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Save Your Brain's Connectome, Upload Yourself Elsewhere
A new scheme for uploading yourself for storage, and later downloading into a suitable body, has been proposed by Robert McIntyre, an MIT graduate, and Gregory M. Fahy, PhD., 21st Century Medicine (21CM) Chief Scientific Officer.
They are proposing to scan the human brain’s connectome (the 150 trillion microscopic synaptic connections presumed to encode all of a person’s knowledge). This information could be used to reconstruct the self of the person.
Minor sticking point: you won't survive the scanning process. But don't let that stop you from taking a spot on their wait list.
That said, the following explanatory video has some really peppy and enjoyable music, which should help you feel better about it.
(Save your connectome for uploading later)
The first step in the ASC procedure is to perfuse the brain’s vascular system with the toxic fixative glutaraldehyde (typically used as an embalming fluid but also used by neuroscientists to prepare brain tissue for the highest resolution electron microscopic and immunofluorescent examination). That instantly halts metabolic processes by covalently crosslinking the brain’s proteins in place, leading to death (by contemporary standards). The brain is then quickly stored at -130 degrees C, stopping all further decay.The method, tested on a pig’s brain, led to 21st Century Medicine (21CM), lead researcher McIntyre, and senior author Fahy winning the $80,000 Large Mammal Brain Preservation Prize offered by the Brain Preservation Foundation (BPF), announced March 13.
Best of all, you can pop on over to their website, and get on the wait list! You know you want to.
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. If memories can truly be preserved by a sufficiently good brain banking technique, we believe that within the century it could become feasible to digitize your preserved brain and use that information to recreate your mind. How close are we to this possibility? Currently, we can preserve the connectomes of animal brains and are working on extending our techniques to human brains in a research context. This is an important first step towards the development of a verified memory preservation protocol, as the connectome plays a vital role in memory storage.(Get on the Nectome wait list)
Fans of the current TV series Altered Carbon may not be aware that the show is based on the excellent 2003 novel Altered Carbon (highly recommended) by Richard Morgan.
"You can't kill me just by wiping out my cortical stack.""You've got remote storage. How regular is the update?"
Bancroft smiled. "Every 48 hours." He tapped the back of his neck. "Direct needlecast from here into a shielded stack over at the PsychaSec installation at Alcatraz."
(Read more about the cortical stack from Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon)
See also the virtual immortality offered by Arthur C. Clarke in his 1956 novel The City and the Stars.
Via KurzweilAI.
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 3/15/2018)
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