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Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd
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: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 19 2018, @07:21PM
I don't think the math we use in current computers has anything to represent consciousness or qualia.
Consciousness and qualia might turn out to be generated by our computers as an emergent thing due to the laws of our universe, but there's really no reason for it to be generated based on the actual math used.
Imperfect analogy- like doing some math generates heat. The math could in theory be done without any heat being generated in a purely mathematical universe but in our current universe doing enough math on a computer normally generates heat. And that's because of the laws of the universe and not the math itself.