I find it difficult to fathom why anyone would want to bring along a broken-down old body which is going to have to be replaced anyway.
Even assuming that making a new body is better than fixing the broken one (quite likely especially if ems are included in “new body”), how would its nerves (or equivalent) be connected to the repaired brain without a template of where each of the old nerves went? I was under the impression that the neural system, like the circulatory system, is “the same” between individuals only on the large scale, and individual fibers grow more or less randomly, like arterioles, the brain learning the positions of everything during growth.
I can well imagine almost-AGI level machines able to deduce most or maybe all of these based only on watching the effects of gentle prods to the inputs on unconscious brains, but with only human-level intelligence, even with em technology and fantastic (but not AI) computers I can’t quite see how you could do it without participation from the patient, and thus subjecting them to what I imagine might be described as “hellish maelstrom of the senses” for a quite long time.
(I don’t expect definite answers, of course—like the rest of cryonics, if we knew all the details we’d be doing it right now. I just wonder if this was discussed somewhere, and perhaps there’s something I’m not aware of which makes it simple in principle given some plausible anticipated advances. Do we even know if it’s possible, looking at just a single random axon, cut at the neck, to tell whether it connected to a nociceptor or a proprioceptor, even knowing exactly where it goes and everything there is in the brain? I mean, other than prodding it and asking the patient what they felt.)
Short summary: if cryptanalytic methods can recover the wiring of World War II rotor machines knowing only some input-output pairs and with only limited information about the actual wiring, then similar algorithms should be able to recover the neuronal “wiring” between different cortical areas when we already have a wealth of information about that wiring plus a good knowledge of acceptable input-output pairs.
Even assuming that making a new body is better than fixing the broken one (quite likely especially if ems are included in “new body”), how would its nerves (or equivalent) be connected to the repaired brain without a template of where each of the old nerves went? I was under the impression that the neural system, like the circulatory system, is “the same” between individuals only on the large scale, and individual fibers grow more or less randomly, like arterioles, the brain learning the positions of everything during growth.
I can well imagine almost-AGI level machines able to deduce most or maybe all of these based only on watching the effects of gentle prods to the inputs on unconscious brains, but with only human-level intelligence, even with em technology and fantastic (but not AI) computers I can’t quite see how you could do it without participation from the patient, and thus subjecting them to what I imagine might be described as “hellish maelstrom of the senses” for a quite long time.
(I don’t expect definite answers, of course—like the rest of cryonics, if we knew all the details we’d be doing it right now. I just wonder if this was discussed somewhere, and perhaps there’s something I’m not aware of which makes it simple in principle given some plausible anticipated advances. Do we even know if it’s possible, looking at just a single random axon, cut at the neck, to tell whether it connected to a nociceptor or a proprioceptor, even knowing exactly where it goes and everything there is in the brain? I mean, other than prodding it and asking the patient what they felt.)
You might want to read Cryonics, cryptography, and maximum likelihood estimation.
Short summary: if cryptanalytic methods can recover the wiring of World War II rotor machines knowing only some input-output pairs and with only limited information about the actual wiring, then similar algorithms should be able to recover the neuronal “wiring” between different cortical areas when we already have a wealth of information about that wiring plus a good knowledge of acceptable input-output pairs.