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Risto_Saarelma comments on PZ Myers on the Infeasibility of Whole Brain Emulation - Less Wrong
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Can Myers engage with stuff he might be wrong about on the Pharyngula blog? He seems to mostly focus on spotting creationists and similar obviously wrong crackpots, hitting them with the biggest hammer in easy reach and never backing down. Taking the same approach to stuff nobody understands very well yet might not be productive.
He works with brain preservation every day. When he says "this is impossible", he's not being uber-sceptic - he's speaking with annoyance at something he'd love to be able to do and that would make his work a lot easier, but that he has excellent reason to consider practically impossible.
No complaints about that part, but then he went off on the weird argument about how increasing the emulation speed is an incoherent idea, and seems to be sticking to his guns in the comments despite several people pointing out that you don't need to do a quantum-level simulation of an entire universe to provide a sped-up virtual sensory reality for the sped-up emulated brain in a box.
That's the stuff some people do understand but PZ either doesn't or can't back down on since he's writing a blog where he must not lose face by admitting mistakes or the creationists win.
The stuff nobody understands is why we can't even build a robot flatworm by emulating the 100-odd neuron flatworm brain, which would be nice to know before we start getting into detailed arguments about the practical requirements of human uploads. Proper understanding of this part might also reveal shortcuts which we can use to loosen the scanning and emulation requirements and still end up with functional uploads.