Startup Claims It Can Preserve Your Mind for Future Upload...But They Have To Kill You First

in #science7 years ago (edited)

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The new startup, Nectome, is developing a way to "backup" human consciousness and cheat death. They have developed a specially-formed chemical solution which they say can preserve the physical body so well that the even the memories in the brain will remain intact. The premise is that in the future, technological innovation will allow advanced computers to download our stored memories and digitize human consciousness.

The catch is, Nectome’s preservation technique is "100% fatal." In order to live indefinitely in the future, clients must be willing to die. Volunteers are put under general anesthesia while connected to a heart-lung machine; then, Nectome's proprietary chemical formula will flood through and fill up the larger arteries in their necks, killing them. Nectome, with help from the startup accelerator Y Combinator, is looking to take advantage of California’s two-year-old End of Life Option Act and enlist terminally ill patients interested in ending their lives with medical assistance.

The company says they already have a waiting list of volunteers.

Would you be willing to undergo such a radical end-of-life procedure for the hope of living again in a vastly different future, as a vastly different form of yourself?

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Consciousness is not found in the brain.
Backing up the brain is like building a copy of your car to see how you used to drive. The driver is what is important, not the vehicle.

So, here we have a group just wanting to kill people.
Probably for organ harvesting.

Further, the chemical storage medium used by the brain is much denser storage medium than anything digital we use, so the "preservations" will be quite large, and prone to defects.

I'm interested in your theory that consciousness is not in the brain. I've researched the Orch-Or theory that posits consciousness fires from inside microtubules inside neurons, rather than between neurons. Are you indicating that consciousness is more universal?

If you learn meditation. You start to realize where your thoughts come from. You start to realize many thoughts come from you from outside yourself. It is very apparent that consciousness is not in the mind.

If you learn astral projection, it is even more apparent that your consciousness is with you, some place other than your body. As in, you are here. And, your body is not.

Further, you can get more spiritual, and get more in touch with the part of you that is not your body. Basically, you will find that you are a spiritual being having a physical experience, not a physical being having a spiritual experience.

To me, this is just statements of experience.


Now, on Orch-Or, they could kinda be correct. The brain is an antenna. It collects information from a lot of waveforms that are our actual world, and then displays to our aware mind the 3D world. That the brain is an antenna is well known, how it works needs much more study.

Yes! I agree with you.
This study freaks me the hell out. Can't people just be happy with where they are now?!

Baller! This is precisely the kind of tech news i’ve been expecting this year!

Things are about to get interesting.

Fascinating. We have no idea yet if it really works, but it sounds like their research will reveal a lot more about the brain in the years to come.