Nectome is still in the research stage, so we are not preserving anyone. If you'd like to learn more about how the preservation process works, check out the paper at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001122401... or the summary at http://aurellem.org/ASC/html/ASC-introduction.html.

And yes, we are in YC Winter 18

"seems" is awfully wishy washy. They cut ties with the company and directly state that the science simply isn't there to start selling a particular way of pickling delicious brains.

It sounds like people are essentially donating their brains to (private) science, with the off-chance that they may come back.

The marketing thereof as something else doesn't sound quite ethical to me. It's downright ghastly if people are dying earlier because of this.

Nobody is making use of this service yet. However, if they were, why would it be ghastly for them to voluntarily trade a small number of days worth of terminal decline for a substantially better quality preservation and thus correspondingly higher chance of revival in the future? To me it sounds like an obvious utilitarian tradeoff, like any reasonable person who was well informed about the situation and averse to dying might choose to make.

> ... if the startup goes south

The startup is a snake oil scam. It is by definition "south." It is not "unclear if the upload is feasible." It is simply NOT feasible.

The startup is not claiming to have current uploading technology. The startup is researching (does not claim to have) brain preservation techniques leading to long-term structure preservation in hopes of uploading sometime in the indefinite future. If your personal opinion is that this cannot happen, that does not make other people who have different beliefs and are upfront about their arguments for them "scammers".

It is likely an iteration on cadaver plastination, wherein tissues are infused with plastic to preserve their structure. This is what enables those "Bodies" exhibitions that show actual human cadavers that have been plastinated, posed, and dissected to show anatomical details.

If you preserve the structure of the brain well enough, you can scrape it down in micrometer-thick layers and progressively photograph the visible surfaces in sufficient detail to reconstruct a map of all neural connections. Combine this with a working model of a neuron, a physics model for chemical diffusion, and knowledge of how living neurons respond to certain chemicals typically found in the brain or those that can cross the blood-brain barrier, and you can simulate a human consciousness inside a computer.

It won't be you, but it will think it was you. That's almost the same thing as what happens every time you wake up in the morning.

Also, in order to avoid frequently resetting the simulation due to insanity, you probably also need a virtual world that simulates realistic inputs through the sensory nerves.

The technology is plausible, particularly if you are a Kurzweilian or transhumanist. Some may feel more comfortable with "Ship of Theseus"-style gradual migration of an organic brain into digital computer via implantation of technology devices with neuron-computer interfaces. But since we aren't as close to that, injecting your dead brain with epoxy is the closest you can get now to not being dead and gone forevermore.

Note that the necessary knowledge for digitizing a preserved brain is likely centuries away, but that doesn't matter if you can preserve your brain to remain unchanged for centuries. To the new entity that can remember being you and likes all the same things you like, it will be like waking up in the future. And hopefully, you left some money for AI civil rights in your will, so it won't be a digitized slave toiling away on the pattern recognition plantations.

The process is described in the science paper at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001122401..., and also at the Brain Preservation Foundation website (http://www.brainpreservation.org/). It involves fixation with glutaraldehyde and then vitrifixation for long-term storage. It does not use plastic.

The casual explanation is that the brains are infused with a chemical that prevents formation of ice crystals and chilled to freezing temperatures until the water in the brain solidifies into a glasslike solid.

This is how frogs in shallow pond-bottoms can freeze solid during the winter and then thaw out in spring. The formation of ice crystals is what damages the organ. But glutaraldehyde is highly cytotoxic, and the brain cells are killed, along with anything else, so your brain won't ever be thawed. They will use ion beams to shave off very thin layers of your brain and use a scanning electron microscope to image it, all while still frozen.

This is the same process, in finer detail, that occurs for detail 3-d imagery of plastinated organs and entire organisms. The crosslinking and heat generated during the curing process of most epoxy resins will destroy the finer structures in the brain as it preserves the macro-structure, so no, you couldn't use the same types of plastic typically used to preserve anatomy specimens. Instead of a microtome, the top layer is ablated with ion beams. Instead of an optical microscope, an electron microscope is used.

You can't currently get a more detailed 3-d image than this. The ion beam can strip away one layer of atoms at a time, and the electron microscope can identify the positions of all the atoms in the next layer.

But imagine the size of that data set. Imaging a volume of about 1500 mL, at a detail level of 1 nm, is 1.5e24 voxels. Even at one bit per voxel, for filled/empty, that's in the yottabyte range. A trillion 1 terabyte hard drives. The gap junction of an electrical synapse is about 3.5 nm, and chemical synapses are 20-40 nm apart. so if you image at a resolution of 3.5nm, you're still talking at least a zettabyte, but at least that's just under half the maximum file size of UFS, at around 2^75 bits.

Better hope those cryo-coolers don't fail before we can store that much data and reduce it all to a neuro-map.

It seems likely you'd have to process as you go, and not store it all. Or have one hell of a datacenter/buffer like the LHC does, holding it until it can be crunched down to a "simple" network instead of voxel data.

There's no real evidence that the human brain functions anything like an Information Processor and, in fact, a growing body of evidence that suggests it's not. We still know so little about the brain and comparing a brain to a computer is is at best a flawed metaphor and at worst an outright falsehood. The idea that any sort of human consciousness can be uploaded or stored by a computer is asinine

The brain is implemented by physics and physics can be simulated by a computer, so I'm not sure I follow you here.

The operative word here being "simulate." I will admit however that that opens a debate about the nature of consciousness in which I'm not prepared to resolutely say would not count as true consciousness.

So I will reframe and clarify my argument -- I believe that we do not know enough about the brain and the nature on consciousness to be able to conclude that taking this kind of "snapshot" of the brain will in anyway preserve any of the necessary information needed to reproduce or even accurately simulate consciousness, and that the argument that it is or will is based on the flawed assumption that the brain is or functions like a information processor (a flawed metaphor that is very quickly reaching it's limitations).

You didn't clarify an argument, you simply made baseless assertions while claiming we don't know enough to make extrapolative arguments.

Literally everything that humans understand is understood in a framework of information processing. It is probably not even possible to understand something without being able to model it as an information-handling process. What basis do you have to say consciousness is different? Because we haven't figured it out yet? It's 2018. There are billions of years of thinking that have yet to happen on the subject.

it isn't feasible.

here is why:

imagine that we create a perfect copy of a person who is alive.

there is now person A, and person B, who are identical. but being identical does not imply shared sensations. if you pinch person A, person B won't feel it. the reverse is true. they're two separate entities, even if they behave similarly. if person A dies, person B is very similar to person A -- but they're not person A. that person is dead.

same goes for "mind uploading". the copy could, hypothetically, exist. it is extremely unlikely that this is technologically possible. but even if it was possible technologically, the original would be dead.

All this does is get you into a philosophical debate of what constitutes "you". We don't know the answer to that. There's a similar conundrum around the idea of teleportation: if it were to work by recording the quantum state of every particle in your body, transmitting that information elsewhere, and then simultaneously creating a new copy of "you" at the destination while destroying the original, is the new copy actually "you"? No one really knows. And no one really knows if the answer to that actually matters in any real sense.

well, let's just cut the philosophical debate in half here.

"you" have a chain of consciousness that is unique to your body. you destroy that body, and that chain of consciousness ends. re-assembling it elsewhere perfectly doesn't re-start that chain. it creates a new chain which from inside of its own perspective is consistent with the original chain. and it is. but the original chain has no further consciousness, as it was destroyed.

this isn't a "nobody really knows" situation so much as a "we know, but people refuse to accept what we know" situation. the semantics of what is "you" really don't matter when faced with reality.

Says who? That's just your opinion on what consciousness is.

Even if I agree with your interpretation, again, I'm not sure it matters. Perhaps my physical body dies and my brain becomes digitized and I "wake up" in a computer simulation, or perhaps in an artificial brain attached to a replacement body. Even if the new me has a new consciousness that isn't just a continuation of the old one, perhaps that's an outcome I'm ok with and welcome.

I'm so glad that you have solved one of the major problems of philosophy and neuroscience in a handful of poorly-constructed sentences.

This is a matter of much debate in philosophy, neuroscience, and other fields. You accidentally touch on identity theory (bundle, substratum, etc), philosophy of mind, etc. The Ship of Theseus is an interesting problem - what if I gradually replace parts of someone's brain with artificial ones, so they are integrated with the rest?

It's not so much an interesting problem as it is an obviously irrelevant one. Our day-to-day conceptualizations were not designed to handle intricate philosophical matters, and trying to force resolution in such plain language is often a source of confusion involving 'problems' that nobody ever seems to face.

ship of theseus isn't relevant to nectome's claims or any claim regarding "uploading". "uploading" is just creating a copy in a different media. it doesn't preserve the conscioussness of the original media, it merely creates another. i think you'll find that the problems of philosophy and neuroscience operate at a different level of abstraction than what they're discussing.

furthermore, academic concerns aside, there's no disproving my original comment in the context of technical feasibility. it's literally bulletproof; one person does not share the sensations of another person.

postscript: i took a philosophy of mind class and a philosophy of cognition class and a systems neurobiology class in college plus a few others that are tangentially relevant. i'm not appealing to authority here, just stating that my simplistic objections are actually the result of an extensive amount of diving into the details of those disciplines. sometimes the details build a picture that's simple from afar.