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PROGRESS TOWARD CYBERIMMORTALITY
William Sims Bainbridge, Ph.D.
Advances in information technology are essential for most of the
imaginable means for achieving immortality, and fundamental
to many. Before nanoscale robots are sent into a persons body
to repair the damage from aging, computers will have to ana-
lyze what is needed and design the nanobots. [1;2] In the slow
process of transferring a mind from an old brain into a freshly
cloned one, that mind will need to be cached temporarily in an
information system. This, then, raises the question of why it
is necessary to transfer the mind from the information system
into a vulnerable brain, rather than into a more durable robot
or keeping it in the information system. [3]
METHODS OF MIND READING
At a first approximation, there are two fundamental ways of
reading the contents of a human mind into a computer: struc-
tural and functional. Each of these has innumerable variants
that share a common principle.
In the structural approach, some process or device reads out
the relevant structure of the brain and duplicates it inside a
computer. The dominant structural assumption at present
holds that a persons memories, mental skills, and much of