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The startup accelerator Y Combinator is known for supporting audacious companies in its popular three-month boot camp.
There's never been anything quite like Nectome, though.
Next week, at YC's "demo days," Nectome's cofounder, Robert McIntyre, is going to describe his technology for exquisitely preserving brains in microscopic detail using a high-tech embalming process. Then the MIT graduate will make his business pitch. As it says on his website: "What if we told you we could back up your mind?"
So yeah. Nectome is a preserve-your-brain-and-upload-it company. Its chemical solution can keep a body intact for hundreds of years, maybe thousands, as a statue of frozen glass. The idea is that someday in the future scientists will scan your bricked brain and turn it into a computer simulation. That way, someone a lot like you, though not exactly you, will smell the flowers again in a data server somewhere.
This story has a grisly twist, though. For Nectome's procedure to work, it's essential that the brain be fresh. The company says its plan is to connect people with terminal illnesses to a heart-lung machine in order to pump its mix of scientific embalming chemicals into the big carotid arteries in their necks while they are still alive (though under general anesthesia).
The company has consulted with lawyers familiar with California's two-year-old End of Life Option Act, which permits doctor-assisted suicide for terminal patients, and believes its service will be legal. The product is "100 percent fatal," says McIntyre. "That is why we are uniquely situated among the Y Combinator companies."
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 19 2018, @04:58PM (6 children)
It's cryogenics on a computer so it can be re-patented.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday March 19 2018, @05:06PM (5 children)
Actually, they just give your brain a big ol' chemical bath. It's up to some other saps to develop the scanning technology to revive the Silicon Valley elites so they can resume world domination.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday March 19 2018, @06:01PM (4 children)
Ever thought about how Roko's Basilisk can re-create people to torture them? Well, obviously their mind has to be stored somewhere for this to be possible. The customers of this startup might one day wake up to an unpleasant surprise! :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday March 19 2018, @06:09PM
https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=24636&page=1&cid=655006#commentwrap [soylentnews.org]
But... but think of the orphans! XD 😂😂😂
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by aristarchus on Monday March 19 2018, @06:41PM (2 children)
But if a mind can be stored anywhere, it would be prudent to have backups, multiple backups. Which raises an interesting question. If you are torturing a copy, are you really torturing the person you intended to torture, or is it just facsimile, a "strawman", as khallow would say, a mere chimera of the original, a shade or an echo? Then there is the Riker problem. http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Thomas_Riker [wikia.com]
Now, think, for a moment. What is it that is "you", essentially. You are unique? Repeat after me. "We are all individuals!" ( Life of Brian, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QereR0CViMY [youtube.com] ) But other than a continuity of awareness, there really is nothing you can point to as "being" what it is the you are. You are a collection of skhandhas, a result of co-dependant co-origination, and at some point you will, if you can release yourself from the bondage of grasping and desire for existence, reach nirvana, or just cease to think you exist. Nothing has self-being (svabhava) and all is empty (sunyata). So the copies you torture are not the person you desired to torture, indeed the actual person you seek to torture is non-identical to itself, and in torturing them, it is you who are tortured by your tortured need to torture.
Roko's basilsk is from the Avici hell region, not an enlightened being at all.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday March 20 2018, @11:15AM (1 child)
Not enlightened? You know the etymology of “Lucifer”?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Tuesday March 20 2018, @07:35PM
Wrong religion, different demonologies! And, just because you carry light, that does not mean you are the light you carry.