X-Message-Number: 5282
From:  (Brian Wowk)
Newsgroups: sci.cryonics
Subject: Re: Mind Uploading -> No revival of cryonics patients
Date: 27 Nov 95 18:54:57 GMT
Message-ID: <>

References: <46q9ef$> <> 
<> <> <>

In <>  (Brad Templeton) writes:

>Now I understand why when I explain cryonics to people they think the
>cryonicists are extremely over optimistic.   There is a reason that
>the problems you can solve today are regarded as trivial.  There are
>still problems from the 19th century that we *don't* now how to solve
>yet, or ones that our better minds just solved recently in complex
>ways, such as Fermat's last theorem.   There will continue to be
>problems from the 19th century they can't solve in the 24th.

	Brad, you never did reply to my complaint that you have
been playing both sides of the fence, and now you're doing it again.
This thread did not start by me saying that cryonics was an inherently
trivial problem, it started by *you* saying that uploading was a
trival problem-- trivial enough to possibly happen before biomedical
nanotech is developed.  By stipulating a world of uploading technology
(implicitly a world of hyperaccelerated advancement) you gave me a
very wide latitude to speculate, and I was simply exercising it.

	If sober reality is now the order of the day, then let's
stick with that for awhile and not keep switching back and forth.
Both cryonics revival (of today's patients) *and* uploading are extremely 
difficult non-trivial problems that IMHO will not be solved for at
least 150 years.  (I expect we will have supra-human intelligent
machines in less than 100 years, but they will not be uploaded humans.)
In fact uploading and cryonics revival are almost the same problem.

	In short, it is inconceivable that wealth and technology
sufficient for uploading of an entire civilization could exist
without revival of cryonics patients having already occurred, or
following very shortly thereafter.  That is the point I want to
make.  It is a point solidly rooted in science/engineering issues,
and it stands independent of any particular level of optimism.

---Brian Wowk


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