(A big reason I took part in a study on people at high risk for schizophrenia is ’cuz I got paid to get a few hours of fMRI. There might be similar opportunities available to be found on aggregator websites for medical studies.)
fMRI is an extremely coarse-grained scan and is unlikely to substantially assist in reconstruction. fMRI works by detecting change in blood flow indicating that specific areas of the brain are using more energy to do the task in question. In practice fMRI is so noisy that in order to get good data one generally needs to average a large number of scans of different people together. Otherwise the noise almost completely overrides any data. The smallest region which an fMRI can scan (a voxel) generally has at least millions of distinct neurons. The smallest temporal resolution levels for an fMRI are around a half a second which is a massive length of time for purposes of thought behavior. Overall, the data that this gives for reconstruction is extremely marginal when it is limited to only a handful of scans.
Academia is not known to attract the most organized people; if you’re ever going to request it, you should probably do it as soon as possible. (And if you weren’t, then haven’t you wasted your time?)
The probabilistic existence of the data makes it easier for hypothetical superintelligences to resurrect me, whether or not I have access to the data. I am not going to get cryonics.
I don’t understand this. There’s probabilistic existence of the data even if you didn’t take part in the study (some aliens could always have abducted you and took scans while you were asleep one day). If you care enough to want to increase the probability, why not increase it further by doing a small amount of extra work? (In case it’s not clear, the increase comes from having backups of the data around if UCSF deletes or destroys their copy.)
Laziness caused by ugh fields caused by guilt caused by dropping out of their study immediately after getting the fMRI, which explicitly wasn’t against the rules but still feels immoral. I also think the probability is low that UCSF and all the people they send the data to will all delete the data. I also don’t emotionally care about living forever or being resurrected or whatever, I just have negative motivations stemming from the potential immorality of not trying to save information about my mind that is for whatever reason useful, e.g. useful for future gods to judge me by. Also I think there are already gods hanging around that already have access to information about my brain-mind. Also I think that even if there weren’t such gods already then alien gods would still be able to collect the information as they rushed towards Earth and bring it back to any future Earth-born gods. Also I’m skeptical that an fMRI makes a big difference, i.e. I’m skeptical of Paul’s approach, especially when compared to options like eating the internet and looking at my writings, including my descriptions of my memories and cognitive style and so on. Basically the scenario where my additional effort makes a difference strikes me as a really unlikely scenario so it’s hard for me to care about it, especially when there are way more important things for me to care about. (ETA: I also tentatively believe in a Leibnizian/Thomistic God, Who would know everything about me already. This is mostly disjunctive with thinking that there are already gods on Earth.)
(A big reason I took part in a study on people at high risk for schizophrenia is ’cuz I got paid to get a few hours of fMRI. There might be similar opportunities available to be found on aggregator websites for medical studies.)
fMRI is an extremely coarse-grained scan and is unlikely to substantially assist in reconstruction. fMRI works by detecting change in blood flow indicating that specific areas of the brain are using more energy to do the task in question. In practice fMRI is so noisy that in order to get good data one generally needs to average a large number of scans of different people together. Otherwise the noise almost completely overrides any data. The smallest region which an fMRI can scan (a voxel) generally has at least millions of distinct neurons. The smallest temporal resolution levels for an fMRI are around a half a second which is a massive length of time for purposes of thought behavior. Overall, the data that this gives for reconstruction is extremely marginal when it is limited to only a handful of scans.
What have you done with the fMRI data?
Nothing, I haven’t even bothered getting UCSF to send it to me. I haven’t yet looked into what I should do once I get around to doing that.
Academia is not known to attract the most organized people; if you’re ever going to request it, you should probably do it as soon as possible. (And if you weren’t, then haven’t you wasted your time?)
The probabilistic existence of the data makes it easier for hypothetical superintelligences to resurrect me, whether or not I have access to the data. I am not going to get cryonics.
...And the probability is much higher if you have a personal copy on your computer, backed up like everything else.
What is this, ‘Newsome’s Wager’? “There exists a non-infinitesimal chance that your brain pattern has been preserved by various processes...”
I doubt that it’s more than an order of magnitude difference. Also see my reply to Wei Dai elsewhere in this thread.
I don’t understand this. There’s probabilistic existence of the data even if you didn’t take part in the study (some aliens could always have abducted you and took scans while you were asleep one day). If you care enough to want to increase the probability, why not increase it further by doing a small amount of extra work? (In case it’s not clear, the increase comes from having backups of the data around if UCSF deletes or destroys their copy.)
Laziness caused by ugh fields caused by guilt caused by dropping out of their study immediately after getting the fMRI, which explicitly wasn’t against the rules but still feels immoral. I also think the probability is low that UCSF and all the people they send the data to will all delete the data. I also don’t emotionally care about living forever or being resurrected or whatever, I just have negative motivations stemming from the potential immorality of not trying to save information about my mind that is for whatever reason useful, e.g. useful for future gods to judge me by. Also I think there are already gods hanging around that already have access to information about my brain-mind. Also I think that even if there weren’t such gods already then alien gods would still be able to collect the information as they rushed towards Earth and bring it back to any future Earth-born gods. Also I’m skeptical that an fMRI makes a big difference, i.e. I’m skeptical of Paul’s approach, especially when compared to options like eating the internet and looking at my writings, including my descriptions of my memories and cognitive style and so on. Basically the scenario where my additional effort makes a difference strikes me as a really unlikely scenario so it’s hard for me to care about it, especially when there are way more important things for me to care about. (ETA: I also tentatively believe in a Leibnizian/Thomistic God, Who would know everything about me already. This is mostly disjunctive with thinking that there are already gods on Earth.)