On Tue, Jul 05, 2005 at 12:41:26AM +1000, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
> point in human evolution. But while we have been discussing the rich
> philosophical issues raised by this possibility, and touched on some of the
> social issues in a world where copying is common, nobody has really talked
> about how these copies will actually be made. It seems to me that our old
This has been discussed in other places though, ad nauseam. Of current
relevance is only one: building numerical models from crysectioned
cryopreserved (vitrified) human tissue. We won't see anything else within our
lifetime.
There you have a number of issues arising: loss of a few hour window
(everything not yet consolidated into long-term memory), destruction of the
original (destructivey copy), creation of an abstracted copy (or several
copies), based on a different substrate yet isofunctional.
> workhorse, the Star Trek teleporter, even if theoretically possible, would
> be a fantastically difficult thing to make. Any civilization advanced
> enough to be up to the task of building one would have long ago developed
> much easier methods of copying and transferring minds by going all
> electronic (or photonic, or whatever), so that atom for atom duplication of
> a biological entity would be a pointless exercise.
--
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.leitl.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
Received on Mon Jul 04 2005 - 11:55:47 PDT