We have a cure to death right here

Ken Hayworth gave an interactive online talk and Q/A in teleXLR8 on How to create a Connectome Observatory of the mouse brain and beyond, on November 13 2011. See the complete report A Connectome Observatory for nanoscale brain imaging on KurzweilAI.

New technologies now permit imaging brain tissue at resolutions approaching 5x5x5nm. voxel size, down to the protein level. “This is more than sufficient resolution to determine all the connectivity and the properties of the synapses that are needed to explain the functionality of the brain circuits,” Ken said.

“In 100 years, if we have the technology to bring someone back, it won’t be in a biological body,” Ken said in a New York Times article last year. “It is these scanning techniques and mind-uploading that, I think, will bring people back. This is a taboo topic in the scientific community. But we have a cure to death right here. Why aren’t we pursuing it?”

In the Q&A, participants compared connectome preservation via the chemical brain preservation techniques proposed by Ken’s Brain Preservation Foundation to cryonics. See the full video of the talk and Q/A below.



Last year I wrote a post on Chemical brain preservation: cryonics for uploaders, also republished by the Cryonics Institute. Excerpt:

This resolution is sufficient to image the smallest brain structures which, according to current scientific knowledge, are the physical substrate of our thoughts, memories, feelings, emotional responses, hopes, dreams and identity. It is important to stress that this can be done with current technology... the information in a chemically preserved brain can be retrieved and run on a different substrate ("mind uploading"). This makes chemical brain preservation a storage technique optimized for future nanoscale scanning, and an ideal form of "cryonics for uploaders". For those who accept scanning the brain and running the information in the scan file on a different substrate as a valid form of identity preservation, chemical brain preservation seems clearly superior to cryopreservation.

After listening to Ken's talk, I am persuaded that the required brain imaging resolution can be achieved NOW with existing technology (and can only improve). So we just need to build operational pipelines for preparation, readout and storage and medical research facilities (and regulations or better absence thereof) able to preserve brains with sufficient accuracy for future readout and personality retrieval.

Ken prefers to discuss brain preservation technology as a scientific research topic instead of speculating on future availability for human patients (see his article on the Alcor Cryonics magazine and Mike Perry's reply). But in response to questions by Mike Perry and myself he said “If there was really a concerted effort to develop brain preservation technology, it would be easy to have highly reliable hospital brain preservation procedures ready to go in any hospital before the end of the decade. It is all a matter of will.”

It is difficult to escape the conclusion that we have a cure to death right here.

Socrates Had Haemorrhoids and Diarrhea

Initially published as a comment to Mike Treder's excellent article Will you die? @ IEET.

I just found this gem of our old friend Carrico. He criticises this article because "That you are going to die is part of what it has always meant to be human..."

Inspired by previous debates (see below) I have taken the liberty to re-write his apology of death, changing a couple of words:

Everybody who has ever lived has suffered from haemorrhoids and diarrhea. Everybody has haemorrhoids and diarrhea. You have haemorrhoids and diarrhea. That you have haemorrhoids and diarrhea is part of what it has always meant to be human. If you didn't have haemorrhoids and diarrhea, you wouldn't be living a legibly human life. But of course you have haemorrhoids and diarrhea so there is no reason to belabor the point, and to do so is probably just to indulge in pathetic panic-stricken distraction or denialism about it anyway.

Mike Treder, Managing Director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (long-time readers may recall that I tend to call it "stealth Robot Cult outfit, IEET" and tend to call its high level muckety mucks as "Very Serious Futurologists" or, alternatively, "White Guys of 'The Future'"), asked the question in a post yesterday, Will You Continue to Have Haemorrhoids and Diarrhea? (The answer, for you kids keeping score at home, is: "Yes, Mike, yes, you will continue to have haemorrhoids and diarrhea, as will every single person who reads these words.")

It doesn't seem right to make fun of people this desperate and deluded and dumb, but, well, I say, go ahead. Especially rich for regular readers will be the robotic predictability with which the Robot Cultists and the industrial-militarist complex continue to announce the arrival of a Cure For Haemorrhoids and Diarrhea, Artificial Intelligence, Drexlerian Nanotech, Designer Babies, Clone Armies, Immersive VR, the Paperless Office, Energy Too Cheap to Meter, Orbital Space Hotels, the Cure for [insert disease], and the history-shattering Singularity when the Robot God inaugurates Tech-Heaven or eats the world for lunch (you decide). No less enjoyable is the accompanying illustration for the piece of drawing-board nanobots on graph paper backgrounds just like real engineers use and with orange arrows indicating the immortalization action, and also, too, the reference to cyber-immortalization via "uploading" presumably involving something called your "essence." Science!

It is interesting to note that in previous debates Carrico has, instead, considered haemorrhoids, diarrhea and similar things related to what he considers as the noblest parts of the sacred human anatomy and the holy human biology as better examples of your "essence." See for example:
Cyborg Angels Live Forever and Never Ever Have to Poop
The Power of Poop; or, Prisco Responds

Dale, my boy, please feel free to live a legibly human life and to pursue happiness and meaning your own way. If this means continuing to suffer from haemorrhoids, diarrhea and death, so be it. I would not wish these things upon my worse enemy, but you are the best judge of what is good for you and makes you happy.

But I hope you will forgive me for choosing to do my best to avoid haemorrhoids and diarrhea. And death. If these things must remain part of legibly human lives, then fuck legibly human lives.