X-Message-Number: 5198
Newsgroups: sci.cryonics
From:  (Brad Templeton)
Subject: Mind Uploading -> No revival of cryonics patients
Date: Thu, 16 Nov 1995 21:52:33 GMT
Message-ID: <>

References: <> 
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I wonder if mind uploading would reduce the likelihood of revival of
cryonics patients.

Imagine that mind uploading becomes possible prior to nanotechnology.
(I know some people think nano is the technology that would allow the scan
but we don't really know much about this.)

This makes nano far less valuable for most of the world, particularly
body repair.  Oh, nano-based bodies would be very *nice* for manipulating
the world, but they would not be necessary, the way that biological bodies
need nano.

More to the point, a lot of people wonder what will happen when people get
uploaded, and more to the point, children get raised uploaded and net
connected.

Many people wonder if this might create a new breed of humanity, one far
beyond us in ways we can't understand.   Many people hope for that, but
they forget that if that happens, the children will come to regard their
parents -- even their uploaded parents -- as curiosities of the past.

They'll see little reason to create more of them, or to revive a population
from the past.  Particularly since that requires work in the real world and
in real time, which is the only thing that's "hard" in the network world.

If we could instantiate an ape mind in silicon, we would of course do it
a few times to see what it was like.  Particularly ape minds from the
past.  But would we do it thousands of times?  Might they view it that way?

The ordinary people who are uploaded might be interested in some people from
the past and go to upload them.  But only if they care about the physical
world, and they work to develop the revival technology that nobody needs
except the cryonics patients.    Cryonics assumes the revival technology
will be extremely valuable to the mainstream world, and that this will pay
for it.  Cyronics can't pay for it.   What if nobody important has a bio-body
any more?   Or if they have them but switch between them and the non-bio
form when they need to?   Who would pay for the development of revival
technology?


I think cryonics, to work, requires that almost all people be living in
biological bodies, and that they be dependent on them, so that they work
to develop repair technology for their own purposes, that as a sideline can
be used to revive the frozen.

So dream of uploading -- but only *after* revival.
-- 
Brad Templeton, publisher, ClariNet Communications Corp.	 
The net's #1 Electronic newspaper		     http://www.clari.net/brad/
		...Announcing 1 MILLION paid subscribers! (www.clari.net)


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