What I'm about

post by Flaglandbase · 2022-01-06T09:20:47.444Z · LW · GW · 7 comments

Death is horrible, or at least the things that happen as it approaches. I've worked in nursing homes and can't understand what normal people will tolerate. Every day is filled with undiscussed horrors. It's unacceptable, too dreadful to face. 
Clearly, the mainstream has unimaginably different opinions than me. But still, there should be SOME effort to do something about death, like a scientific religion or social movement. 
I'm certainly not afraid of death because my life is so good, but more afraid of losing something I've never had. I have a highly specific vision of a virtual reality heaven. Basically, I would be left alone for all eternity on my personal island designed in such a way nothing could go wrong. After countless eons I would begin to relive days I lived before.

The first step to achieve such a thing would be a device to accurately scan the contents of a human brain. That data would then be used to recreate the brain's software "continuation".
However, this process would require science fiction-like devices even more complicated than human brains. No one has managed to scan the connections between even a few neurons. I suspect Kurzweil was too optimistic about the rate of technological progress, and we will all die before that technology is invented.
Those of us who fear death enough, will have to invent a way to preserve our mind contents using today's highly inadequate technology. The best hope is obviously cryonics. Let's freeze our brains until they can be scanned in the future, ideally before they are decayed by old age or other horrible conditions.
Unfortunately, I have no money to afford cryonics. There's just no way, unless the government makes it available for free like emergency healthcare. There is no political will for that - but why doesn't every millionaire have their head frozen after death?

There may be one other alternative.
It started for me in the early 1980s with a vague interest on how to record fleeting memory states in an effort to hold on to the past. This eventually led to research on Rudy Rucker's Lifebox idea (https://www.rudyrucker.com/pdf/rucker_marvell_lifebox_immortality.pdf). Basically, his method involves recording everything you have done and learned in as much detail as possible.
I have scanned about 40,000 documents sorted by approximate date, plus under a million digital files. I did it all myself, but could have used a service like 1dollarscan.com or something. There are also megabytes worth of notes and diary entries. 
Many different estimates exist on the amount of information in a brain, but none of them think its function could be adequately recreated from a stack of floppy disks. It might as well be scribbles on a cocktail napkin. 
However, could only a small percentage of a brain's information be required? Most of our memories are rarely or never recalled. There's a tiny chance the mystery of personal identity is much simpler than expected. Evolution may have economized on it.

Then the next step would be to invent various mind and personality tests to capture as much of this uniqueness as possible. That's the only hope I have for escaping death, some incredibly clever way to capture a tiny portion of a brain's pattern that would be good enough to recreate its essence. I have many vague ideas.
The above may all seem futile, crazy even, but it's literally my only chance. If this doesn't work I'm totally doomed with no hope at all. And so are most of us.

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