Looks like flash memory stores information using varying levels of charge; that would be quite painful to read out with a destructive scan. Happily that’s unlikely to be the case with the brain’s long-term storage, since AIUI it doesn’t contain any sufficiently good insulators.
Freeze the volatile memory - - this preserves its state (you can retrieve passwords from shutdown laptops this way. an upside down can of computer cleaner will work). Slice it up, scan it (this assumes it wasn’t significantly damaged while slicing; some damage is acceptable because what was there can be inferred—this is a method in data recovery. also, you wouldn’t slice it up tbh. probably the same with a brain.). With the scan you should be able to build a 3d representation of the memory with pixels (more information than just rgba). Now, you use some kind of pattern recognition to map patterns of pixels to physical representations (eg. take a Quake map and look for pixel patterns that match a jump pad).
Now, if you understood how the memory and cellphone software works, you could just get the state into a binary form acceptable for a cell phone emulator. But, because we don’t understand how it works, we’ll need to simulate reality to a sufficient level. I.e., we need an empty emulated universe with physical laws that correspond to our own, so that we can interpret pixels into their physical correspondents. So, when we pattern match a bunch of pixels into a memory cell with a certain state, we can then drop that interpretation into the emulated world.
For the emulated world to be sufficient for emulating the cell phone, I don’t think you would need atoms or electrons (or anything below that level). You could probably emulate the components at the level of electricity, silicon, wire, gold, ect, because we can explain and predict the phenomena a phone produces at that level without going further. E.g., we just need to know what an electric current does, not what its electrons are doing to turn on an emulated light bulb.
(This was my internal monologue as I went through this problem. It’s not researched, and is intended to be taken more as bar talk than anything very serious.)
That seems feasible if you knew both the model and the operating system, and had a scan showing very precise relative temperatures. You could then match the state of the simulated phone to a long but finite list of the possible states of the phone given the operating system. But I’m not a doctor.
Assume there are 20 apps on the phone, and each app can be in 5 states. Then this list is already 5^20 (or about 10^14) entries long. This doesn’t include stored memory, as the address book would entail (number of possible names for the first entry of the address book is already something like 26^20 as a conservative estimate).
I did like the test problem in the comments:
Now, how would you approach that one? Assume a known model of phone.
Looks like flash memory stores information using varying levels of charge; that would be quite painful to read out with a destructive scan. Happily that’s unlikely to be the case with the brain’s long-term storage, since AIUI it doesn’t contain any sufficiently good insulators.
Step 1 is to construct a superintelligent machine...
Freeze the volatile memory - - this preserves its state (you can retrieve passwords from shutdown laptops this way. an upside down can of computer cleaner will work). Slice it up, scan it (this assumes it wasn’t significantly damaged while slicing; some damage is acceptable because what was there can be inferred—this is a method in data recovery. also, you wouldn’t slice it up tbh. probably the same with a brain.). With the scan you should be able to build a 3d representation of the memory with pixels (more information than just rgba). Now, you use some kind of pattern recognition to map patterns of pixels to physical representations (eg. take a Quake map and look for pixel patterns that match a jump pad).
Now, if you understood how the memory and cellphone software works, you could just get the state into a binary form acceptable for a cell phone emulator. But, because we don’t understand how it works, we’ll need to simulate reality to a sufficient level. I.e., we need an empty emulated universe with physical laws that correspond to our own, so that we can interpret pixels into their physical correspondents. So, when we pattern match a bunch of pixels into a memory cell with a certain state, we can then drop that interpretation into the emulated world.
For the emulated world to be sufficient for emulating the cell phone, I don’t think you would need atoms or electrons (or anything below that level). You could probably emulate the components at the level of electricity, silicon, wire, gold, ect, because we can explain and predict the phenomena a phone produces at that level without going further. E.g., we just need to know what an electric current does, not what its electrons are doing to turn on an emulated light bulb.
(This was my internal monologue as I went through this problem. It’s not researched, and is intended to be taken more as bar talk than anything very serious.)
That seems feasible if you knew both the model and the operating system, and had a scan showing very precise relative temperatures. You could then match the state of the simulated phone to a long but finite list of the possible states of the phone given the operating system. But I’m not a doctor.
It’s possible to directly read the state of transistors in the phone’s memory via scanning capacitance microscopy (http://www.multiprobe.com/technology/technologyassets/S05_1_direct_measurements_of_charge_in_floating_gate.pdf), so you can reconstruct the actual contents of the memory. Probably the greater challenge would be figuring out how to cut the phone into slices without damaging the memory.
Assume there are 20 apps on the phone, and each app can be in 5 states. Then this list is already 5^20 (or about 10^14) entries long. This doesn’t include stored memory, as the address book would entail (number of possible names for the first entry of the address book is already something like 26^20 as a conservative estimate).
Interestingly, people already try to do this kind of thing http://artematrix.org/archive/computer/restoration.simulation.htm, http://simh.trailing-edge.com/.