I’m not sure the analogy is appropriate. The sat-photos of the library give no information on the works of Shakespeare because the library’s rooftop (and the bookshelves, and the book cover, and the pages themselves) obscures the text, and there’s no traceable causal relation between the rooftop and what Shakespeare wrote.
However, even with current “off-the-shelf” brain scanners, you can with some training and machine-learning have your scanner recognize specific thoughts, so that whenever you think “Browser” in just the right mental pattern the headset will detect it (and fire up your web browser or something). So there is some correlation somewhere.
So a more appropriate analogy would be if you tore out all the pages of Shakespeare, and laid them out next to eachother on the rooftop, and then had a bunch of low-res satellite photographs, but also more importantly, of various types of video recordings from moving satellites all pointing at that text. With enough pictures and videos, emphasis on number and diversity of viewpoints / moving pictures / different imaging techniques, you’ll be able to eventually reconstruct quite a significant portion of the text if you had correspondingly amazing image-reconstruction technology.
(we can already do some pretty amazing things in that area from one single blurry picture to readable text, so imagine with the kind of future tech that reanimates dead people and massive visual datasets with varying angles and recording technologies...)
Still, it’s true that it might not provide much information. But it also might provide more than enough. It also might provide a helpful little bit more. It’s something that’s pretty hard to estimate, and I would stake my chances on more data rather than less if I’ve got the money available and am going to get frozen anyway.
That’d be help for the people doing the reanimation, not the reanimated you?
Being a bit weird, I might actually prefer a cryonic preservation where the people reanimating me get basically zero information beyond my physical remains, and will need to bring me back and ask me if they want to know my name. That way I’d know that whoever gets brought back will probably have their mind-state pretty closely causally connected to the one I had going in the suspension, assuming they will have a mind at all. Having lots and lots of lifelog information seems like it might increase the chances of the reanimators producing scrambled actors who are good at parroting my surface mannerisms to match the recordings, but aren’t internally much more of a continuation of me than a very capable actor doing Napoleon is the continuation of the actual Napoleon.
I’m not sure the analogy is appropriate. The sat-photos of the library give no information on the works of Shakespeare because the library’s rooftop (and the bookshelves, and the book cover, and the pages themselves) obscures the text, and there’s no traceable causal relation between the rooftop and what Shakespeare wrote.
However, even with current “off-the-shelf” brain scanners, you can with some training and machine-learning have your scanner recognize specific thoughts, so that whenever you think “Browser” in just the right mental pattern the headset will detect it (and fire up your web browser or something). So there is some correlation somewhere.
So a more appropriate analogy would be if you tore out all the pages of Shakespeare, and laid them out next to eachother on the rooftop, and then had a bunch of low-res satellite photographs, but also more importantly, of various types of video recordings from moving satellites all pointing at that text. With enough pictures and videos, emphasis on number and diversity of viewpoints / moving pictures / different imaging techniques, you’ll be able to eventually reconstruct quite a significant portion of the text if you had correspondingly amazing image-reconstruction technology.
(we can already do some pretty amazing things in that area from one single blurry picture to readable text, so imagine with the kind of future tech that reanimates dead people and massive visual datasets with varying angles and recording technologies...)
Still, it’s true that it might not provide much information. But it also might provide more than enough. It also might provide a helpful little bit more. It’s something that’s pretty hard to estimate, and I would stake my chances on more data rather than less if I’ve got the money available and am going to get frozen anyway.
That’d be help for the people doing the reanimation, not the reanimated you?
Being a bit weird, I might actually prefer a cryonic preservation where the people reanimating me get basically zero information beyond my physical remains, and will need to bring me back and ask me if they want to know my name. That way I’d know that whoever gets brought back will probably have their mind-state pretty closely causally connected to the one I had going in the suspension, assuming they will have a mind at all. Having lots and lots of lifelog information seems like it might increase the chances of the reanimators producing scrambled actors who are good at parroting my surface mannerisms to match the recordings, but aren’t internally much more of a continuation of me than a very capable actor doing Napoleon is the continuation of the actual Napoleon.