Cryonics for uploaders: WTF is consciousness?

Giulio Prisco
Turing Church
Published in
4 min readMar 21, 2018

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The recent “cryonics for uploaders” breakthrough means that you could, here and now, preserve your brain for future mind uploading. But it can be argued that we don’t understand consciousness yet.

The Brain Preservation Foundation (BPF) and Robert McIntyre, the researcher who won the Brain Preservation Prize, are persuaded that Aldehyde-Stabilized Cryopreservation (ASC), also known as “vitrifixation” (fixation + vitrification), is the best available way to achieve long-term brain preservation for future mind uploading. ASC is believed to accurately preserve the connectome (see “Connectome: How the Brain’s Wiring Makes Us Who We Are,” by Sebastian Seung).

Alcor is less enthusiastic: “[It] may remain unclear to some whether this research and associated prizes show whether ASC or current vitrification without pre-fixation is more likely to preserve cell structures and molecular structures necessary for memory and personal identity,” reads an “Alcor Position Statement on Brain Preservation Foundation Prize.” At the same time, Alcor acknowledges that “ASC produces clearer images than current methods of vitrification without fixation.”

Vitrifixation is “toxic to the biological machinery of life,” and therefore is not suitable for future biological revival. Future technology could conceivable do something about that. However, I am more interested in mind uploading, so here I’m focusing on memory preservation.

I don’t know enough to form an independent opinion on whether vitrifixation or vitrification without fixation is the best available memory preservation technology, so I have to rely on the opinion of the experts. I am sure both technologies will be improved, and perhaps some new brain preservation technology will be developed.

I am organizing a “cryonics for uploaders” meeting in Second Life with the experts, next Sunday March 25, to find out more.

Here I am just assuming that suitable technology can preserve the brain with sufficient resolution to permit, in principle, reading all memories.

Is that enough?

Here’s where consciousness comes in. I don’t intend to discuss consciousness at the meeting but, for those interested, here are my current thoughts on consciousness and how it relates to mind uploading.

I suspect that consciousness, whatever that is, is NOT encoded in the connectome.

But I think it doesn’t matter, because there is no such thing as “my consciousness” or “your consciousness.” There is just consciousness, and consciousness + your memories = you.

In a simple but I think essentially correct analogy, consciousness is a computer program and memories are data. Think of a retro example: Microsoft Word. When Word (consciousness) opens a stored document (your memories), a “living” document (you) can be read and edited.

I think it makes sense to consider consciousness as a state of matter. Max Tegmark’s paper “Consciousness as a State of Matter” (2014) “generalizes Giulio Tononi’s integrated information framework for neural-network-based consciousness to arbitrary quantum system.”

The brain is a complex physical system able to support consciousness. Perhaps the brain is “quantum matter” in which quantum physics plays a strong critical role. Other physical systems able to support consciousness could include plasmas, superfluids, and perhaps the fabric of spacetime itself, the quantum vacuum (see my “Super toy model” and “Deep neural networks in the quantum vacuum”).

If consciousness depends critically on exotic quantum physics, conventional silicon computers would not be able to “run” uploaded minds. If so, we’ll have to develop substrates that exhibit the critical quantum behavior of conscious matter and can play the role of Word in the analogy above. Perhaps future quantum computers able to simulate complex quantum matter will be able to run uploaded minds.

But this is a problem for future scientists and engineers. Now, we can preserve our memories for future mind uploading. The question is, which preservation technology is the best? Vitrifixation, vitrification without pre-fixation, or something else? Finding a consensus is very important.

I think Martine Rothblatt’s soft uploading approach (see Martine’s “Virtually Human: The Promise — and the Peril — of Digital Immortality”), which bypasses the physical connectome and records just the high-level memories in a “mindfile” (diaries, blogs, pictures, videos, answers to personality tests, etc.), could work in-principle, but couldn’t work in-practice with current technology.

But with very high-bandwidth brain-computer interfaces, soft uploading could work in-practice as well. Also, incomplete mindfiles could be completed with information available in the cloud, and in other people’s mindfiles. I think hard and soft memory preservation, connectomes and mindfiles, can and should be used in tandem.

Picture from Wikimedia Commons.

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Writer, futurist, sometime philosopher. Author of “Tales of the Turing Church” and “Futurist spaceflight meditations.”