion forum? 1. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/whats-behind-skyrocketing-insulin-prices https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/whats-behind-skyrocketin...

rhombocombus 9y ago

This sounds just like the transcardial perfusion that I used to do on hamsters and rats in graduate school. After doing and witnessing hundreds of those I think I will pass, I'd rather rot. What's wrong with dying? I am a huge fan of living and of life, but as cool as it sounds to have my consciousness reconstituted in some server closet, being perfused with formalin (and whatever else) before I'm technically dead is not something I place a high level of confidence in working, and it also makes me viscerally uncomfortable.

paradroid 9y ago

Whether you can get derive function from structure is a big if. This is for the vain.

doorbumper 9y ago

It seems interesting from the perspective of the customer, but the really interesting thing is that if this succeeds, they will have access to brain imaging data that no one else has. You can't normally get such detailed scans of a human brain, because it requires the human to die. It's a business model that allows them to accelerate the pace of research without the human rights violations that come from human experimentation. The real value in this company is in what research arises from the data they gather, while being funded by people paying to donate their brains to research. It's a diabolical everybody wins situation.

mulmen 9y ago
It's unclear to me how the euthanized brain donors "win" in the absence of proof that memories can be recovered.
- vokep 9y ago
  They certainly don't lose. They are all to be patients who are going soon anyways, who opt for the process.
- Spivak 9y ago
  They're going to die anyway and get to contribute to scientific progress and get the best chance possible today for immortality.
  - mulmen 9y ago
    They could contribute to scientific progress by donating the money to a research university. Depending on your concept of immortality donating sperm or eggs seems to have a higher chance of success.
- doorbumper 9y ago
  It's not a guaranteed win, no. However, if they are at the point where they wish to be euthanized then their outlook is grim. However, even a minuscule chance is better than zero chance, correct? In addition, by donating their brain structure they're directly fueling the research needed to improve that chance.

noetic_techy 9y ago

Preserve my brain. Liquidate all assets and put them into an index fund. Boot me back up when I'm rich in a new sleeve.

nooron 9y ago
Think about the impact this would have on interest rates. Closest thing I can imagine would be this: http://www.standupeconomist.com/pdf/misc/interstellar.pdf http://www.standupeconomist.com/pdf/misc/interstellar.pdf

intrasight 9y ago

Can we see if they can "wake up" a fly? I'd like some proof-of-concept before investing my brain in this.

kolpa 9y ago
You're missing the point. The point is to get money and brains for imaging and drug research, not really to clone people.
mr_toad 9y ago
We don’t yet have the resources to simulate the brain of even a fruit fly. Even the neural simulation of a flatworm is challenging. https://www.jefftk.com/p/whole-brain-emulation-and-nematodes https://www.jefftk.com/p/whole-brain-emulation-and-nematodes

ai_ia 9y ago

Reading this thread makes me realize how much closer we are going towards Black Mirror Universe. Scary.

davidkuhta 9y ago

Interesting idea. The phrasing on the deposit gave me a lol: > fully refundable if you change your mind

debrisapron 9y ago

"I hope future people are appalled that in the 21st century, the richest and most comfortable people in history spent their money and resources trying to live forever" I hope nobody tells this guy about chemotherapy, he's gonna flip.

Turing_Machine 9y ago
> I hope nobody tells this guy about chemotherapy, he's gonna flip. Or about vaccines. Or about antibiotics. Or about sterile surgery procedures. Or about running water and electricity. Or about.... Just about everything that makes up our modern quality of life was only available to a privileged class when it first came on the scene. My bet is that future people won't be appalled in the slightest. Something tells me that Professor Hendricks isn't living a Neanderthal lifestyle (or even a modern Third World lifestyle).
- anentropic 9y ago
  these are all significantly different from living forever

Invictus0 9y ago

I'm beginning to think that YCombinator will fund anything with MIT on it. Just last month I spoke with a YC founder that was trying to get me to pay $50 to have a 30 minute phone call with people working at Google. Not an interview, not a phone call with some executive--just a phone call with Google's rank and file. I've lost a lot of respect for YC as venture capital firm.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

hartator 9y ago

> It has also won a $960,000 federal grant from the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health I have nothing against the elite trying to live forever. However, I wish they weren’t using our taxes in the process.

Turing_Machine 9y ago
You don't think that freezing a brain in this way is likely to produce a lot of generally valuable scientific knowledge, regardless of whether it leads to something like "immortality"? I disagree. I bet they'll learn all kinds of useful stuff from this, however it turns out.
eggpy 9y ago
Let's start here: > In 2013, 138.3 million taxpayers reported earning $9.03 trillion in adjusted gross income and paid $1.23 trillion in income taxes. [0] Assuming the taxes collected this year are even remotely similar, and assuming this grant came 100% from income tax, and assuming you pay an equal amount in taxes as everyone else, this grant cost you (960000/1.23 trillion)=1/1281250 of the taxes you paid. I know that's a lot of assumptions, but even if that calculation is off by several orders of magnitude, the tax burden is pretty darn small. If you earned $100,000 last year you paid roughly 8 cents for this. It could open up doors to a lot of interesting research. Maybe nothing will come of it. I'd pay 8 cents to find out though. Also, who says this is "the elite" wanting to live forever and us schlubs footing the bill? [0] https://taxfoundation.org/summary-latest-federal-income-tax-data-2015-update/ https://taxfoundation.org/summary-latest-federal-income-tax-...
- hartator 9y ago
  > Also, who says this is "the elite" wanting to live forever and us schlubs footing the bill? I think it's reasonable to think that's someone that is ready to put aside $10,000 in the eventually of an accident leading to coma for the small odds that future people will be able and willing to give him a new body is probably part of the elite.
  - 9y ago

noetic_techy 9y ago

This is going to sound a bit out there, but what if your brain is simply an antenna for your consciousness to come through from wherever. Has anyone actually tried to boot up an artificial brain derived from a real organism? I'd like to see a proof of concept that your brain IS indeed the seat of your consciousness, and not just a fancy quantum antenna.

serans 9y ago
That's pretty much what Descartes proposed! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactionism_(philosophy_of_mind) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactionism_(philosophy_of_.... My favourite argument against this idea is that it would violate the law of conservation of energy. In any case it looks to me that all these dualist theories of mind are non-falsifiable
- chronolitus 9y ago
  It's irrelevant anyways, I would argue that what makes you you is not the emergent/transferred via antenna/magic consciousness - a.k.a. sensation of being a aware of your brain's processes. Rather, the brain's processes themselves are probably what makes you you. Regardless of whether they generate consciousness, the biochemical sensory-processing, storage-and-modelling, and decision-making algorithms (which we can detect by looking at synapses) are where you lie. If your brain was somehow modified to take completely different decisions and make different statements ('dumb' magic-less rewiring), with the magic/antenna/emergent/quantum/whatever consciousness part kept intact, I am pretty sure that I would not consider the resulting being 'me'. Of course everyone is free to believe otherwise.
  - imtringued 9y ago
    Your "me" is going to disappear. How do you convince your "me" that it is necessary to disappear? One possible explanation is that you will get another "me".
mozumder 9y ago
This is what I've always thought. I think the structure of DNA or proteins themselves is that antenna that interacts with a fifth fundamental force of nature - which is that life spirit.

yters 9y ago

What if they run two identical copies?

21 9y ago
I would say it's still better than 0.
- yters 9y ago
  Which one is the true consciousness?
  - kolpa 9y ago
    Both, obviously.
    - yters 9y ago
      It seems that way on the surface. Both will wake up with the view that they are the true consciousness. Another variant is the concept that every decision we make we actually split into two universes, one making one decision and the other making the other decision. But, anyway the scenario is set up, the question is why does that particular brain have that particular consciousness? It is easier to see in the splitting scenario. Why do I end up being the consciousness that chose A instead of B? A materialistic view does not have a satisfactory resolution of this issue, whereas the common sense view that I actually am choosing A and not B and there is only one me easily accounts for the perception of such. It is only within a strictly materialistic worldview that common sense accounts run into opposition, which would be a good reason to look beyond materialism.
      - dqpb 9y ago
        You sound like you've thoroughly confused yourself. If the mind is software then it can be duplicated. There is no dilemma here, and it's irrelevant what the copies think of it.

mannykannot 9y ago

So, assuming the technical premises are correct here, who will be paying for the uploading? If it is a trust fund established from the initial fee, then the question of who manages the fund becomes an existential matter - it's not like you can switch managers post-(your)-mortem. On the other hand, if the continued operation of this service depends on later recruits, that's quite the pyramid scheme that you are participating in. IIRC, in one of Larry Niven's novels, the funds of the frozen dead had been confiscated because they were monopolizing global wealth, and the living were indebted to the dead.

myroon5 9y ago
Do you remember the name of the Larry Niven novel? Sounds interesting

yters 9y ago

Sounds like a perfect scam. Rich guy pays you to kill him. He can't sue cuz he's dead.

pjc50 9y ago

Ah, the Head of Vecna as a service: http://www.blindpanic.com/humor/vecna.htm http://www.blindpanic.com/humor/vecna.htm

pavlov 9y ago

Americans seem to have an obsession with embalming of nearly Egyptian proportions. Apparently it started in the Civil War, and became a nation-wide sensation after Lincoln's corpse did a three-week tour in in a "funeral train": http://theconversation.com/how-lincolns-embrace-of-embalming-birthed-the-american-funeral-industry-86196 http://theconversation.com/how-lincolns-embrace-of-embalming...

anotheryou 9y ago

Do they have any Idea which resolution of what parts you need to capture anything close to the original mind? Do we even know it's just the very material shape, not some quantum or magnetic field magic along with it?

CryptoPunk 9y ago

We should do everything in our power to eliminate death. There is nothing meaningful about it. It is totally meaningless and tragic, and one day we'll look back on the days when millions died every year the same way we look back on the day when three fourths of children died before the age of five. And this criticism of the rich embracing it first totally misses how technology develops. The rich are always the early adopters, and the high prices paid by them enable the industry to scale up which gradually brings the price down. If you look at any technology over the last 50 years, you see this pattern at work: PCs, tablets, smart phones, etc. The first generation was always expensive and only affordable for the rich.

alonmower 9y ago
I'm torn about this, I agree that in a world without death we'd view it as meaningless and tragic. I worry about what our path there would look like. Let's say we find a way to eliminate death or aging. It's expensive at first so only the very wealthy can afford it. Now you have a set of rich people in positions of control that won't age out of them. They'll live forever so they'll continue amassing wealth, if they don't give up control then a new generation with new ways of thinking about the world won't be able to take the helm. I mean, lots of people aren't able to really internalize new ideas in their own current lifetimes, let alone these hypothetically endless ones. The people in control get wealthier, inequality increases, new ideas have a harder time taking hold. Even if this life extension eventually trickles down to the rest of humanity would they ever be able to catch up? Would they want to live an eternal life subjugated by the elite? Also, assuming this life extension is biological and not digital all of a sudden we have lots of people. Necessity is the mother of invention and all that so hopefully we figure out a way to move excess people to other planets/space colonies, but what if that takes too much time? What if we increase the number of people faster than we can solve the scaling problems? Food, energy, waste, ways of transporting these excess people elsewhere. If we don't solve all of them we're talking about periods of extreme pain and tumult. What happens if we need to put a cap on the number of people while we figure some of them out? Are some people now not allowed to have children? Are some people not allowed to live forever? Who decides the answer to these questions? Hopefully not the ultra rich & powerful class that's formed - that might not be good for the average folks. Anyways, maybe I'm being pessimistic and on the time scales we're talking about we'd figure out reasonable solutions but it still feels like this whole area feels pretty hand-wavy today when I hear people talk about eliminating death. Death, for better or worse is a sort of equalizer, remove it and a lot of the problems that exist today could get worse. This is even putting aside questions about what happens to a hypothetical brain that lives forever. Do we run out of space for new memories? Do we start forgetting things after enough time? If so, is the person we are 500 years from now that can no longer remember it's first 100 years the same person as us today?

bulletsvshumans 9y ago

If folks really want to make sure they come back from the dead, they might also think about setting up proper incentives for performing the potentially highly laborious process that resurrection might entail even 100+ years from now. It might be helpful to place a sort of back-to-life bounty on yourself, to be held in escrow, and only to be paid out upon successful resurrection. The bigger the bounty, the higher your de-facto priority in the queue. Let it collect interest and fund the ongoing administration of your bounty in the meantime. If you really want to make it stringent, make the bounty require a password that only that (deceased) person knows. Best case scenario they do such a good job resurrecting you that you still remember the password, or at worst there's an incentive to picking the fact out of your brain, which might be only slightly less difficult than doing the full resurrection.

jjr8 9y ago
Hmm, interesting. Assuming resurrecting you was easier than picking your brain, there would be the problem of you lying, both when you died and after you were brought back to life. How would they deal with that? I guess they could just kill you again. But would the threat of that happening in the future deter you from lying at time of death, when you have nothing else to lose? It seems like there would need to be system of proving possession of a password that would have to last 100 years. I have not thought through this kind of scenario (sorry!). Perhaps this has been considered before by those studying the problem in detail (e.g. science fiction authors)? What are the solutions?
- dhimes 9y ago
  Or the conjugate problem: people bringing you back before they really have the capability to do it well, and having you be some sort of invalid/derelict version of yourself. That's terrifying to me.
- sowbug 9y ago
  You're describing public-key cryptography. Sign a message to prove you know a private key that also authorizes the release of funds. This happens to be exactly the functionality of Bitcoin. It is debatable whether known public-key cryptography systems will survive attack for the amount of time under discussion here. I suspect the hack will be to extract the secret from the brain being resurrected, recover the funds, and toss the brain in the trash.

smaslennikov 9y ago

where do i sign up

bambax 9y ago

There's a company in the US that pitches taking care of your pets after "the rapture" (a once-in-the-history-of-the-world event where, apparently, the righteous will ascend to heaven). It's a kind of insurance, because you won't be able to pay the company after the rapture, so you have to pay now. Also, the company has to be manned by evil people (as a matter of fact and marketing), because if they were good they wouldn't stay behind after the rapture to execute their contractual obligations. The best kind of commerce is when you take money and don't have to deliver anything in return; however sometimes customers feel cheated. The bestest kind of commerce is the same, but the customer is happy. But, SV should be wary of becoming its own caricature.

colanderman 9y ago
I suppose you don't get your money back if your pets die pre-rapture?

devgutt 9y ago

I think we need to completely understand every detail of the brain in order to successfully make a cryogenic procedure viable. But at this point, we will not need this procedure anymore.

epiddy 9y ago

Does Nectome sell gift cards yet?

Vadoff 9y ago

Why are there so many people excited to do this? Don't they realize it'll be a copy/digital clone of them? Even if they could upload a digital representation of a person's brain without the person dying, it would still be a copy. This isn't immortality, this is a company killing you then promising to create a clone of you with your memories at a later time.

projektir 9y ago
> Why are there so many people excited to do this? Because science doesn't have evidence for the presence of "you"s, and it's fashionable among intellectuals these days to only believe scientific ideas have validity.

dingo_bat 9y ago

> That way, someone a lot like you, though not exactly you, will smell the flowers again in a data server somewhere. Why not exactly me?

yters 9y ago

Proof that Silicon Valley is becoming a religious institution.

mrfusion 9y ago

It seems to me they can image the synapses but I don’t see how they’re going to get the synaptic weights. Take a look at the picture in the article. You’re really just getting the shape of the synapse at best.

whack 9y ago

Any sufficiently advanced technology that is capable of resurrecting your brain/consciousness, is also capable of subjecting your digital consciousness to eternal torture worse than anything experienced by Man thus far. If you haven't already, check out Black Mirror's last episode: Black Museum. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy, even if there's only an infinitesimal chance of it happening. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Museum_(Black_Mirror) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Museum_(Black_Mirror) https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Roko's_basilisk https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Roko's_basilisk

kevindeasis 9y ago
There's also a similar scene in Altered Carbon
- satori99 9y ago
  Iain M Banks' Culture novel, Surface Detail, also deals with the idea of eternal digital heavens and hells. Many of them are run by corporations. Some civilizations even send young sinners on day trips to hell to keep them on the 'right' path. Scary stuff. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_Detail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_Detail
  - pmoriarty 9y ago
    Back in 1965, Stanislaw Lem wrote in his Cyberiad about a sadistic king who was given a virtual world to rule over. The king gleefully proceeded to torture its virtual inhabitants. Lem has a lot to say on the ethics of this. You can read this remarkable story and Douglas Hofstadter's and Daniel Dennett's commentary on it here: https://themindi.blogspot.com/2007/02/chapter-18-seventh-sally-or-how-trurls.html https://themindi.blogspot.com/2007/02/chapter-18-seventh-sal...
- wavefunction 9y ago
  "What do I care for your suffering? Pain, even agony, is no more than information before the senses, data fed to the computer of the mind. The lesson is simple: you have received the information, now act on it. Take control of the input and you shall become master of the output." Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, "Essays on Mind and Matter"

speby 9y ago

Imagine the ego you could curate when you believe you can upload your mind for eternity. How special you are!

jakecrouch 9y ago

I'm somewhat uncomfortable with brain fixation because there is no way to actually verify that it works. Mind uploading is very far off if we still can't upload C. Elegans. It is more plausible that we would be able to test biological revival within the next couple decades. Going from atoms to bits is much harder than going from atoms to atoms.

mirimir 9y ago

Arguably, this is religion. Because very little of it is testable now. Or will be testable in the foreseeable future.

analog31 9y ago

This leads to an interesting dilemma: Suppose there are multiple immortality technologies, such as mind-uploading, cryo-preservation, and so forth. How do you choose? What if there emerge hundreds of competing processes?

axaxs 9y ago

Maybe I'm a bit jaded...but I don't like this. Or any of the 'anti-aging' initiatives. Natural death is a beautiful thing; it's a part of life. I'll be honored to die a natural death at a normal age. I don't want to live forever - even at my age I feel the world is changing out from underneath me. Friends and family tick off one by one each year. I'm not too old yet, but already appreciative of the time I've been given. Not sure why anyone who values human relationship would want to 'live forever', even if it's just in digital form.

rorykoehler 9y ago
What constitutes a natural death? We used to die at 40 now we die at 80. Is that natural? At what point does natural become unnatural?
- axaxs 9y ago
  Natural in the context of not being murdered or otherwise unlucky. I really feel especially for say, kids who get terminal diseases before they reach their teens, so I'll throw that in. I'm not old yet, but I've gotten to experience a lot of life to the point where I'd accept my fate. Sorry for the nonanswer, but it requires a bit of thinking and opinion.
  - rorykoehler 9y ago
    If medicine advanced to the point of repairing your body to be able to live a healthy life indefinitely would you try stay healthy using the best science has to offer or would you not?
    - axaxs 9y ago
      It would depend on a lot of factors. Can everyone afford it, even my poorer friends and family? Is the population booming? Off the cuff - no. If we all lived forever there'd be no world change, the birth rate would have to drop by a ton to near zero, etc. The older I become, the more set in my ways I become. That's just natural, even if you consciously fight it. Imagine where we'd be as a society if they'd discovered how to live forever in the caveman days...

jackvalentine 9y ago

Surely having your consciousness in some kind of computer/machine will be similar enough to 'locked in' syndrome to be a torture? If they network you with others, it'll be a a true system of narcissists.

knowThySelfx 9y ago

Have got a very bad feeling about this. Makes you wonder what really is "You" or "I". Just a collection of memories in your brain? Do people here approve of the idea of soul? Most probably won't because there's no "scientific" proof for it yet.

sreejithr 9y ago

I wish they could do this to Stephen Hawking's brain.

eggsome 9y ago

I can't believe no one has mentioned MLP - Friendship is Optimal: https://www.fimfiction.net/story/62074/friendship-is-optimal https://www.fimfiction.net/story/62074/friendship-is-optimal An amazing work that had some help from some of the guys at Less Wrong. One of the most enlightening and funny things I've read in ages. Here is a great talk that led me to reading it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7eUomiDaTo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7eUomiDaTo TL;DR: It's a superintelligent AI that just wants to make humans happy... with Frendship and Ponies.

projektir 9y ago

I wonder if, when they do create this technology, it'll be all that great of an idea. I'm not really on Greg Egan's page of things here.

gcb0 9y ago

so, legal euthanasia for the rich?

e12e 9y ago

> “And there is a much larger humanitarian aspect to the whole thing. Right now, when a generation of people die, we lose all their collective wisdom. You can transmit knowledge to the next generation, but it’s harder to transmit wisdom, which is learned. Your children have to learn from the same mistakes.” Books?

ramblerman 9y ago

It's really strange to think it will be someone just like you, but not actually you. You never re-open your eyes so to speak, your copy does. It seems a bit narcissistic to know you will never open your eyes again, but you would still like a copy of you to exist.

camillomiller 9y ago

This seems to be based on the theory of the connectome, which is widely accepted but still fundamentally unproven. The idea that we are but a sum of the electrical interactions between cells in our brain is extremely short-sighted. Our nervous system expands over the physical limit of the brain. How can we be sure that memories are not activated by specific interactions with other departments of our body. And even if it were true that brain equals conscience, how can we ignore the constant interaction with the external world? Would it be possible to recreate a conscience "in sich" and "für sich", to say it with Kant, without connecting it to a simulation of whatever else is there? In any case, I applaud at this trial. It is intriguing and interesting, but it also is a display of scientific hybris that you don't see often. I completely disagree with the assumptions that are moving this operation, but I'm extremely excited to see where this ends up.

rajacombinator 9y ago

This is treading a very thin line between a typical voluntary snake oil (with a hint of reverse Pascal’s wager) transaction and unethical exploitation (and murder for profit, one could easily argue) of the desperately ill and naive. Although I suspect many involved (investors...) may themselves be naive enough to imagine this works. Merging it with a YC/VC “do anything and break any rule to produce growth” mentality - which is great for a business - is wildly unethical. There’s no theoretical basis for “brain uploads” other than middlebrow “tech solves everything” pie-in-the-skyism. There’s no economic basis for getting people in the far future to do you favors. And there’s no medical basis for brain embalming/freezing. If they could do this on pigs and resurrect them after x number of days it would be a different story.

Veedrac 9y ago
By the time we can do this on pigs, the ethical disaster of the fact that billions of people will have died preventable deaths will be at holocaust levels. The only ethical action is to do this well before it's possible, roughly at the point where the probability of it happening at some point in the future crosses the cost-benefit threshold. The idea that there is a less than 1-in-10000 chance that in 10,000 years we will be unable to run brains in simulation given over the last ~50y of development we've produced hardware literally nine orders of magnitude faster than that of the brain, done so in a mass-producible fashion, made unbelievable strides in neuroscience, discovered CRISPR and make synthetic biology, gone from AI-as-theory to computers that can talk, describe images, and synthesise photorealistic faces, gone from technology as niche to CPUs on plastic that cost literally a since cent... is frankly an blunt unwillingness to consider the issue.

basementcat 9y ago

Are people in the future going to find bootleg copies of other peoples' consciousness on torrents? When will we be able to check ourselves into Github? After you see that particularly horrifying youtube video, you might be able to roll yourself back to a previous commit and literally unsee what you have seen!