Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!nanotech From: peb@tma1.eng.sun.com (Paul Baclaski) Newsgroups: sci.nanotech Subject: Re: Drexler on immortality, source of nano books. Keywords: incremental personality backups Message-ID: Date: 21 Mar 90 03:44:53 GMT Sender: nanotech@athos.rutgers.edu Lines: 36 Approved: nanotech@aramis.rutgers.edu In article , hcobb@walt.cc.utexas.edu (Henry J. Cobb) writes: > > Immortality implys infinite experence. Restoring yourself from old > tapes wipes out your life along with your senility. JoSH says: > As for infinite experience, that becomes an interesting question. > If your mind "fills up", then you either get old fashioned or > forget things, so you only gain limited benefit from living forever. > It may prove necessary to keep changing into new technology, continuously, > to get bigger and bigger memories. I figure that an intricate "rejuvenation" (Fountain of Youth (TM)) will be a big market. The idea is that the newness, naivete, and energy of Youth is instilled into your jaded, filled memory/brain. The best approaches will cause selective memory loss--keeping the good memories, erasing the bad ones. The tricky part is making local changes to many parts of the brain to eliminate the jadedness or mental momentum of perhaps a century of experience. This would be an expensive process and would require significant knowledge of the organization of the human brain and mind. I predict this would be a big market about 50 years after downloading and backup of the human mind is possible. Paul E. Baclaski Sun Microsystems peb@sun.com [I'll bet that just plain physical rejuvenation will be a pretty hot seller well before then-- but I agree, some way of sweeping out that dusty attic would be nice. --JoSH]