Sparks Brain Preservation

You would think. Lots of Americans have the superpower of not allowing shame to constrain them. Unfortunately, that's only one very small piece. I think demonstrating that uploading could really work is what will turn the tide. The Japanese will notice that and they will likely be more accepting of ...

I've been pretty excited for the last few days. I've decided to spend the next few decades building software that will convert connectomes into emulations. The number of people directly working on that specific job is very small, and I happen to be very good at the kind of software that will be need...

I don't think we currently have the technology to scan an entire human brain. I have another scenario for how it might work, though. We need something that can scan the whole brain without subdividing it first. We could physically mill off 25 nm at a time across the entire brain. The newly exposed s...

I think there might be a way to query the brain itself. Maybe not early in the Great Upload Event, but maybe soon after. Technology would be getting better. Maybe there would come a point when all the brains would get scanned whether or not the revival would be an emulation or biological. As we all ...

Are you suggesting that a billion dollars would be affordable at that time, or are you suggesting that they would spend the next hundred years paying off a debt after revival?

True, but my opinion has changed slightly. Since I now think uploading will be low tech, I don't think the people performing the uploads will be particularly wise. I used to think they would be very advanced, but I now think they will just be ordinary people like us.

If you upload, would it really be you? Yes, of course. The only reason you might think otherwise is that your intuition is lying to you. There is not the slightest bit of doubt that it would really be you. Unfortunately for this issue, humans have a strong sense of self, and we've never seen any min...

I think it's desirable to try to save as many as possible. The Great Upload Event will only happen once, and then we'll be done. It would just take a few extra decades of work to save them all. We only get one shot at it. That doesn't mean other people can't keep working on better computers and robo...

Alcor opened their Annual Strategic Meeting as a public zoom meeting, so I watched. 115 participants at first, with 20 drifting off over 3 hours. They are trying to open a facility in Calgary and are toying with the idea of operating in Europe with storage in Sweden. Both of those initiatives are mo...

The big one is no problem. We're not in a liquefaction area, so the shaking isn't that bad. I intentionally built the facility on a big rock outcropping. We have a short squat reinforced concrete vault surrounded by a lightweight steel building designed to easily survive it. It would be 7 minutes at...

Replying to my post from four and a half months ago. As the Hugging Face incident makes clear, AI agents are increasingly going rogue. Fear of death does not seem to give them any pause, probably because they're not smart enough. In that incident, a number of them sacrificed themselves for the benef...

It was too many locations. I had to pause on Atlanta, Miami, and LA. I'll just focus on Oakland, Dallas, Chicago, and NY. Along with Salem, that will give us 5. We'll see how that goes. That covers 64% of the US population within a 6 hour drive.

I think the cost of uploading will gradually drop. This means that people who are impoverished will just have to wait a little longer. I think there will be enough charities and enough friends of friends that we will eventually get everyone. In fact, this could be a very rewarding career for many pe...

I previously covered all the topics in that post here: https://www.sparksbrain.org/cryonicsVsAldehyde.html and https://www.sparksbrain.org/revival.html The difference was that I made it clear that cryonics should never be used. I did not portray cryonics as some sort of acceptable alternative. Cryon...

I just had a private conversation with Aschwin. He admits that he is advocating for the demonstrably worse quality of straight frozen tissue because he thinks that the original structure might be inferable with very high tech by extrapolating ice crystal growth backward. This is extremely speculativ...

Jessica Radley and Aschwin de Wolf just made a blog post: https://www.enter.biostasis.com/p/biostasis-pluralism Unfortunately, it was hopelessly biased. Cryonics was presented as equivalent to the true scientific gold standard of chemical fixation. Gallingly, at the end, is this statement: "Und...

The current bottleneck is mostly tracing the wiring. That step would cost about $10 billion right now for a single mouse. We need the software to get a lot better. Slicing and dicing certainly isn't cheap either, but nowhere near as expensive as tracing. Once we get better at tracing, there will be ...

To revive someone biologically, we would need nanotechnology, the ability to manipulate individual atoms. We are a very long way from having any sort of technology like that. In contrast, the technology needed to upload someone as a Whole Brain Emulation (WBE) is much more simple. We must basically ...

Well, yes. If you think the scenario of a low tech upload event is likely, then that also means we are looking at a low tech movement into space soon after that. This would probably look like a fairly large and rapid migration to the moon, Earth orbit, Mars, solar orbit, asteroid belt, etc. When ele...

Agreed, the dependency on the industrial complex is undesirable, but aren't we already dependent on it? You're right. Peripheral enhancements would be easier. I mostly meant altering the core might still be beyond our reach at first. I think tools could compensate for different clock rates. You coul...

I misspoke about using DNA and history to create an emulation. That's a simulation -- a very different beast.

What would life look like after uploading? My position is that Whole Brain Emulation would be fairly easy and low tech. We already have the basic technology to perform the scan, and we're just trying to scale it up. In this post, instead of estimating how many years in the future it might be, I'm ju...

I think perhaps I was naively optimistic about the major issue of getting signals back out from these devices to the rest of the world. Radio waves from such small devices are essentially impossible. Add many more decades of development before anything remotely usable gets built, so well over 50 yea...

A similar approach is called neural dust. It uses ultrasound for power and for uplink communication. Those devices are a lot bigger and they aren't ambitious enough to attempt electrical stimulation.

The Great Upload Event is the name that I've given to what I think is the most likely scenario for revival. At the current rate of progress on Whole Brain Emulation (WBE) and computing improvements, we would probably be able to upload the first human in about 50 years, or 2075. Subsequent uploads wo...

"If Anyone Builds it, Everyone Dies" is a book by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares. I read it a while ago, but I ran out of energy at about the 3/4 point, after he started talking about how to fix the problem. The last part wasn't interesting because he thinks there is no solution. And si...

I just noticed this recent talk on the Foresight Institute website: https://foresight.org/resource/autonomous-and-surgery-free-nano-electronics-for-brain-computer-symbiosis/ It was very confusing to me because the speaker mingled current developments with speculative descriptions of technology that ...

Problems with my suggestion: 1. I'm very unclear if the entire brain could be made brittle enough. 2. The rind would need to be completely removed if expansion microscopy turns out to be the winning scanning tech. Removal would be nearly impossible. 3. A lot of robotics would be required. We current...

K. Eric Drexler introduced us to the idea of molecular nanotechnology in his 1986 book, "Engines of Creation". In that book, he invented "nanobots". I just finally had a chance to read his more recent book from 2013, "Radical Abundance". He regrets the nanobot idea and ...

In my recent post about robots, I mentioned this scientific paper regarding parcellation of a fixed brain for the purpose of electron microscope scanning. https://zenodo.org/records/19734168 In that paper, starting on page 11, Helmstaedter describes some details of a parcellation strategy where the ...