http://fortune.com/2018/03/14/nectome-preserve-brain-y-combinator-sam-altman/

And here I thought ICOs were the biggest scam Silicon Valley was capable of.

Imagine being so afraid of dying that you kill yourself. We're all dead someday, people. You should learn to embrace that. You might, in fact, learn to enjoy life a little bit.

I wonder if he will put the digital copy of himself in his will, so that it may someday inherit billions of dollars in the form of Bitcoin.

Since Sam Altman is gay, this may be one option for him to have 'children' (though obviously there are other ways). And if he wants to use his inheretence charitably, what better way to do this than to have a copy of himself in control of it. Unless of course this copy decides to keep the money for another thousand years!

That said, the sad thing is it's pretty clear to me that this is all just an elaborate marketing ploy for Altman to increase publicity of yet another Y Combinator company... sigh

Do you seriously think most ICOs are coming out of silicon valley?

Corporations are people too, you racist.

If Sam Altman wants to have 'children' he should donate all of his money to set up agricultural co-ops in economically stressed areas.

Wow. Now here's a concise malapropism that aptly captures the times and all that's wrong with them.

True, they couldn't afford to live there lmao

And if they did have some source of income that enabled them to afford SF Bay Area housing, they wouldn't need to be starting currencies just to take people's money.

And the rich don't seem to have much to contribute to ICOs, except perhaps to buy the coins. Like those twins who bought all those Bitcoins with the money they won from Zuckerberg.

Well it looks like MIT is having none of this professor and his scheme to milk money out of rich idiots with shoddy science. Lol.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610743/mit-severs-ties-to-company-promoting-fatal-brain-uploading/

[quote=MIT Media Lab]
In response to questions being raised about the relationships of Professor Ed Boyden and MIT with the company Nectome, the MIT Media Lab is releasing the following statement. MIT is party to a subcontract under an NIMH small business grant awarded to Nectome, with the Boyden group working on an academic research project to combine aspects of Nectome’s chemistry with the Boyden group’s invention, expansion microscopy, to better visualize mouse brain circuits for basic science and research purposes. Such a novel chemistry could, if achieved, facilitate brain disorder drug discovery, boost basic neuroscience circuit mapping, and facilitate brain banking for future research into health and disease states. Professor Boyden has no personal affiliation—financial, operational, or contractual—with the company Nectome. Upon consideration of the scientific premises underlying the company’s commercial plans, as well as certain public statements that the company has made, MIT has informed Nectome of its intent to terminate the subcontract between MIT and Nectome in accordance with the terms of their agreement.

Neuroscience has not sufficiently advanced to the point where we know whether any brain preservation method is powerful enough to preserve all the different kinds of biomolecules related to memory and the mind. It is also not known whether it is possible to recreate a person’s consciousness. In more detail:

Regarding the first point, it is not known what the exact kinds of biomolecules are that must be preserved, to preserve memories and other information related to the mind. Given that we do not know the exact set of molecules required, we cannot say whether a given brain preservation technique is sufficient to preserve all the biomolecular detail required to preserve memories and other information related to the mind. This is a very interesting basic science question, and one that we hope that we at MIT can contribute to, but ultimately, much more science is needed. If, someday, we can measure the location and identity of enough biomolecule types throughout a neural circuit, and then discover that simulating those things in concert is sufficient to recapitulate a brain’s function, that would be extremely interesting and exciting, to be sure. But this has not been done yet, and like any fundamental science question, there is no guarantee that it is possible at all.

Regarding the second point: currently, we cannot directly measure or create consciousness. Given that limitation, how can one say if, for example, a computer or a simulation is conscious? It’s possible that someday we will be able to simulate, in a computer, neural circuits with great accuracy, based on detailed enough biomolecular maps. But currently we do not know how to determine what such a simulation, even if scaled up to the size of the human brain, would “feel” like. To understand this will require new science that represents a nonlinear jump from the neuroscience occurring today, and some people regard this as an unsolvable problem (aka the “hard problem” of consciousness).
[/quote]

Also, does anybody here think it might be impossible to retrieve a brain's memories if the brain isn't actually "on"? It's pretty interesting to imagine trying to simulate all the possible ways a static snapshot of the brain could result in this or that dynamics, but maybe that won't work?

In b4 Heisenberg uncertainty principle implies we can't measure consciousness (although this is more or less what I am implying)

Also... if the rich people's brains get woken up in some future age that is far enough in the future for the history books to have been written... do they really want to be around? Just so a clone of their consciousness can be tortured for eternity like in Black Mirror?

Well that sort of depends on how memories are stored, whether or not they're due to cellular/molecular changes in the brain cells themselves or if it's the interactions of collections of neurons firing. If it's the former, then it might be possible once you "turn it on" again. If it's the latter, then I would think it's more like volatile memory when you've turned a device off and you've lost everything but the core functionality.

exact