Kaj_Sotala comments on Is cryonics necessary?: Writing yourself into the future - Less Wrong

6 Post author: gworley 23 June 2010 02:33PM

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Comment author: gwern 23 June 2010 04:09:43PM *  18 points [-]

Writing is extremely low-bandwidth. If I recall correctly, Shannon did some experimentation and found that per letter, English was no more than a bit and I've seen other estimates that it's less than a bit, per letter. (In comparison, depending on language and encoding, a character can take up to 32 bits to store uncompressed. Even ASCII requires 8 bits/1 byte per character.) And given the difficulty of producing a megabyte of personal information, and the vast space of potential selves...

If we're going to try to preserve ourselves through recorded information, wouldn't it make much more sense to instead spend a few hundred/thousand dollars on lifelogging? If you really do record your waking hours, then preservation of your writings is automatically included - as well as all the other stuff. Plus, this solves the issue of mundane experiences.

Comment author: Kaj_Sotala 23 June 2010 08:53:34PM 2 points [-]

What's the situation with commercially available lifelogging software/hardware? Can I just put in some money to get a recorder and start using that, or does it still involve a lot of customization to get something that might or might not work very well for the purpose?

Comment author: gwern 15 October 2010 01:06:10AM 2 points [-]
Comment author: gwern 24 June 2010 12:59:15AM 2 points [-]

I'm afraid I couldn't really say. I have seen the specs of enough small digital cameras and surveillance devices to know that decent quality 8 or 16 hour products using Flash are perfectly possible (and hard drive space is now so cheap as to not be worth discussing).

But I have yet to hear of anything that strikes me as ideal. Perhaps some other commentators know more.