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Nornagest comments on The Extended Living-Forever Strategy-Space - Less Wrong
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Comments (36)
My take on it wouldn't be so much that it's unlikely to contain meaningful information as that it's unlikely to contain enough meaningful information. Whatever (almost certainly very bad) PRNG function you're implementing when you type out random strings, it's not going to leak more than a bit of brain state per bit of output, and most likely very much less than that. Humans have tens of billions of neurons and up to about 10^15 synapses; even under stupidly optimistic assumptions about neurological information storage and state sampling, getting all of that out would take many lifetimes' worth of typing.
I basically agree with you that the strategy seems pretty unlikely. But I think you are over-harsh on it; you don't need to reconstruct the entire brain, just the stuff that deals with personal identity. If you can select from any one of thirty keys on your keyboard then every ten letters you type has 10^15 bits of entropy, so it seems possible that if somebody knew absolutely everything about the state you were in when typing they could reconstruct you just from this. You are also not restricted to tapping away randomly - I suspect words or sentences would leak way more the pseudorandom tapping. At any rate, this strategy is almost free, so you'd need astonishingly good reasons not to attempt it if you plan on attempting cryonics.
I think those reasons exist (I'm skeptical the information would survive) but I don't think the theory is quite as much in the lunatic fringe as you do.
A little less than 50 bits of entropy, actually, if you're choosing truly randomly. Total entropy of a sequence scales additively with additional choices, not multiplicatively: four coin tosses generate four bits of entropy. 50 bits is enough to specify an option from a space of around 10^15, but the configuration space of those 10^10-11 neurons in the human brain is vastly larger than that.
I didn't know that. Fair enough, seems likely 'signal preservation' is much more costly than I originally realised and not worth pursuing (I think the likelihood of revivification is the same or better than cryonics, but the cost in terms of hours spent tapping at a keyboard is basically more than any human could pay in one lifetime)
You assume that keystrokes are independent from each other. They aren't.
They don't.
You probably get a lot more relevant information about yourself by using various QS tools like MyBasis. I personally didn't get a MyBasis but I have preordered Angel.
My Anki review data pile, produces a bunch of information about my brain state that's of much higher quality than random keyboard typing.
Anki data in addition to heart rate data from Angel tells you which Anki cards produced hypothalamic reactions.