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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

There have to be ways of getting high space and time resolution signal capable of reconstructing people's exact thoughts, memories, and senses.

Non-invasively. No "below threshold of detection". Beyond anything our scientists say is possible.

We're just not advanced enough as a species to do it yet.

We need to keep pushing these boundaries.

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This would likely require completely new forms of physics and interacting with matter I'm afraid. It simultaneously requires extremely high resolution and high penetration (we need to see deep into the brain). You'll need to be able to measure the state of neurons and connections - probably down to the quantum level - and do this real time, and then record the data that you collected.

I suppose you could flood the brain with nano-machines which would latch onto all the bits and pieces and collect the data? But where would they store it? How would we get them all back out again?

I don't think it's possible to do this with our current understanding of physics. This is not a question of needing better technology, but needing a whole new universe with different physics altogether.

I'm not even sure what is more far fetched, this or superluminal travel. I'm actually leaning towards the former :D

At least there’s a theoretical path forward to super-luminal travel beyond hand-waving. Just find some exotic negative energy density matter.

We have more people thinking about super-luminal travel than people thinking about BCI, brain scanning, brain uploads, and digital immortality.

We've kind of got this whole thing backwards.

Imagine n^3 EMF-generating cubes surrounded by 6n^2 EMF-detecting cubes. Starting from an initial given state, is there any n for which over time the state of any given EMF-generating cube cannot be deduced?

Then consider a further constrained version in which the EMF-generating cubes may only generate EMF in response to external inputs, i.e. as in the game of life.

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