If we're relying on a future superintelligence to reconstruct our brains, why not make it a little harder?
There's no reason you couldn't buy a wearable camera that recorded your inputs and outputs, and back everything up to hard disks in HD. Much cheaper to store than a frozen brain. After a few decades of video, there would have to be more than enough data to do the reconstruction. Then, when you die, you just stick the big stack-o-harddrives into a vault and wait for the future AI overlord to find them, scan them, and put them back together into a person again. Boom. Immortality on the cheap.
After a few decades of video, there would have to be more than enough data to do the reconstruction.
Sandberg & Bostrom are skeptical. Page 109:
...Again, it is sometimes suggested that recording enough of the sensory experiences and actions would be enough to produce brain emulation. This is unlikely to work simply because of the discrepancy in the number of degrees of freedom between the brain (at least 10^14 synaptic strengths distributed in a 10^22 element connectivity matrix) and the number of bits recorded across a lifetime (less than 2 * 10^14 b
Paul Christiano recently suggested that we can use neuroimaging to form a complete mathematical characterization of a human brain, which a sufficiently powerful superintelligence would be able to reconstruct into a working mind, and the neuroimaging part is already possible today, or close to being possible.
Paul was using this idea as part of an FAI design proposal, but I'm highlighting it here since it seems to have independent value as an alternative or supplement to cryonics. That is, instead of (or in addition to) trying to get your body to be frozen and then preserved in liquid nitrogen after you die, you periodically take neuroimaging scans of your brain and save them to multiple backup locations (1010 bits is only about 1 gigabyte), in the hope that a friendly AI or posthuman will eventually use the scans to reconstruct your mind.
Are there any neuroimaging experts around who can tell us how feasible this really is, and how much such a scan might cost, now or in the near future?
ETA: Given the presence of thermal noise and the fact that a set of neuroimaging data may contain redundant or irrelevant information, 1010 bits ought to be regarded as just a rough lower bound on how much data needs to be collected and stored. Thanks to commenters who pointed this out.