Esar comments on PZ Myers on the Infeasibility of Whole Brain Emulation - Less Wrong

11 Post author: peter_hurford 14 July 2012 06:13PM

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Comment author: [deleted] 14 July 2012 10:50:44PM *  2 points [-]

That seems feasible if you knew both the model and the operating system, and had a scan showing very precise relative temperatures. You could then match the state of the simulated phone to a long but finite list of the possible states of the phone given the operating system. But I'm not a doctor.

Comment author: Lachann 15 July 2012 12:49:55AM 2 points [-]

It's possible to directly read the state of transistors in the phone's memory via scanning capacitance microscopy (http://www.multiprobe.com/technology/technologyassets/S05_1_direct_measurements_of_charge_in_floating_gate.pdf), so you can reconstruct the actual contents of the memory. Probably the greater challenge would be figuring out how to cut the phone into slices without damaging the memory.

Comment author: jsteinhardt 16 July 2012 06:21:00AM 1 point [-]

Assume there are 20 apps on the phone, and each app can be in 5 states. Then this list is already 5^20 (or about 10^14) entries long. This doesn't include stored memory, as the address book would entail (number of possible names for the first entry of the address book is already something like 26^20 as a conservative estimate).