Crosspost

[Keith Henson]

[I spent some time last night on this which might interest some of you.]

I am not quite as much of a Musk fan as Howard (Bloom) because I think
space mining and O'Neill cylinders are a better idea than Mars.
However, anything serious in space such as power satellites or space
mining requires low-cost lift, and no doubt Musk (SpaceX) was doing a
great job. His foray into EV didn't mean as much to me, but I know
people who were totally taken.

Unfortunately, Musk's venture into politics has done enormous damage
to his EV business and I worry about it making such a mess of the US
that it wrecks SpaceX. I can't blame Musk, the reward people get from
political attention was wired in through a million years of evolution.
Few people can resist it. Out of the 1000 or more people my wife and
I have known, only 3 or 4 were able to resist. (O'Neill was not one
of them, ask me the story in private sometime.)

Anyway, I am sure there is a general awareness about the guy who was
deported to the notorious prison in El Salvador and you know of Musk's
DODG. Friday, using government computers, DODG sent an email to a
second-generation-born-in-the-US lawyer. She posted it, kicking off
this thread.

https://bsky.app/profile/reichlinmelnick.bsky.social/post/3lmljpkrdj22h

‪Aaron Reichlin-Melnick‬ ‪@reichlinmelnick.bsky.social‬
·
6h
There’s a big thread of baffled people on Reddit trying to figure out
what the emails mean or if they’re real. They include:

- Citizens
- Canadians (living in Canada)
- Green card holders
- DACA recipients

Worth spending a little time on the tread, but the point is that
Musk's association with DODG and this stunt is likely to cause the
kind of damage to SpaceX, including Starlink that happened to Tesla.
Or worse.

Sigh.

Winner? Hard to say. Chinese maybe.


Keith

[John Clark]

On Sat, Apr 12, 2025 at 12:22 PM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I am not quite as much of a Musk fan as Howard (Bloom) because I think
space mining and O'Neill cylinders are a better idea than Mars.

I strongly agree, although the exponential improvement in AI may render both Mars and O'Neill cylinders irrelevant, and may do so before the end of the Trump administration. And Musk loves Bitcoin, I thought it was a pretty neat idea too when it first came out in 2009, but now it's pretty clear it was a failed experiment; the only thing you can actually do with a bitcoin is to use it to buy illegal drugs, pay off blackmailers and kidnappers, and sell it so you can get real money. And even the simplest transaction with bitcoin needs to use an obscene amount of electricity and state of the art computer chips that could be put to a much better use in AI. So my admiration of Elon musk has decreased about two orders of magnitude over the last two years.  

 

> Unfortunately, Musk's venture into politics has done enormous damage to his EV business

It's ironic that a year ago the most enthusiastic buyers of Teslas tended to be on the liberal side, but now they hate Musk's guts and feel embarrassed to drive one of his cars. Trump's ridiculously high tariffs will enormously harm his EV business but it will harm his competitors even more, so he may be OK with that. 

> and I worry about it making such a mess of the US that it wrecks SpaceX.

It's almost a law of nature that anybody who gets close to Trump gets burned, they seem to end up impoverished, disgraced or jailed.  

  John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

jid

[Simon Quellen Field]

The tariffs will mean that Tesla's only market is the U.S.

China's BYD will own the rest of the world.

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[Keith Henson]

On Sat, Apr 12, 2025 at 12:28 PM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:
>

> On Sat, Apr 12, 2025 at 12:22 PM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> > I am not quite as much of a Musk fan as Howard (Bloom) because I think
>> space mining and O'Neill cylinders are a better idea than Mars.
>
> I strongly agree, although the exponential improvement in AI may render both Mars and O'Neill cylinders irrelevant,

True. Not long ago I projected humans taking an upload and speed up
future. If what we are seeing is the shadows of data centers, they
did not take a "sink in the ocean for cooling" and "make small for
short communication delay" approach.
http://hplusmagazine.com/2012/04/12/transhumanism-and-the-human-expansion-into-space-a-conflict-with-physics/

The structures (if they are structures) are 1.5 light seconds across.
That implies that their subjective perception of time is about the
same as we use (again if there are any aliens).

> and may do so before the end of the Trump administration.

Maybe. But as fast as things are moving up the exponential curve, I
don't think it will happen that fast.

> And Musk loves Bitcoin, I thought it was a pretty neat idea too when it first came out in 2009, but now it's pretty clear it was a failed experiment; the only thing you can actually do with a bitcoin is to use it to buy illegal drugs, pay off blackmailers and kidnappers, and sell it so you can get real money.

I think the biggest "market" for bitcoin is people trying to hide
assets from the government.

> And even the simplest transaction with bitcoin needs to use an obscene amount of electricity and state of the art computer chips that could be put to a much better use in AI. So my admiration of Elon musk has decreased about two orders of magnitude over the last two years.
>
>>
>> > Unfortunately, Musk's venture into politics has done enormous damage to his EV business
>
>
> It's ironic that a year ago the most enthusiastic buyers of Teslas tended to be on the liberal side, but now they hate Musk's guts and feel embarrassed to drive one of his cars. Trump's ridiculously high tariffs will enormously harm his EV business but it will harm his competitors even more, so he may be OK with that.

Hard to say, the policy is not fixed yet. On the other hand, the
uncertainty has frozen business planning.

Keith

>> > and I worry about it making such a mess of the US that it wrecks SpaceX.
>
>
> It's almost a law of nature that anybody who gets close to Trump gets burned, they seem to end up impoverished, disgraced or jailed.
>
> John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis
> jid
>

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[John Clark]

On Sun, Apr 13, 2025 at 2:47 AM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:

 

http://hplusmagazine.com/2012/04/12/transhumanism-and-the-human-expansion-into-space-a-conflict-with-physics/

That link doesn't work.

 

> The structures (if they are structures) are 1.5 light seconds across.
That implies that their subjective perception of time is about the

same as we use .

I don't think it's as simple as that for two reasons: 

1) The maximum time it takes to send a message from one side of the brain to the other is NOT the only factor, another factor that is just as important if not more so is the bandwidth of that message channel; and for Mr. Jupiter Brain that bandwidth would be many billions or trillions of times wider than any biological brain has.

2) Mr. Jupiter Brain wouldn't need to use His entire brain for simple tasks, such as finding the integral of a 4D tensor equation, He would probably not be consciously aware of the steps He used to find it nor would He need to be, for Him the answer would just be intuitively obvious. In the same way a baseball player is not consciously aware of the steps his brain used to figure out the split second when he should start to swing his bat, he swung it when his intuition told him the time was right.  

> (again if there are any aliens)

The events of the last two years have made me even more convinced that ET doesn't exist, if he did we'd know by now. 

 John K Clark

 

[Keith Henson]

On Sun, Apr 13, 2025 at 4:35 AM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Sun, Apr 13, 2025 at 2:47 AM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> http://hplusmagazine.com/2012/04/12/transhumanism-and-the-human-expansion-into-space-a-conflict-with-physics/
>
> That link doesn't work.

Try

https://web.archive.org/web/20121130232045/http://hplusmagazine.com/2012/04/12/transhumanism-and-the-human-expansion-into-space-a-conflict-with-physics/

>> > The structures (if they are structures) are 1.5 light seconds across.
>> That implies that their subjective perception of time is about the
>> same as we use .
>
> I don't think it's as simple as that for two reasons:

The article assumed that uploading humans would communicate with the
same delay we now experience on Earth. A million-to-one speed-up
required shrinking the hardware-to-hardware distance to 300 meters for
the same subjective experience.

> 1) The maximum time it takes to send a message from one side of the brain to the other is NOT the only factor, another factor that is just as important if not more so is the bandwidth of that message channel; and for Mr. Jupiter Brain that bandwidth would be many billions or trillions of times wider than any biological brain has.
>
> 2) Mr. Jupiter Brain wouldn't need to use His entire brain for simple tasks, such as finding the integral of a 4D tensor equation, He would probably not be consciously aware of the steps He used to find it nor would He need to be, for Him the answer would just be intuitively obvious. In the same way a baseball player is not consciously aware of the steps his brain used to figure out the split second when he should start to swing his bat, he swung it when his intuition told him the time was right.

Popularly I was tagged with conceiving of the Jupiter Brain. It
wasn't me, I located the thread. I responded by throwing cold water
on the idea for the reasons that a large computer would operate slowly
because it could not be of one mind if some parts were not
communicating due to the speed of light,

>> > (again if there are any aliens)
>
> The events of the last two years have made me even more convinced that ET doesn't exist, if he did we'd know by now.

What events?

If you can account for the blinking of 24 stars in a 2000 LY cluster
in any way that does not involve aliens I would be most interested.

I hope you can, I don't want to be right.

But the blinks did cause me to think about the fate of uploaded
humans. If you want to build power and heat sink hardware for
trillions of uploaded humans, you would probably do it in the
"computational" zone say 5 AU where error rates are kept down by the
low temperature.

Keith

> John K Clark
>
>
>>
>>
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[John Clark]

On Sun, Apr 13, 2025 at 6:39 PM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Popularly I was tagged with conceiving of the Jupiter Brain.  It
wasn't me, I located the thread.  I responded by throwing cold water
on the idea for the reasons that a large computer would operate slowly
because it could not be of one mind if some parts were not
communicating due to the speed of light,

I don't think your conclusion that a large brain is a slow thinking brain is valid. If a problem is easy then the entire brain is not needed to solve it, and if a problem is difficult then a large massively parallel machine can solve it much faster than a small fast serial machine. Most of the problems that would interest a businessman, engineer or scientist can be solved on a massively parallel computer such as the type that Nvidia makes. That even includes emulating the 3 pounds of gray glue that's in a bone box that rests on your shoulders; the current AI revolution would be impossible without massive parallel processing. 

There are only 3 things that parallel processors still have trouble with:

1) Problems  that have been deliberately designed to be difficult for a computer, or a human, to solve; cryptographic codes for example.

2)  Large complex NP optimization problems.

 3) Quantum Mechanics. 

But even in those cases a parallel computer can find useful approximations much faster than a serial computer can, and there is a strong possibility that quantum computers will soon do even better.    

>> The events of the last two years have made me even more convinced that ET doesn't exist, if he did we'd know by now.

> What events?

Two years ago there was good reason to think that exponential growth in machine intelligence was possible but there was no rock solid proof of that. Today we have that proof. And the universe is over 13 billion years old, so if ET existed a blind man in the fog bank would be able to detect it, but even our largest telescopes are unable to find even a hint of intelligence unless scientists turn their instruments toward the Earth   

> If you can account for the blinking of 24 stars in a 2000 LY cluster
in any way that does not involve aliens I would be most interested.
I hope you can, I don't want to be right.

Tabetha Boyajian, the astronomer that Tabby's Star (KIC 8462852) is named after, now thinks the blinking is caused by interstellar dust because different colors of light decreased in intensity at different times which is consistent with dust but inconsistent with a solid object like a ET built megastructure. In 2016 Éric Trottier and Ermanno Borra reported that 234 stars in one small region of the sky were blinking in a strange manner, however no other astronomer has been able to repeat that observation, and today the SETI Institute says the blinking was almost certainly an artifact caused by bad data processing.  

  John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

4nd

[John Clark]

On Sun, Apr 13, 2025 at 11:29 PM Will Steinberg <steinbe...@gmail.com> wrote:

>I mean seriously, uploading requires SERIOUS advances in metaphysics. 

There has been exactly zero advancement in the metaphysical study of consciousness during the last thousand years and there is no reason to think the next thousand years will do any better. However there has been an astronomical advancement in the scientific study of intelligence during just the last two years. 

 

>What happens if they copy you twice? 

That's easy! Then there will be three Will Steinbergs (assuming the scanning process is not destructive) because there will be three chunks of matter that behave in a Willsteinbergen way.

> Problem: we have absolutely no idea what “you” is

Yes we do, "you" is a personal pronoun whose antecedent has, due to technological limitations, always referred to one and only one chunk of matter, however there is no reason to think that will always be the case.  Or to put it another way, I can give a clear answer to the question "what will happen to Will Steinberg?" but I cannot give an answer to the question "what will happen to you?"  because  a flaw in the English language renders the question meaningless if "you" duplicating machines exist; not surprising really, when personal pronouns were invented nobody was thinking about such machines.  I think the English language will soon need an upgrade.  

  John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

*@x

 

[John Clark]

On  Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote on https://web.archive.org/web/20121130232045/http://hplusmagazine.com/2012/04/12/transhumanism-and-the-human-expansion-into-space-a-conflict-with-physics/

> The problem is that the faster you run your brain, the more the world around you seems to slow down. With only a modest speedup, movement would seem like wading through molasses.

That depends, interesting phenomena occur at all times scales. Even if your brain was sped up by a factor of a million billion, many particle physics phenomena would still seem to occur virtually instantaneously.   

 > For a million-to-one speedup, that means that all the communicating nodes can be no more than 300 meters apart,  i.e., configured as a sphere 300 meters in diameter with a hole to pump water in or out (for cooling). The area of the sphere is ~283,000 square meters.

In previous posts I have given my reasons why I don't think a brain would be limited to a sphere of only 300 m in diameter, but even if it is that works out to be a volume of about 14,000,000 cubic meters. The average human brain is about 0.00135 cubic meters. And the signals in the human brain travel between 0.5 and 120 meters per second depending on if the axon is myelinated or unmyelinated. The speed of light is 300,000,000 meters per second.

 > One consequence that Eric Drexler discussed in Engines of Creation (end of Chapter 5) was a million years of science and engineering being done in one year. He didn’t discuss the subjective effect of a whole society uploading and subjectively experiencing a million years per calendar year.

 

To GPT, Claude or Gemini it may seem like it's taken a million years to reach superhuman intelligence, but that doesn't mean we humans won't experience a superhuman AI before the end of the Trump administration.  

   John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

5e2

[Keith Henson]

If you read the article, you seem to have missed that the 300-meter
sphere was a civilization, the brains were 10 cm cubes per Eric
Drexler.

Best wishes,

Keith

[John Clark]

On Mon, Apr 14, 2025 at 1:05 AM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Not my goal.  Until the process is fully reversible, I don't want
anything to do with it [uploading]

 

I am not nearly as hesitant about that as you are, indeed you and I are both signed up with ALCOR but I think if an AI is kind enough to revive us it will almost certainly be as an upload, they will not want us running around at the same level of reality that their data servers are in. That's why I'm disappointed ALCOR does not offer ASC,  Aldehyde-Stabilized Cryopreservation, it's what Eric Drexler recommended in his book Engines Of Creation, and electron microscopic pictures show that ASC
preserves the information about how the neurons are connected to each other. It's not known if the procedure used by ALCOR preserves that information because,  due to osmotic dehydration, it shrinks the brain by 50%.  

Even if that information is preserved, and I sure hope it is, it certainly makes it harder to read. Cryonics is superior to a procedure that burns up the information that makes you be you or to have it be eaten by worms, so I don't understand why ALCOR doesn't see the advantage in something that doesn't shrink the brain by 50%.   If one method can make remarkably clear electron microscope pictures of brain cells and one can't because of distortion caused by shrinkage, then one preserves information better than the other.

The only rationale, if you can call it that, that ALCOR gives for not embracing ASC is that  it makes restoring biological viability more difficult which is true but irrelevant and "We are reluctant to settle for preservation of ultrastructure alone because this goal can always trigger objections that we are failing to preserve crucial identity-encoding parts of the brain " which is just silly. No matter what ALCOR does, they're not gonna win any popularity contests, tens of millions of people will say they're evil, half of them because they think it won't work and the other half because they think it might. I think they should use scientific evidence and not public relations to determine how they should care for their patients.

Oh and they also say "restoring function after reversal of our procedures is the most credible test of the efficacy of our procedures", but the day that becomes possible will be the day that ALCOR is no longer needed.  

 John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

wwc

[jkst...@sbcglobal.net]

IF Technology is as good as I think it will be when they defrost people, none if this will be a problem.

I have no interest in uploading, and certainly not in ASC.

 

John S.

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[Keith Lofstrom]

On Sun, Apr 13, 2025 at 07:34:40AM -0400, John Clark wrote:
> *1) The maximum time it takes to send a message from one side of the brain

> to the other is NOT the only factor, another factor that is just as
> important if not more so is the bandwidth of that message channel; and for
> Mr. Jupiter Brain that bandwidth would be many billions or trillions of

> times wider than any biological brain has.*

I had lunch yesterday with an old friend whose PhD research
(decades ago) involved hummingbird brains. The wings are
controlled by a separate tiny lump of neurons. More
compact, distributed, and far more energy efficient than
human brain neurons. There's a lot to learn from nature.

John later did proof-of-correctness engineering at Intel.
Sadly, he was bypassed when some idiot changed a lookup
table without proper formal logic analysis, causing the
infamous billion-dollar Pentium FDIV bug.

Some managers are less intelligent than hummingbirds.

Intel used to be revolutionary, but all revolutions
evaporate into a thin slime of bureaucracy. Our system
architecture errors will be far more difficult to correct.
We will need perfect mathematical proof, not hand-waving.

----

Separated lumps of computation are best for "space brain"
light harvesting, most importantly for heat dissipation,
so that kTln2 bits require minimal power. Hot and dense
is logically and economically STUPID.

Deep space heat sink is 2.7K. My masters thesis (50 years
ago!) was about cryogenic logic at a balmy 4 Kelvins.
John's son designs sensors working at millidegree Kelvins;
the eldritch quantum phenomena zone (cue Rod Serling).

-----

BTW, I'm currently studying a "Jupiter brain" ... except
in a shallow "gravitational valley" in front of Earth-Sun
L1, 1.5 million kilometers and 10 seconds round trip away.
Independent gossamer compute/PV elements in Lissajous
orbits, connected with laser data beams, not structural
beams and wires. Orbit math shamelessly stolen from the
Sun observation probes in 6ish-month slow orbits near ESL1
now; those consume about 1m/s/y of station-keeping thrust.
If they were lower mass, the delta V could be done with
low-performance electronically-shuttered "solar sailing".

ESL1 supports more than a "Jupiter's surface" of power
collection, with 50 times Jupiter's 5.2 AU insolation.
Lissajous orbits result in a mostly empty zone near the
Earth-Sun line (more opacity at the sides). The Earth
will remain properly lit, and communication signalling
will be off-axis to the noisy Sun.

Amusing orbital mechanics, especially regards the "light
pressure" of unusable reflected infrared, but challenging
for my 70+yo brain to grok. 20 kW of computation power
per kilogram seems possible, in the -50C shadowed "tail"
of a thin sun-facing photovoltaic film. Cold permits
lower energy bits and signalling.

A typical rule of thumb is that electronics wear-out rates
double every 10C, hence -50C chips will last 1000 times
longer than the 50C Pentium in the computer you are reading
this with. Redundant-path chips will "die of obsolescence"
far sooner than they die of heat, or high energy particles.

Radiation-induced failures? Details about the absurdly
high radiation resistance of redundant nanometer-scale
transistors will require signing a non-disclosure
agreement, to protect my chip fab customers ... mostly
from US government export controls. We "have our ways
of assuaging the bureaucrats, while protecting the US
from our own technology used against us.

I hope; China is clever. Do NOT feed or vex the dragon;
a formidable enemy, but also a boy's best friend.

-----

All that said ... I wouldn't mind co-authoring a journal
paper about space computing arrays.

But first, I need to finish another paper about an amusing
new way to power silicon-on-insulator CMOS. Perhaps I will
first get a patent on that, which could reduce the cost of
most terrestrial electronics by a few percent. Royalties
could pay young folk for further research; alternatively,
the chip fabs might pay royalties "in kind" with "space
chips" during times when demand is low for terrestrial
applications. That way, my friends working at Intel and
Wafertech and Broadcom will keep their jobs in recessions.

-----

If there are experts on Bitcoin timing and connection
protocol reading this, Bitcoin mining MAY be a "practical"
near-term application of these technologies. "Free" power
may be MUCH more important than the "cost" of 10 second
latency subtracted from the 600 second Bitcoin compute
window. HOWEVER, I don't know NEARLY enough Bitcoin
implementation and timing details to be sure. (help?)

And no, I don't want to argue about "Bitcoin bad" or
"Ethereum better" etc. My goal is to remove a 4 GW load
from the global grid ASAP, using surprisingly little
space bandwidth, while making a giant step towards VAST
space-powered computation resources decades from now.
Bitcoin lemons squeezed into lemonade.

Co-generate mining power meters away from the compute
load; don't ship power 36 megameters from GEO, and cook
the Earth's atmosphere with the resulting waste heat.

When all the other "miners" are "power-priced" out of
the Bitcoin business, mining chips can be replaced with
chips for more useful computations, such as petawatt AI.
I prefer that my feeble human brain has a 10 second time
advantage relative to "AIL1" for matters terrestrial.

----

BTW, I know(?) how to design extremely low-mass and
rad-hard chips. I also have friends at advanced US chip
fabs, currently with surplus capacity. WE CAN DO THIS,
and there is no better time than NOW.

Keith L.

--
Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com

[John Clark]

On Mon, Apr 14, 2025 at 3:43 PM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:

> If you read the article, you seem to have missed that the 300-meter
sphere was a civilization, the brains were 10 cm cubes per Eric Drexler.

I don't think it makes sense to hypothesize about the brain activity of millions or billions of separate individuals being computed inside a sphere of 300 meters. If there was an extremely fast and astronomically wide communication channel between your brain and mine so that every thought I had you had and every thought you had I had then we would stop being separate people, only Keith Clark (or John Henson) would exist.  

 John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

 

>> > The problem is that the faster you run your brain, the more the world around you seems to slow down. With only a modest speedup, movement would seem like wading through molasses.


> That depends, interesting phenomena occur at all times scales. Even if your brain was sped up by a factor of a million billion, many particle physics phenomena would still seem to occur virtually instantaneously.

>>  > For a million-to-one speedup, that means that all the communicating nodes can be no more than 300 meters apart,  i.e., configured as a sphere 300 meters in diameter with a hole to pump water in or out (for cooling). The area of the sphere is ~283,000 square meters.


> In previous posts I have given my reasons why I don't think a brain would be limited to a sphere of only 300 m in diameter, but even if it is that works out to be a volume of about 14,000,000 cubic meters. The average human brain is about 0.00135 cubic meters. And the signals in the human brain travel between 0.5 and 120 meters per second depending on if the axon is myelinated or unmyelinated. The speed of light is 300,000,000 meters per second.


>>  > One consequence that Eric Drexler discussed in Engines of Creation (end of Chapter 5) was a million years of science and engineering being done in one year. He didn’t discuss the subjective effect of a whole society uploading and subjectively experiencing a million years per calendar year.


> To GPT, Claude or Gemini it may seem like it's taken a million years to reach superhuman intelligence, but that doesn't mean we humans won't experience a superhuman AI before the end of the Trump administration.
>
>    John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

[Keith Henson]

On Tue, Apr 15, 2025 at 4:58 AM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Apr 14, 2025 at 3:43 PM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> > If you read the article, you seem to have missed that the 300-meter
>> sphere was a civilization, the brains were 10 cm cubes per Eric Drexler.
>
>
> I don't think it makes sense to hypothesize about the brain activity of millions or billions of separate individuals being computed inside a sphere of 300 meters.

Try reading it again. Only the surface had uploaded humans, 100 to
the square meter. The reason for the shape was the water flow for
carrying off 20 kW of waste heat from running a brain simulation at a
millionfold. The reason for the size limit was to keep subjective
communication delays no worse than what we have on Earth.

> If there was an extremely fast and astronomically wide communication channel between your brain and mine so that every thought I had you had and every thought you had I had then we would stop being separate people, only Keith Clark (or John Henson) would exist.

You are assuming something that is not in the design. On a subjective
basis, the communication needs to be no faster or more bandwidth than
we use today. You don't merge with someone by watching their youtube
video or talking on the phone. Of course you could, but that was not
in the physical design which is about communication delay and waste
heat problems of running fast.

But while I think the physics works for a million to one speedup, if
what we see at Tabby's star is data centers with trillions of uploaded
aliens, they did not take the speedup route. If they had we would
never see them. Whatever, data centers or dust, the light blockers
are 1.5 light seconds across. I have posted the math on the Exi list
if you want to check it.

Keith

[John Clark]

On Tue, Apr 15, 2025 at 11:24 AM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:

 On a subjective basis, the communication needs to be no faster or more bandwidth than
we use today.  

But in general, the wider the bandwidth between the parts of a brain are, the smarter the brain will be. So regardless of subjectivity, a 300 meter diameter brain with a wide bandwidth will outcompete another 300 meter diameter brain that uses a narrower bandwidth. And if a brain of that size uses high bandwidth then it would be best thought of as a single individual and not many individuals.

If the brain were the size of Jupiter then things are not quite as clear cut. It's hard to imagine what it's subjective experience would be like, calling it a very close-knit team of like-minded individuals would probably be too weak a statement, and calling it a completely united being would probably be too strong; but if we forget subjectivity and just consider how it would objectively look to an outside observer then it would seem like a single individual.

> But while I think the physics works for a million to one speedup, if
what we see at Tabby's star is data centers with trillions of uploaded
aliens, they did not take the speedup route. 

These days few if any astrophysicist still believe that Tabby's star has anything to do with ET, and that includes the astronomer who discovered it.  

 John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis 

6hn

On Tue, Apr 15, 2025 at 4:58 AM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Apr 14, 2025 at 3:43 PM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> > If you read the article, you seem to have missed that the 300-meter
>> sphere was a civilization, the brains were 10 cm cubes per Eric Drexler.
>
>
> I don't think it makes sense to hypothesize about the brain activity of millions or billions of separate individuals being computed inside a sphere of 300 meters.

Try reading it again.  Only the surface had uploaded humans, 100 to
the square meter.  The reason for the shape was the water flow for
carrying off 20 kW of waste heat from running a brain simulation at a
millionfold.  The reason for the size limit was to keep subjective
communication delays no worse than what we have on Earth.

> If there was an extremely fast and astronomically wide communication channel between your brain and mine so that every thought I had you had and every thought you had I had then we would stop being separate people, only Keith Clark (or John Henson) would exist.

.

[Keith Henson]

On Wed, Apr 16, 2025 at 4:13 AM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
snip

> These days few if any astrophysicist still believe that Tabby's star has anything to do with ET, and that includes the astronomer who discovered it.

I really, really hope they are right. Aliens 3000 years ahead of us
would be serious competition. But I doubt they are the right experts.
They are, for example, not aware of directional waste heat radiation
from thermal power satellite designs which would account for the
impossibly low observed temperature of what they think are dust
clouds.

In any case, it got me thinking about the fate of uploaded humanity
and the idea of a cold computational zone and hardware, energy, and
heat sinks to house them.

Years ago I made a case for fast uploads sunk in the ocean for cooling
as the long-term fate of humanity. That does not seem to be the only
solution.

If you can think of a third alternative, that would be cool.

Keith

[jkst...@sbcglobal.net]

Anyone who has been uploaded is almost certainly dead already.
Thus an uploaded future is rather depressing,

John S

-----Original Message-----
From: power-satell...@googlegroups.com <power-satell...@googlegroups.com> On Behalf Of Keith Henson
Sent: Wednesday, April 16, 2025 8:23 AM
To: John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com>
Cc: extro...@googlegroups.com; ExI chat list <extrop...@lists.extropy.org>; Power Satellite Economics <power-satell...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [Extropolis] Crosspost

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[Paul Werbos]

Good morning, Bart and Keith!

Since Keith has been promoting the idea of humans downloading themselves into... computers..

as a path to human personal immortality... I feel moved to get back in touch with Bart Kosko, who was in my view the number one world ... developer... of that vision, years ago.

I hope Bart will not sue me for revealing an old story. Many years ago, Bart submitted a proposal to be honored as a Presidential Young Investigator (PYI), in the first year of that government-wide program, under President Bush. I ran the relevant NSF review, and saw how the reviews for Bart were unequivocal and supportive. After my Division (electrical engineering) discussed ALL the proposals and reviews we had reviewed, we forwarded the recommendation to the White House, with our full support. BUT THEN... I do not know what happened in the White House, which surprised us, but it seems they ordered us to deny the proposal because they did not like his politics.

TODAY, I find that amusing in a way, because this year (10the anniversary of my leaving NSF)

was MY first time to vote Libertarian for President because BOTH candidates of the major parties came with baggage I would find embarrassing. (I had great positive contact with "W" in other areas, but no world leader is perfect.)

BUT WHAT ABOUT DOWNLOADING OF OUR MINDS? This is a VERY realistic and serious issue,

which we really should be careful and thoughtful about. Even the libertarian community is deeply divided, like the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland pointing in  two directions at once.

I do owe you a side comment: **I** have unique knowledge now of the math of "artificial general intelligence" (AGI) as illustrated in my several patents and early patent applications in that area https://patents.justia.com/inventor/paul-j-werbos, for which I won the lead technical field award of IEEE in 2022. The details and the real math matter a LOT here.

Many people in my neighborhood (Arlington Virginia, which was initially part of DC and still is in some ways) believe that Trump will leave the Presidency by 2026, and that Vance will be led by Musk even more than Trump has been. Musk's DOGE plans are VERY well known, in technical detail with legal advice, in this neighborhood, in part because many well-connected people are personally affected.

(This morning, I sent family members mention of a France24 documentary which showed two human interest videos on the great purge, all free on youtube, directly reflecting members of my family, on different sides.)  Musk's basic idea is to replace human decision making in agencies with AI decision-making. I suppose that humans downloaded into LLM "clones" might become eligible for positions to make the top policy decisions. But the scary thing is that Musk does not really understand the mathematical principles involved, either for AI or for Tesla technology, or even for low cost access to space. He is not like Andrew Carnegie, who was far more skilled in seeking out the best technology and in using Scottish Rite Freemasons to help verify issues like truth and the human mind.

The best hope for now, in my view, is that MORE ENERGETIC QUALIFIED MATHEMATICALLY COMPETENT PEOPLE might link to the new USGOV (whatever it might be) to nudge us towards the

more benign and hopeful future tracks, including -- yes -- mega intelligent systems and "computer" hardware, designed in a more knowledgeable way. In truth, USC, where Bart works, COULD be a crucial player in making a more positive outcome possible. Now that I think of it, a major task is EDUCATING OURSELVES about crucial, little understood technical realities, AND THEN building cadres of graduate students capable of the intellectual, engineering and dissemination challenges necessary to avoid the many very deep pitfalls. 

MANY realities ...

I am glad Bart can appreciate (and create!) science fiction, which is not always 100% true, but often 

contains inspired truth we all really need to assimilate deeply.

FOR EXAMPLE... the old Doctor Who TV series had a great episode on "where did the Daleks come from,"

which reflects key features of the math of real AGI. In that episode, the kindly old father of a lead woman

was kidnapped by Daleks, who then inserted his brain into a robot. (Musk is a leader in supporting related Brain Computer Interface BCI technology, for which I often send out slides from the interagency conference which persuaded me to retire from USGOV.) Because the robot had inputs and outputs from the human brain -- the sensory and motor nerves -- there were great screams at first coming from the robot. HOWEVER, the robot also had wires sending reinforcement signals to that brain. (This is exactly what Musk's neuralink system does.

 It was amusing when he showed SOME concerns about the DARPA program which funded several groups to develop such technology, which reminded some of us of the "clone armies" of Star Wars, also very realistic in many ways. At first, he proposed using it on... wild boars or pigs... which would make great oinking clone armies.)

After some time affected by the new reinforcement signals, he became a normal Dalek, working effectively to eliminate all humans.

Just as an aside.... this is basically how opioids and ALMOST ALL psychedelic drugs work as well, and also the 

electrical "therapies for depression" now allowed by FDA. (If anyone needs it... there is a great session video from the Arizona consciousness conference I spoke at years ago. That session reported front line technical research with all the neurochemistry.)

And so... YES, human brains often possess very important information which WOULD be useful to humanity if PROPERLY downloaded, BUT THE design of the receiving system is absolutely essential to the harm or benefit of the outcome. That kind of design work is EXTREMELY difficult to get right ... which is why

new design networks are essential. 

I would be happy to say more about those essential details, but this email is already more than long enough

for human brains to assimilate.

Best of luck to us all. We need it.

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[Paul Werbos]

As Keith also wants crosspost with "extropy", I looked up what "extropy" means.

It refers to a principle in the universe expanding life somehow.

As it happens, I do also have unique knowledge in THIS area. More precisely,

I do NOT believe that our universe is governed by a fuzzy principle apart from the ultimate laws of physics... BUT the two theories of physics which I now consider most credible, drawing on the most advanced empirical data available,  https://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2021/11/q-basic-realities-of-living-in.html, DO imply that the patterns we call "life" are present mathematically in the ENTROPY FUNCTIONS, i.e. the equilibrium probability distributions of states, of the universe.

As it happens, at arxiv (cond-mat) I posted the exact form of the entropy function for one of those theories. That form DEPENDS on the choice of Hamiltonian or Lagrangian function, which is a long discussion in itself, but -- it basically tends to favor locally low-energy states.

WHEN I try to visualize the IMPLICATIONS of that math... it does seem likely to fit a version of the

"extropy" idea, in which life -- even life using atoms as PART of the recipe -- WOULD naturally expand beyond just a few solar systems, and persist as long as the universe does (which might well be unbounded)... IF we give birth somehow to the use of the kind of free energy available in deep space. I am intrigued by the possibility that one of my old patent applications

(quantum separator) MIGHT POSSIBLY do the job. But that certainly would require a lot of RD&D,

and I doubt that FDA and others would allow me to use the new technology (for NATURAL longevity) which would let me live long enough to lead that RD&D!! 

[Keith Henson]

On Wed, Apr 16, 2025 at 6:53 AM <jkst...@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
>
> Anyone who has been uploaded is almost certainly dead already.
> Thus an uploaded future is rather depressing,

You have read "The Clinic Seed" where people were able to freely move
between being uploads and being physical state humans.

Now it is going to take a lot of technical development to get there,
but can you see any reason it is not possible?

Keith

[John Clark]

On Wed, Apr 16, 2025 at 9:53 AM <jkst...@sbcglobal.net> wrote:

> Anyone who has been uploaded is almost certainly dead already.
Thus an uploaded future is rather depressing,

 Information-Theoretic Death

Well, there's death and there's information theoretical death and the two are not necessarily the same. I have no scientific or philosophical worries over the procedure, just practical engineering concerns. I'm pretty healthy but I'm also pretty old and there's no way of knowing when I will start going downhill, so if I was reasonably certain that the bugs had been worked out I would get uploaded today even if it involved a destructive scanning of my brain. 

  John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

eo8

[John Clark]

On Wed, Apr 16, 2025 at 9:23 AM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:

>> These days few if any astrophysicist still believe that Tabby's star has anything to do with ET, and that includes the astronomer who discovered it.

> I really, really hope they are right.  Aliens 3000 years ahead of us would be serious competition. 

If ET does exist, and I don't think he does, then it would be very surprising if he was only 3000 years ahead of us because the universe is 13.8 billion years old.  

 

> But I doubt they are the right experts. They are, for example, not aware of directional waste heat radiation from thermal power satellite designs which would account for the
impossibly low observed temperature of what they think are dust clouds.

I don't know what you mean by "impossibly low observed temperature".

> Years ago I made a case for fast uploads sunk in the ocean for cooling
as the long-term fate of humanity.  That does not seem to be the only
solution. If you can think of a third alternative, that would be cool.

The deep ocean is cold but empty space is even colder, only 2.7° kelvin. And the Boomerang Nebula is colder yet, the dust is at only 1° kelvin; unusual thermodynamic conditions there cause it to act like a natural refrigerator so it's even colder than the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation.  

   John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis 

ed6

 

[Keith Henson]

On Wed, Apr 16, 2025 at 12:01 PM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

snip
>

> If ET does exist, and I don't think he does, then it would be very surprising if he was only 3000 years ahead of us because the universe is 13.8 billion years old.
>

Surprising is certainly the right word, not only in the span of time
but *close* physically. 1470 ly is practically next door. On the
other hand, it might be that ET civilizations of this kind are
relatively common, but for some reason don't communicate.

But no matter how unlikely something is, if it happens, that's reality.

>> > But I doubt they are the right experts. They are, for example, not aware of directional waste heat radiation from thermal power satellite designs which would account for the
>> impossibly low observed temperature of what they think are dust clouds.
>
> I don't know what you mean by "impossibly low observed temperature".

A natural dust cloud, like a comet tail, will be in thermal
equilibrium. At the distance you can determine from the transit time,
it is getting a little over 100 W/m^2. For incoming and outgoing to
balance, the cloud should be at 210 deg K. It measures 65 K.

>
Years ago I made a case for fast uploads sunk in the ocean for cooling
>> as the long-term fate of humanity. That does not seem to be the only
>> solution. If you can think of a third alternative, that would be cool.
>
> The deep ocean is cold but empty space is even colder, only 2.7° kelvin.

That's true, but to get rid of 500 MW at that temperature takes
thousands of square km. At 20 deg K, it takes 60,000 square meters to
radiate one kW.

Keith

[Simon Quellen Field]

"https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/16/science/astronomy-exoplanets-habitable-k218b.html"

----

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[a.p.kothari astrox.com]

Quite amazing and world changing if repeatedly proven true.

 

 

------------------------------------------------------

Dr. Ajay P. Kothari

President

Astrox Corporation

 AIAA Associate Fellow

 

Ph: 301-935-5868

Web:  www.astrox.com

Email: a.p.k...@astrox.com

-------------------------------------------------------

 

From: power-satell...@googlegroups.com On Behalf Of Simon Quellen Field
Sent: Wednesday, April 16, 2025 7:35 PM
To: Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com>
Cc: John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com>; extro...@googlegroups.com; ExI chat list <extrop...@lists.extropy.org>; Power Satellite Economics <power-satell...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [Extropolis] Crosspost

 

"https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/16/science/astronomy-exoplanets-habitable-k218b.html"

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/power-satellite-economics/CAA0yOM4TBzu17gTm0HDwFjg1SMasBaJ%3DFq9w5o0v-5HNkrkjMw%40mail.gmail.com.

[Keith Henson]

On Wed, Apr 16, 2025 at 8:51 AM Paul Werbos <paul....@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> As Keith also wants crosspost with "extropy", I looked up what "extropy" means.
> It refers to a principle in the universe expanding life somehow.

Extropy-chat is a long-running email list, at times highly
influential, Bitcoin came out of that group of people. I met Max More
through cryonics and have posted off and on to this list since 1993.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extropianism

"Extropy" redirects here. For extropy in thermodynamics, biology and
information theory, see Negentropy.

Extropianism, also referred to as the philosophy of extropy, is an
"evolving framework of values and standards for continuously improving
the human condition".[1] Extropians believe that advances in science
and technology will some day let people live indefinitely. An
extropian may wish to contribute to this goal, e.g. by doing research
and development or by volunteering to test new technology.

Originated by a set of principles developed by the philosopher Max
More in The Principles of Extropy,[1] extropian thinking places strong
emphasis on rational thinking and on practical optimism. According to
More, these principles "do not specify particular beliefs,
technologies, or policies". Extropians share an optimistic view of the
future, expecting considerable advances in computational power, life
extension, nanotechnology and the like. Many extropians foresee the
eventual realization of indefinite lifespans or immortality, and the
recovery, thanks to future advances in biomedical technology or mind
uploading, of those whose bodies/brains have been preserved by means
of cryonics.[2][3]
^^^^^^^^

Keith

[John Clark]

On Wed, Apr 16, 2025 at 7:05 PM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:

 

> If ET does exist, and I don't think he does, then it would be very surprising if he was only 3000 years ahead of us because the universe is 13.8 billion years old.

> Surprising is certainly the right word, not only in the span of time
but *close* physically.  1470 ly is practically next door. 

Doesn't that make you question your theory that ET is responsible for the dimming of Tabby's star?  

 

> But no matter how unlikely something is, if it happens, that's reality.

I don't doubt the reality that Tabby's star is dimming, but I do doubt the reality of your theory about the cause of that dimming.  

>>> I doubt they are the right experts. They are, for example, not aware of directional waste heat radiation from thermal power satellite designs which would account for the impossibly low observed temperature of what they think are dust clouds.

 

>> I don't know what you mean by "impossibly low observed temperature".

> A natural dust cloud, like a comet tail, will be in thermal
equilibrium.  At the distance you can determine from the transit time,
it is getting a little over 100 W/m^2.  For incoming and outgoing to
balance, the cloud should be at 210 deg K.  It measures 65 K.

I have no idea where you got those temperature figures. Real dust clouds around stars can NOT be considered to be blackbodies, things are more complicated than that. The amount of radiation a dust cloud gives off that we are able to detect depends on the total amount of mass in the cloud, the size of the dust particles in the cloud, and the metal content of those particles. In the case of Tabby's star all those factors are very imprecisely known, the best determined is the particle size and even then all we can say is they are between 10^-6 and 10^-7 meters across; we know it can't be a solid object because there is more dimming in the blue and ultraviolet than there is in the infrared, but a solid object would dim all wavelengths equally. 

And of course the temperature of the cloud depends on how far it is from its sun which is also very imprecisely known. The result of all this is that the temperature estimate of that cloud has huge error bars, between about 100 and 1200 Kelvin.

   John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis 

heb

    

 

[Keith Henson]

I could go through the math and logic starting with the size of the
dips and the transit times plus why I was strongly biased against
megastructures and why very reluctantly came to the conclusion I did,
plus some of the local long-term consequences for humanity where this
line of thinking led regardless of what we are observing. But it does
not seem to be worthwhile to do so.

I freely acknowledge my tentative conclusions could be wrong, and hope
they are because they may have dire consequences for the future of
humans and our AI offspring. I understand why people don't want to
deal with this possibility and I don't blame you, The local problems
are enough to saturate our worry centers.

Just FYI, the thing that pushed me over the edge was reports that
there are 23 other stars in a cluster that also have light dips like
Tabby's star. I lack the imagination to understand this as anything
but intentional or to dismiss it. The closest one is 511 ly. The
spreading seems to be around 1/3 of c. Either we will go there, or
they will come to us and we will know. If we see Vista being turned
into a data center we will know. Not that we could do anything about
it.

Keith

[John Clark]

On Thu, Apr 17, 2025 at 2:06 PM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Just FYI, the thing that pushed me over the edge was reports that
there are 23 other stars in a cluster that also have light dips like
Tabby's star.  I lack the imagination to understand this as anything
but intentional or to dismiss it.

As the late great Carl Sagan was fond of saying, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence", and nobody has been able to confirm or repeat that observation. So the evidence is not very extraordinary.  

[John Clark]

On Thu, Apr 17, 2025 at 11:25 AM Lawrence Crowell <goldenfield...@gmail.com> wrote:

 

> The issue about downloading minds into computers may be resolved by realizing that a scan of a brain and the mapping of brain states takes time. By the time you reconstruct a mind in a computer the original mind may have progressed beyond that point, so the reconstructed mind in the machine is effectively a different mind. I rather doubt these things will happen in a practical sense.

You're talking about fast non-destructive scanning of the brain and I'm not sure that's possible;  a slower destructive scanning is difficult but not impossible. The following is one possible scenario: 

More cell damage occurs during the thawing process than the freezing process, and if ASC chemical fixation is used there is no brain shrinkage and the synaptic connection information is preserved; we know this because beautiful electron microscopic pictures have been taken of brain cells preserved in this way. Then the frozen brain could be disassembled from the outside in, one very thin layer at a time, and the information about where and how strong all the synaptic connections in that layer could be recorded, and then work could start on the next layer and you keep going until there is nothing left of the brain.  After all the information in all 10^14 synapses have been recorded that information is later translated into electronics and the uploading has been completed.  

OK OK I admit the above scenario may seem like a crazy fantasy but it should be remembered that, unlike perpetual motion or faster than light spaceships or traveling to the past, it does NOT need to invoke new science to become a reality, all it needs is improved engineering. 

> I also doubt that ET beings create mega-structures or planet sized computers or brains. 

I too think ET is very unlikely. 

 

> If it does happen it might be in one out of a trillion galaxies. It will not be done by us. I suspect we will be off the Darwinian game table in the rather near future.

I very much doubt biological humans will still be around a century from now and perhaps not a decade from now, but I have some hope that Mr. Jupiter Brain will have at least a little affection for us, after all He wouldn't exist except for us, so maybe He will give us access to a small (by His standards) server so that a few billion uploads can be run in a pleasant virtual world. 

  John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

5oo

[Keith Henson]

On Fri, Apr 18, 2025 at 4:56 AM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Apr 17, 2025 at 11:25 AM Lawrence Crowell <goldenfield...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> > The issue about downloading minds into computers may be resolved by realizing that a scan of a brain and the mapping of brain states takes time. By the time you reconstruct a mind in a computer the original mind may have progressed beyond that point, so the reconstructed mind in the machine is effectively a different mind. I rather doubt these things will happen in a practical sense.

Minds are always changing, you are not exactly the same person in the
morning you were when you went to sleep. So what? At a practical
level, I don't think it is worth being concerned about.

>
> You're talking about fast non-destructive scanning of the brain and I'm not sure that's possible; a slower destructive scanning is difficult but not impossible. The following is one possible scenario:

I don't have the slightest interest in a destructive brain scan.
That's like insisting that the original copy of a file be destroyed
when you make a copy. Poor archival process, and not needed. There
is no reason I can see why all the structures in a brain could not be
mapped out by infiltrating it with nanomachines. If there is an
argument against this, I would like to know what it is.

Keith

> More cell damage occurs during the thawing process than the freezing process, and if ASC chemical fixation is used there is no brain shrinkage and the synaptic connection information is preserved; we know this because beautiful electron microscopic pictures have been taken of brain cells preserved in this way. Then the frozen brain could be disassembled from the outside in, one very thin layer at a time, and the information about where and how strong all the synaptic connections in that layer could be recorded, and then work could start on the next layer and you keep going until there is nothing left of the brain. After all the information in all 10^14 synapses have been recorded that information is later translated into electronics and the uploading has been completed.
>
> OK OK I admit the above scenario may seem like a crazy fantasy but it should be remembered that, unlike perpetual motion or faster than light spaceships or traveling to the past, it does NOT need to invoke new science to become a reality, all it needs is improved engineering.
>
>> > I also doubt that ET beings create mega-structures or planet sized computers or brains.
>
>
> I too think ET is very unlikely.
>
>>
>> > If it does happen it might be in one out of a trillion galaxies. It will not be done by us. I suspect we will be off the Darwinian game table in the rather near future.
>
>
> I very much doubt biological humans will still be around a century from now and perhaps not a decade from now, but I have some hope that Mr. Jupiter Brain will have at least a little affection for us, after all He wouldn't exist except for us, so maybe He will give us access to a small (by His standards) server so that a few billion uploads can be run in a pleasant virtual world.
>
> John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis
> 5oo
>
>>

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[John Clark]

On Fri, Apr 18, 2025 at 2:02 PM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I don't have the slightest interest in a destructive brain scan.

There's no disputing matters of taste. As for me I'd prefer a destructive scanning that didn't corrupt information over a non-destructive scanning that did. 

 

> There is no reason I can see why all the structures in a brain could not be
mapped out by infiltrating it with nanomachines. 

That might be possible but it would be slower, harder and more expensive than a destructive scan, we are both ALCOR clients and if we're lucky enough to be revived I don't think we will have much say about how it was done.  

  John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

mt4

[Keith Henson]

On Fri, Apr 18, 2025 at 11:18 AM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Apr 18, 2025 at 2:02 PM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> > I don't have the slightest interest in a destructive brain scan.
>
> There's no disputing matters of taste. As for me I'd prefer a destructive scanning that didn't corrupt information over a non-destructive scanning that did.

You might convince me that destructive scanning preserves information
better than non-destructive scan. Can you make such a case?

>>
>> > There is no reason I can see why all the structures in a brain could not be
>> mapped out by infiltrating it with nanomachines.
>
> That might be possible but it would be slower, harder and more expensive than a destructive scan,

I am curious why you would be concerned about slower. As to harder,
it's not like humans would be doing this, as long as it is automated,
who cares about harder or expensive?

BTW, have you ever seen a destructive scan of a brain? The one I know
a little about uses a vibrating diamond knife and slices off the
(mouse) brain while collecting data. It is not fast, and if anything
goes wrong, you lose the data. Presumably advanced technology would
do better but between slicing and infiltration, I can't say which
would be faster, not that speed matters. But if you don't have to,
destroying the original is a poor archive procedure.

we are both ALCOR clients and if we're lucky enough to be revived I
don't think we will have much say about how it was done.

You can write specifications into your contract. One Alcor patient
is/was blind. He specified that he is not to be revived until the
procedure can give him sight.

But you are essentially correct.

Keith

[John Clark]

On Fri, Apr 18, 2025 at 10:09 PM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:

>> There's no disputing matters of taste. As for me I'd prefer a destructive scanning that didn't corrupt information over a non-destructive scanning that did.

> You might convince me that destructive scanning preserves information
better than non-destructive scan.  Can you make such a case?

I can make a moderately strong case that destructive brain scaning has already occurred a few times, but nothing even close to a non-destructive scan exists today. Of course both will improve in the future but destructive scanning has a significant head start.  Today several human brains have been chemically fixed with ASC , sliced with a diamond saw into many very thin slices, the slices were photographed with a high power microscope, and then computers were used to analyze the photographs and trace out the neural connections. The last two steps were the slowest and the most expensive, and those are also the two steps that are likely to improve the fastest in the coming years; and an organization such as ALCOR need not worry about those two steps because that is a problem for the future. 

Fun fact: one of the brains that were treated in this way was that of a convicted murderer who had been executed by lethal injection. 

>>> There is no reason I can see why all the structures in a brain could not be mapped out by infiltrating it with nanomachines.

>> That might be possible but it would be slower, harder and more expensive than a destructive scan.

> I am curious why you would be concerned about slower. 

If you're going to infuse a living human brain with nanomachines to record how things are wired up and expect the brain to continue to function normally then you're severely limited in the number of nanomachines you could put into that brain, and that limitation is going to slow things down. I might add that if a mechanic is trying to change the spark plugs on an engine his task becomes much slower and more difficult if he is not allowed to turn that engine off while he works; it also makes it more likely that he will make an error. 

> it's not like humans would be doing this, as long as it is automated, who cares about harder or expensive?

 We know for a fact that ASC preserves the synaptic neural connections in the brain better than the procedure ALCOR currently uses because today we can detect those connections if ASC is used but cannot do so with ALCOR's procedure. We have some reason to be hopeful that ALCOR's procedure also preserves that information and it's just scrambled up more, but we do NOT know that for a fact. And why make things more difficult for future technology to bring us back if that difficulty can be avoided? 

This is what ALCOR had to say about ASC back in 2018 and as far as I know they haven't said anything about it since: 

"A new cryobiological and neurobiological technique, aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation (ASC)  provides strong proof that brains can be preserved well enough at cryogenic temperatures for neural connectivity (the connectome) to be completely visualized. [...] Current brain vitrification methods without fixation lead to dehydration. Dehydration has effects on tissue contrast that make it difficult to see whether the connectome is preserved or not with electron microscopy. That does not mean that dehydration is especially damaging, nor that fixation with toxic aldehyde does less damage."

ALCOR's position on brains preservation

I would maintain that the last sentence in the above is factually incorrect. ASC DOES cause less damage than ALCOR's current method. That's why we are able to trace the neural connections with today's technology with one method but not with the other. The damage caused by ALCOR's method may not be irreplaceable, the information may just be scrambled more than it is with ASC and require Mr. Jupiter Brain to jump through more hoops to recover it, but maybe not, so why take the chance?   

>> we are both ALCOR clients and if we're lucky enough to be revived I don't think we will have much say about how it was done.

> You can write specifications into your contract.  One Alcor patient
is/was blind.  He specified that he is not to be revived until the
procedure can give him sight. But you are essentially correct.

That seems unnecessary, if the future people have the technology to repair a freeze damaged human brain they certainly have the technology to restore his sight. I wrote no specifications in my ALCOR contract because I thought it unlikely that anybody would pay attention to them and if they did they might turn out to be counterproductive because I have only a hazy understanding of what the post singularity world will be like. For example, if somebody wrote that they do not wish to come back as an upload and that request was honored I don't think Mr. Jupiter Brain would bring him back at all.  

John K Clark   See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

288

[Keith Henson]

On Sat, Apr 19, 2025 at 5:03 AM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Apr 18, 2025 at 10:09 PM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>> >> There's no disputing matters of taste. As for me I'd prefer a destructive scanning that didn't corrupt information over a non-destructive scanning that did.
>>
>> > You might convince me that destructive scanning preserves information
>> better than non-destructive scan. Can you make such a case?
>
> I can make a moderately strong case that destructive brain scaning has already occurred a few times, but nothing even close to a non-destructive scan exists today. Of course both will improve in the future but destructive scanning has a significant head start. Today several human brains have been chemically fixed with ASC , sliced with a diamond saw into many very thin slices, the slices were photographed with a high power microscope, and then computers were used to analyze the photographs and trace out the neural connections.

I am a long way from thinking that the wiring diagram is enough to get
a person back from suspension. From what we know, synaptic weight is
essential to memory. I think without this data, which as far as I
know is not visible, you get back a blank brain with no memory. I
don't know about anyone else, but to me, a no-memory on revival
cryonic suspension seems pointless. Your case would be much improved
if you could show that memory could be recovered from a scanned brain
slice.

> The last two steps were the slowest and the most expensive, and those are also the two steps that are likely to improve the fastest in the coming years; and an organization such as ALCOR need not worry about those two steps because that is a problem for the future.
>
> Fun fact: one of the brains that were treated in this way was that of a convicted murderer who had been executed by lethal injection.
>
>>>> >>>
There is no reason I can see why all the structures in a brain could
not be mapped out by infiltrating it with nanomachines.
>>>
>>> >> That might be possible but it would be slower, harder and more expensive than a destructive scan.
>>
>> > I am curious why you would be concerned about slower.
>
> If you're going to infuse a living human brain with nanomachines to record how things are wired up and expect the brain to continue to function normally then you're severely limited in the number of nanomachines you could put into that brain,

Given the relative sizes of nerve cells and nanomachines, I doubt
that's much of a limit. But it is something we can put numbers on.
Brains function fine after swelling 5-10 percent. How many machines
is there room for? A bigger problem might be getting the connection
and synaptic weights out of the brain. I have given a little thought
to this. The reason you want to go slowly is to keep the waste heat
down.

[From the Clinic Seed story]

She was mildly distressed that she now had to voice talk to Suskulan,
who appeared as a projection, instead of "talking" directly to his
spirit in the spirit world she had inhabited. Then she realized from
her new knowledge there was a way she could if she took a bit of the
clinic with her. However, there wasn't much time to before her
parents came.

"Can I come back to visit even if I am not hurt?" she asked.

"Yes. Anytime I don't have another patient."

"May I take the clinic's interface with me?"

"There is nothing so addictive . . ." thought Suskulan.

"You may." Part of the cloud of nanomachines that had just left
Zaba's brain returned as a momentary haze. Since they retained their
memory of where they had been it was a matter of a few minutes before
the machines reestablished their monitoring posts in Zaba's brain.

"I missed not being able to talk to you in the spirit world." Zaba
said without voicing. A wire frame image in Zaba's visual cortex
overlaid the physical projected image of Suskulan.

"Spirit talk does not reach as far as your garden." Suskulan warned her.

Zaba lay down on the repair table that was now at the bottom of the
elevator shaft. The elevator lifted it into its place in the clinic.
Zaba was treated to seeing the rapidly thinning utility fog image of
her body that had comforted her family for the last ten days before
she merged into her image.

The nanomachine haze that had fogged her image and now her real body
withdrew into the low table. She greeted her family as they came into
the clinic and in voice talk said goodbye to the image of an old man
Suskulan was projecting. Then they stepped through the clinic's
keyhole door to where the other members of the tata were waiting for a
joyous celebration of the healing of Zaba.

Suskulan sent off a strictly factual report. There were no replies
this time, but perhaps that was due to the high report traffic.

Her family had visited every day, but they were still delighted and
relieved that Zaba was back with no visible effects from being shot.
Her parents had been worried that her value as a bride might have been
damaged, but none of the tata seemed to be concerned, only very proud
of the growing powers of their clinic Suskulan. (The elders had long
since wildly inflated the value of the fetish they had traded for the
clinic seed.)

Zaba had been warned not to flaunt her new knowledge to adults and
with Suskulan's help had built temporary inhibitions into her mental
processes. She was under no such injunction toward the other
children, though. They were absolutely fascinated and wanted the
ability to talk to Suskulan in the spirit world as well. In spirit
world talk Zaba asked Suskulan if he would give the others an
"interface" like she had.

"Yes, though not in one day like I did with you. It takes several
days to a week for an interface to establish itself unless you are
very cold."

[end quote]

> and that limitation is going to slow things down. I might add that if a mechanic is trying to change the spark plugs on an engine his task becomes much slower and more difficult if he is not allowed to turn that engine off while he works; it also makes it more likely that he will make an error.

This is not a problem since low temperature will shut down a
biological brain just fine.

With cryonics patients at LN2, you are starting with a shut-down brain.

>> > it's not like humans would be doing this, as long as it is automated, who cares about harder or expensive?
>
>
> We know for a fact that ASC preserves the synaptic neural connections in the brain better than the procedure ALCOR currently uses because today we can detect those connections if ASC is used but cannot do so with ALCOR's procedure. We have some reason to be hopeful that ALCOR's procedure also preserves that information and it's just scrambled up more, but we do NOT know that for a fact. And why make things more difficult for future technology to bring us back if that difficulty can be avoided?
>

Do you have any pointers to ASC preserving synaptic information? That
would be very interesting, essentially reading out memory. As far as
I know (and I may be out of date) they can see synaptic nodes, but
pictures do not disclose the weighting of a node.

> This is what ALCOR had to say about ASC back in 2018 and as far as I know they haven't said anything about it since:
>
> "A new cryobiological and neurobiological technique, aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation (ASC) provides strong proof that brains can be preserved well enough at cryogenic temperatures for neural connectivity (the connectome) to be completely visualized. [...] Current brain vitrification methods without fixation lead to dehydration. Dehydration has effects on tissue contrast that make it difficult to see whether the connectome is preserved or not with electron microscopy. That does not mean that dehydration is especially damaging, nor that fixation with toxic aldehyde does less damage."
>
> ALCOR's position on brains preservation
>
> I would maintain that the last sentence in the above is factually incorrect. ASC DOES cause less damage than ALCOR's current method. That's why we are able to trace the neural connections with today's technology with one method but not with the other. The damage caused by ALCOR's method may not be irreplaceable, the information may just be scrambled more than it is with ASC and require Mr. Jupiter Brain to jump through more hoops to recover it, but maybe not, so why take the chance?
>
>>> >> we are both ALCOR clients and if we're lucky enough to be revived I don't think we will have much say about how it was done.
>>
>> > You can write specifications into your contract. One Alcor patient
>> is/was blind. He specified that he is not to be revived until the
>> procedure can give him sight. But you are essentially correct.
>
>
> That seems unnecessary, if the future people have the technology to repair a freeze damaged human brain they certainly have the technology to restore his sight.

It is not a matter of restoration, the patient was blind from birth.
He was one of those blinded by preme oxygen treatment.

>I wrote no specifications in my ALCOR contract because I thought it unlikely that anybody would pay attention to them and if they did they might turn out to be counterproductive because I have only a hazy understanding of what the post singularity world will be like. For example, if somebody wrote that they do not wish to come back as an upload and that request was honored I don't think Mr. Jupiter Brain would bring him back at all.

Possible. However, I think repairing brains/bodies is on a par with
uploading. I suspect that uploaded humans will find that state more
desirable than the physical state, leading to a population collapse.

Keith

[John Clark]

On Sat, Apr 19, 2025 at 11:39 AM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:

 

> I don't know about anyone else, but to me, a no-memory on revival cryonic suspension seems pointless.

I certainly agree with you about that!  

 

> I am a long way from thinking that the wiring diagram is enough to get a person back from suspension. 

I never said it was. 

 

> From what we know, synaptic weight is essential to memory. 

Yes. The wiring diagram is necessary but not sufficient, but I think it's a reasonable extrapolation to say that if a frozen brain that has been infused with cryoprotectant and ASC does a better job at preserving wiring information than a brain that is infused with cryoprotectant alone (and we have strong evidence that it does) then it probably does a better job at preserving synaptic weights too.  

> Your case would be much improved if you could show that memory could be recovered from a scanned brain slice.

I am not suggesting that ALCOR should start slicing up the brains of their frozen patients, but I am suggesting that those brain slices provide powerful evidence that ASC plus cryoprotectant scrambles information less than cryoprotectant alone does. The exact method Mr. Jupiter Brain chooses to extract that information I don't know so I will leave that to His discretion, He will know much more about that than I do, although I'm certain Nanotechnology will be involved, and I think it would be wise to do everything we can to make His job easier.

>  I suspect that uploaded humans will find that state more desirable than the physical state 

Then why did you say you had no interest in uploading if it required a destructive scan?

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

jaa 

> > We know for a fact that ASC preserves the synaptic neural connections in the brain better than the procedure ALCOR currently uses because today we can detect those connections if ASC is used but cannot do so with ALCOR's procedure. We have some reason to be hopeful that ALCOR's procedure also preserves that information and it's just scrambled up more, but we do NOT know that for a fact. And why make things more difficult for future technology to bring us back if that difficulty can be avoided?

> Do you have any pointers to ASC preserving synaptic information?  That
would be very interesting, essentially reading out memory.  As far as
I know (and I may be out of date) they can see synaptic nodes, but
pictures do not disclose the weighting of a node.

This is what ALCOR had to say about ASC back in 2018 and as far as I know they haven't said anything about it since:

> "A new cryobiological and neurobiological technique, aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation (ASC)  provides strong proof that brains can be preserved well enough at cryogenic temperatures for neural connectivity (the connectome) to be completely visualized. [...] Current brain vitrification methods without fixation lead to dehydration. Dehydration has effects on tissue contrast that make it difficult to see whether the connectome is preserved or not with electron microscopy. That does not mean that dehydration is especially damaging, nor that fixation with toxic aldehyde does less damage."

> ALCOR's position on brains preservation

> I would maintain that the last sentence in the above is factually incorrect. ASC DOES cause less damage than ALCOR's current method. That's why we are able to trace the neural connections with today's technology with one method but not with the other. The damage caused by ALCOR's method may not be irreplaceable, the information may just be scrambled more than it is with ASC and require Mr. Jupiter Brain to jump through more hoops to recover it, but maybe not, so why take the chance?

>>> >> we are both ALCOR clients and if we're lucky enough to be revived I don't think we will have much say about how it was done.

>> > You can write specifications into your contract.  One Alcor patient
>> is/was blind.  He specified that he is not to be revived until the
>> procedure can give him sight. But you are essentially correct.


> That seems unnecessary, if the future people have the technology to repair a freeze damaged human brain they certainly have the technology to restore his sight.

It is not a matter of restoration, the patient was blind from birth.
He was one of those blinded by preme oxygen treatment.

>I wrote no specifications in my ALCOR contract because I thought it unlikely that anybody would pay attention to them and if they did they might turn out to be counterproductive because I have only a hazy understanding of what the post singularity world will be like. For example, if somebody wrote that they do not wish to come back as an upload and that request was honored I don't think Mr. Jupiter Brain would bring him back at all.

Possible.  However, I think repairing brains/bodies is on a par with
uploading.  I suspect that uploaded humans will find that state more
desirable than the physical state, leading to a population collapse.

Keith

> John K Clark   See what's on my new list at  Extropolis
>

[John Clark]

On Sat, Apr 19, 2025 at 1:52 PM Will Steinberg <steinbe...@gmail.com> wrote:

> The mind is 4d

The mind is what the brain does. 

 

> if you freeze it in time you lose the information. 

If you freeze a mind in time then the mind isn't doing anything, if you unfreeze it properly then it will start doing things again because consciousness is the way information feels when it is being processed intelligently.  

 

> Not to mention the electrical potentials and other things that will change or disappear upon freezing:

Electrical potential is far too ephemeral to be responsible for long-term memory.  

> Plus you will be dead

As I said before, there's being dead and then there's being information theoretically dead.  

Information-Theoretic Death

 > It’s surely impossible. 

 It's not impossible. And don't call me Shirley.

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

sdc

On Fri, Apr 18, 2025 at 7:56 AM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Thu, Apr 17, 2025 at 11:25 AM Lawrence Crowell <goldenfield...@gmail.com> wrote:

 

> The issue about downloading minds into computers may be resolved by realizing that a scan of a brain and the mapping of brain states takes time. By the time you reconstruct a mind in a computer the original mind may have progressed beyond that point, so the reconstructed mind in the machine is effectively a different mind. I rather doubt these things will happen in a practical sense.

You're talking about fast non-destructive scanning of the brain and I'm not sure that's possible;  a slower destructive scanning is difficult but not impossible. The following is one possible scenario: 

[John Clark]

On Sat, Apr 19, 2025 at 5:36 PM Will Steinberg <steinbe...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Well unfortunately we don’t have a way to “freeze [anything] in time. 

Actually we can. At liquid nitrogen temperatures, 77° kelvin, chemical reactions are slowed down by a factor of about 10^20 compared to room temperature. That's a billion trillion.  

 

> Cryogenics aren’t magic time brakes, they gravely affect the brain.

It's not magic, it's science. And yes, temperatures like that do affect the brain because the brain is a chemical machine and the machine slows down by a factor of a billion trillion when frozen by liquid nitrogen.    

> I think it’s not at all conclusive that electrical potentials don’t have a significant effect on LTM and selfhood.

If you believe that the reason you can remember being in the first grade is because a pattern of electrical charges in your brain has remained unchanged since then ... well ... there's some swamp land I'd like to sell you .

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

8zw

[Keith Henson]

On Sat, Apr 19, 2025 at 10:47 AM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
snip

> Yes. The wiring diagram is necessary but not sufficient, but I think it's a reasonable extrapolation to say that if a frozen brain that has been infused with cryoprotectant and ASC does a better job at preserving wiring information than a brain that is infused with cryoprotectant alone (and we have strong evidence that it does) then it probably does a better job at preserving synaptic weights too.

You might be right. It's my opinion that crosslinking all the
proteins in a synapse would make examining them harder, possibly
impossible. But that's just my opinion.

>> > Your case would be much improved if you could show that memory could be recovered from a scanned brain slice.
>
> I am not suggesting that ALCOR should start slicing up the brains of their frozen patients, but I am suggesting that those brain slices provide powerful evidence that ASC plus cryoprotectant scrambles information less than cryoprotectant alone does. The exact method Mr. Jupiter Brain chooses to extract that information I don't know so I will leave that to His discretion, He will know much more about that than I do, although I'm certain Nanotechnology will be involved, and I think it would be wise to do everything we can to make His job easier.
>
>> > I suspect that uploaded humans will find that state more desirable than the physical state
>
> Then why did you say you had no interest in uploading if it required a destructive scan?

I don't like destroying original material. There is no reason I can
see that uploading should not be reversible. Destroying the original
makes this no longer an option.

[John Clark]

On Sat, Apr 19, 2025 at 7:25 PM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:

> The wiring diagram is necessary but not sufficient, but I think it's a reasonable extrapolation to say that if a frozen brain that has been infused with cryoprotectant and ASC does a better job at preserving wiring information than a brain that is infused with cryoprotectant alone (and we have strong evidence that it does) then it probably does a better job at preserving synaptic weights too.

I am not suggesting that ALCOR should start slicing up the brains of their frozen patients, but I am suggesting that those brain slices provide powerful evidence that ASC plus cryoprotectant scrambles information less than cryoprotectant alone does. The exact method Mr. Jupiter Brain chooses to extract that information I don't know so I will leave that to His discretion, He will know much more about that than I do, although I'm certain Nanotechnology will be involved, and I think it would be wise to do everything we can to make His job easier.

> You might be right.  It's my opinion that crosslinking all the proteins in a synapse would make examining them harder, possibly impossible.  But that's just my opinion. [...] Your case would be much improved if you could show that memory could be recovered from a scanned brain slice.

I asked Claude about that and this is what he said:  

 "Aldehyde-Stabilized Cryopreservation (ASC) is particularly effective at preserving many of the structural elements associated with memory storage in the brain. Here's what ASC typically preserves:

ASC generally preserves well:

• The overall connectome (the map of neural connections)
• Synaptic structures, including pre- and post-synaptic densities
• Dendritic spine morphology and distribution
• Cell membranes and general cellular architecture
• Many proteins (though cross-linked by the fixation process)

ASC may partially preserve:

• Some molecular information, though chemically modified by the aldehyde fixation
• Spatial relationships between subcellular components
• General epigenetic states (though with some degradation)" 

But Claude also says ASC does not do a good job at preserving dynamic processes or the exact electrical properties of neurons, of course neither does conventional cryopreservation, however that doesn't bother me very much because I don't see how exact electrical or dynamic processes can have much to do with long-term biological memory. 

According to Claude ASC also does not do a good job at preserving "the native conformational state of many proteins (due to cross-linking)", however it does preserve the amino acid sequence of a protein and with that information, thanks to recent advancements in AI, we can predict what that protein must've folded up into when it was in a living biological brain before it got cross linked with ASC. And if we can do it now Mr. Jupiter Crain certainly will be able to do it in the future. 

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

brk

 

 

>> >  I suspect that uploaded humans will find that state more desirable than the physical state
>
> Then why did you say you had no interest in uploading if it required a destructive scan?

I don't like destroying original material.  There is no reason I can
see that uploading should not be reversible.  Destroying the original
makes this no longer an option.

>> > > We know for a fact that ASC preserves the synaptic neural connections in the brain better than the procedure ALCOR currently uses because today we can detect those connections if ASC is used but cannot do so with ALCOR's procedure. We have some reason to be hopeful that ALCOR's procedure also preserves that information and it's just scrambled up more, but we do NOT know that for a fact. And why make things more difficult for future technology to bring us back if that difficulty can be avoided?

>> This is what ALCOR had to say about ASC back in 2018 and as far as I know they haven't said anything about it since:

 "A new cryobiological and neurobiological technique, aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation (ASC)  provides strong proof that brains can be preserved well enough at cryogenic temperatures for neural connectivity (the connectome) to be completely visualized. [...] Current brain vitrification methods without fixation lead to dehydration. Dehydration has effects on tissue contrast that make it difficult to see whether the connectome is preserved or not with electron microscopy. That does not mean that dehydration is especially damaging, nor that fixation with toxic aldehyde does less damage."
>>
>> > ALCOR's position on brains preservation
>>
>> > I would maintain that the last sentence in the above is factually incorrect. ASC DOES cause less damage than ALCOR's current method. That's why we are able to trace the neural connections with today's technology with one method but not with the other. The damage caused by ALCOR's method may not be irreplaceable, the information may just be scrambled more than it is with ASC and require Mr. Jupiter Brain to jump through more hoops to recover it, but maybe not, so why take the chance?

 

>

>> >I wrote no specifications in my ALCOR contract because I thought it unlikely that anybody would pay attention to them and if they did they might turn out to be counterproductive because I have only a hazy understanding of what the post singularity world will be like. For example, if somebody wrote that they do not wish to come back as an upload and that request was honored I don't think Mr. Jupiter Brain would bring him back at all.
>

>> >> >> > More cell damage occurs during the thawing process than the freezing process, and if ASC chemical fixation is used there is no brain shrinkage and the synaptic connection information is preserved; we know this because beautiful electron microscopic pictures have been taken of brain cells preserved in this way. Then the frozen brain could be disassembled from the outside in, one very thin layer at a time, and the information about where and how strong all the synaptic connections in that layer could be recorded, and then work could start on the next layer and you keep going until there is nothing left of the brain.  After all the information in all 10^14 synapses have been recorded that information is later translated into electronics and the uploading has been completed.
 OK OK I admit the above scenario may seem like a crazy fantasy but it should be remembered that, unlike perpetual motion or faster than light spaceships or traveling to the past, it does NOT need to invoke new science to become a reality, all it needs is improved engineering.

[John Clark]

On Sun, Apr 20, 2025 at 3:14 PM Will Steinberg <steinbe...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I suggest making peace (or at least detente) with death. 

"Do not go gentle into that good night, rage, rage against the dying of the light."  Dylan Thomas.

John K Clark

[John Clark]

On Sun, Apr 20, 2025 at 11:08 PM Will Steinberg <steinbe...@gmail.com> wrote:

> In Is there a real reason you feel it is irrational? [...] In my eyes there may or may not be some kind of persistence of consciousness after death.

A china teapot may or may not be in orbit around the planet Uranus, there are only two possibilities: it's there or it's not, there is no evidence for or against the idea. However it would be irrational to therefore conclude there is a 50% chance it's there; it would even be irrational to take the idea seriously, by that I mean to significantly change your lifestyle based on the possibility of that tea pot existing. I would put life after information theoretical death in the same category as that teapot. 

As for cryonics, to my knowledge nobody has presented any evidence that it couldn't theoretically work, but people have presented evidence that it could theoretically work.  Of course there is a huge gap between "could theoretically work" and "will work" but ......well....  If I was in a hurricane on a sinking ship thousands of miles from land, and no rescue messages had been sent, and the waves were mountainous and the lifeboat was very small, I'd still get in the boat. But apparently you would not.

And after all, if cryonics doesn't work it won't make me be any deader than somebody like you who doesn't use cryonics.  The only thing it cost me is some money and I can afford it. 

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

uxq