Posted on 03/15/2018 9:53:07 AM PDT by Enlightened1
Neuroscience startup Nectome wants to harvest your brain for science. The nascent company, which is a member of famed incubator Y Combinator’s winter 2018 class, is focused on preserving brains for future computer upload.
Why Does Nectome Want My Brain?
“Our mission is to preserve your brain well enough to keep all its memories intact: from that great chapter of your favorite book to the feeling of cold winter air, baking an apple pie, or having dinner with your friends and family,” Nectome’s website says. “We believe that within the current century it will be feasible to digitize this information and use it to recreate your consciousness.”
Digitizing consciousness is a familiar theme from science fiction works, but Nectome thinks that sometime in the next 80 years, it will actually become an attainable feat. The company hopes to kickstart the process by perfectly preserving the connectome, or the totality of connections between neurons and synapses in the brain. The idea is that in the future, neuroscientists will have the ability to read connectomes like databases and translate the structural components of the connectome into a consciousness that lives in a computer. How Does Preservation Work?
To preserve the brain, Nectome uses a process called aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation. Essentially, it’s high-tech embalming — or a modern version of Egyptian mummification.
But in order to achieve perfect preservation, Nectome requires a fresh brain that won’t be needed much longer. In a story published in Technology Review on Tuesday, cofounder Robert McIntyre said that the process is “100 percent fatal.” To that end, the startup is marketing its service to people in end-of-life care.
“Burdening future generations with our brain banks is just comically arrogant. Aren’t we leaving them with enough problems?” Hendricks said. “I hope future people are appalled that in 21st Century...
(Excerpt) Read more at inverse.com ...
Interesting. Years ago, I watched a short sci-fi TV series entitled “Cold Lazarus.” The premise was the old “freeze the head and thaw it out later” plot. The problem came when they thawed out the head of this rich industrialist. When he realizes what is happening, he’s horrified and wants to pull the plug. Albert Finney, I believe. Anyone remember this?
My question as a non-science non-tech sort of person;
If they use the brains of people who have terminal illnesses and are six months away from death, won’t those brains be in poor condition too? Why revive a brain that is slowing down in many of it’s major functions, or has already stopped certain functions completely? The brain stems are likely to be providing reduced nourishment for the lobal regions.
Upload your neurons into the Cloud and live forever?
Oh but you have to die to do it.
...
A guy once told me everybody wants to go to Heaven, but nobody wants to die.
>>Our mission is to preserve your brain well enough to keep all its memories intact: from that great chapter of your favorite book
Isn’t that a copyright violation?
Same with earworms.
Perfect!
Absolutely stupid. Memories cannot be uploaded to a computer. Consciousness will not be recreated. Dead is dead.
There are no memories after death.
This is a scam. How can people be so stupid?
...
Some people wonder how you can be so arrogant?
I think it is just to retrieve what you can as once in the computer there will be all the nourishment one needs as long as there is enough electricity.
It delved into some mostly dark issues - in a society where your entire life experience is continually backed up onto a recording device surgically implanted into your body. Should you die it can be transplanted into a new body, or "sleeve" (if you can afford it, of course).
The rich take full advantage, not only securing immortality by continually upgrading to new flesh, but engaging in weird fetishes and criminal acts.
-A cage match to the death with winner getting a new, better body and loser getting dead
Hookers paid handsomely to be beaten, torture, even killed, then provided with new bodies afterward
People moving their consciousness into cloned bodies of their friends/enemies/relatives and impersonating them for nefarious reasons
Lots of torture themes - with this tech you can torture someone to death, "re-sleeve" them and torture them again, ad infinitum
"Double-sleeving" - make an exact clone of yourself, download a copy of your mind and be two places at once
Or make love to yourself - one woman had an island playpen populated with identical copies of herself, narcissism gone wild
The masses get into it, too, although cost issues deny them the really fun stuff. Cloned bodies are too high but you can inhabit something from the slab at the morgue. One guy reanimates his wife, but the only body available was male. Woman brings back her mom, but it's a tattooed biker....
This is all woven around a murder mystery, with a rather unsatisfying ending
Sounds pretty much the same as the book. Wasn’t my thing and after reading the first one I didn’t read the sequels.
That’s a great story. Laughed my way through it.
Brain wave scans theoretically already contains maps of our brains, we just haven’t developed algorithms/computers to process them yet.
“This is a scam. How can people be so stupid?”
Mind and spirit don’t reside in the brain.
You can put all the information of your brain into a computer and process it, but it doesn’t have anything to do with you living. You are still dead.
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