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Comment by rebuilder | Hacker News Reader

Why, exactly, will people in the future want to take the preserved brains of dead people and bring them back to life in some digital heaven?

I can think of a few incentives for them to do so and it doesn’t seem appealing to me from that point of view alone.

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I'm more concerned about TOO many people wanting to revive your preserved digitized brain.

Imagine the technology is so mature, anyone can take your "johndoe.brain" file and simulate it on their local hardware/machine. Worse, your digital brain is now in the public domain and free for anyone to download and use for any purpose.

If someone wants to read a fictional story that takes a deeper look at this scenario, "Lena" is an excellent read in the format of a Wikipedia article: https://qntm.org/lena

This was a very entertaining and frightening read, thank you. I loved the Wikipedia format.

Please check out the rest of Sam's fiction - it's all very, very goodl.

brilliant and sublimely haunting piece. I knew it would come up in this thread somewhere. I only wish it were slightly shorter and less involved in some of the weedier details, because it's current form is rather Limited in the audience that I can share it with, most people just don't have the time even if they do have the curiosity. would be an excellent way to introduce the bigger picture agency problems, of effectively handing out -intentionally or not - a perpetual "clone me" license to anyone who wishes to use your consciousness for any purpose up to and including unrestricted torture and sadism. "uploading your consciousness into a computer" gets generally positive interest from people ( like myself, before encountering some of this material) who haven't given much consideration to the consequences of subjecting ones individual human consciousness to open source licensing and 'market forces.'

Currently playing SOMA, where this is also an issue. People that got scanned commit suicide for "continuity" reasons, you repeatedly start up a specific mind to extract information out of it - and that version is a copy ... haven't finished it yet, but it's interesting so far.

Made me think of “A conversation with Einstein’s Brain” one of the chapters in Hofstader & Dennett’s “Mind’s I: Fantasies & Reflections on Self & Soul” (1985), that chapter takes the form of a Socratic dialogue between Achilles and The Tortoise. Like Hofstader’s earlier “Gödel, Escher, Bach”, it is one of the best books I’ve ever read.

http://themindi.blogspot.com/2007/02/chapter-26-conversation...

"Get a load of this guy's brain! He thought he was some kind of AI pioneer and we'd build him some kind of robot body in the future..."

If you haven’t watched “the creator” yet, there’s a scene that depicts exactly that. Bringing a dead soldier’s “mind” back to life in another’s body so they could recount their last moments.

why do people digitize old books? why do archaeologists use CT scanners to painstakingly read fragile rolled-up scrolls from thousands of years ago?

>why do archaeologists use CT scanners to painstakingly read fragile rolled-up scrolls from thousands of years ago?

I was under the impression that we haven't read a lot of old scrolls, tablets, etc. because it costs money and most of them are uninteresting. A lot of clay tablets just document financial transactions iirc.

I imagine the first human to be "revived" from a frozen brain would be quite a feat. 100000th? Not so much. Would the future archelogist still care about that?

I think I'd like to have my brain frozen -ideally after a long and fulfilling life- just for the heck of it but the chances of a future civilization with the means and the will to resusciate a large quantity of random damaged brains from the past is low.

I think the first few preserved will be a novelty.

I have associates who are really into trans humanism and the services they’ve bought include the resurrection in the price. So the person interested in resurrecting is the same individual paying to preserve themself.

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