X-Message-Number: 822 Date: 13 May 92 02:05:49 EDT From: Thomas Donaldson <> Subject: Re: cryonics: #817 Dear David: Fortunately or unfortunately, we are NOT computers. Frankly, I don't think we will ever choose to be. (Enhancing our abilities, including our mental abilities, is NOT the same as becoming or uploading ourselves into computers). Furthermore, although I have no doubt that someday it will be possible to store a sufficiently complete description of a person so that they can be recovered (including their identity), doing so, as I'm sure you see, is not the same as "uploading" that person. I hope you have arranged for your own suspension, since terminal illness or catastrophic accidents can come with no warning, even to the most intelligent. Yes, I think it is the best we can do now; and my own sense of how our real brains really work suggests to me that it will be a long time (certainly more than a few decades, conceivably more than a century) before we will work out how to reliably capture everything about someone's brain at the level of detail required to revive them. That problem is very much NOT the same as devising machines that show some signs of intelligence, which will come much sooner. Thomas Donaldson Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=822