I'm no expert in the biochemistry of the brain, but surely thoughts and memories depend as much upon the fluid medium of the brain as well as the more permanent structures of its neurons—the complex cycles and oscillations in dissolved ions, neurochemicals, &c. that cease to exist when the brain is killed and preserved with glutaraldehyde or whatever. and yes, they're proposing exactly that: https://nectome.com/the-case-for-glutaraldehyde-structural-encoding-and-preservation-of-long-term-memories/ glutaraldehyde, H(C=O)(CH₂)₃(C=O)H, is a somewhat less toxic alternative to formaldehyde in the preservation of soft tissue by chemical cross-linking.
so you preserve the physical structures of the brain—so what? what does that get you, when you've lost the complex chemical medium in which a living brain functions? and you can't get that back because the glutaraldehyde preservation has reacted with and thus destroyed much of the fine chemical structures that were present in the living brain. it's cross-linked all the proteins, denatured them. the idea of somehow reconstructing thoughts and memories from these dead and permanently altered tissues seems a bit like thinking that you can reconstruct Windows 10 by meticulous microscopic examination of an Intel microprocessor that happened to be running Windows 10 before it was removed for examination. that's not an analogy I want to push too far because a brain and its neurochemicals aren't the same as a computer's hardware and software, but still—organic life and organic thought are so dependent upon transient phenomena, chemical oscillations that are destroyed upon death, that I don't get why this wild notion is supposed to be plausible.
anyway, if Sam Altman wants to convince me that he ought to be able to preserve his brain, first he should convince me that there's anything worthwhile in it.
~Chara
…that the gross physical structure is
- all you need to preserve
- preserved well enough by this process that a mind can be reconstructed
this idea still makes no sense
When this brain in silico is booted up, that's not your mind. It is a copy of your mind. Your experience as a brain uploadee will simply be death. All you are achieving (if you are achieving anything) is making a hellish eternal experience for a copy of your mind where digital you knows for certain that they are a copy of a dead tech bro, and where digital you could definitionally never know, for example, that digital you is the only copy, which seems existentially terrifying.
