I'm glad to see Jordan pursuing this approach, part of the reason for which is that I've been convinced for a long time (since the mid-1980's) that bioreanimation may pose great difficulties, and that in the end 'emulations' (uploading) may be the most viable course. A story of mine from that time (the 1980's) has been on line for some time, and some of you may have seen it.
Link to "Nothing's Impossible"
One thing to add, a fragment from a rather longer thing I'm slowly working on. One of the characters in the story is discussing uploading and whether or not one could 'go back and compare with how one felt earlier, as a biohuman', to be sure one wanted to 'make the jump'. I'll rephrase it, so the synopsis works as a posting here, rather than try to drag in the context of the novel in which it is (will be) used:
[][][][][]
In a novel once started, a man had been frozen, but only after being pressured by his relatives to sign a statement that ‘he was willing to contribute to science, but was never to be reanimated’.
A century or so later, in perfecting suspended animation, the nanotechnology people wanted to use his brain as a ‘prototype’ for repair, which would not be a danger to his ‘personality’, since he had gone on record as being unwilling to ever be reanimated.
All went well, and the repair was virtually perfected, but some of the people involved were troubled by the idea that the man’s brain would simply be ‘left in the freezer’, or even disposed of as ‘used sample material’.
One of them suggested that since they’d made an entire map of the brain to repair it, they might be able to make a crude ‘emulation’ of the brain and ‘have a conversation with it’, to see if he really was serious about never being reanimated.
This turned out to be easier than they had hoped, since he was being given no input/output except speech and hearing. A week or two later, then, they were seated in a conference room with a little ‘CD player’ size thing, which we could think of as a primitive IM ('identity module'), and when they turned it on, he ‘woke up’ inside it and asked, ‘Why doesn’t it hurt any more?’
The experimenters said, ‘Don’t worry about that, the question is, did you really mean it when you signed those papers that said never to reanimate you?’
The ‘emulation’ replied:
“I’m not sure I’d be of any use to the world of the future. Why doesn’t it hurt anymore? Am I dying, and you’re giving me some pain killer? Is that what’s happening?”
The experimenters asked him to ignore the details of ‘what’s going on’ for a moment and focus on just one question: Would he be willing to be reanimated, if a great many other people might benefit by his helping to pioneer the process?
After a moment, the emulation said:
“Sure, I’d be glad, if it could do some good, in fact, if my memories were as clear as this, Wow, they’re great. Of course I’d be happy to come back. What have you done to me anyway? I feel like you’ve got me on drugs. The memories are so clear, so sharp, I seem to be able to think so fast. This is fantastic! If it’s going to be anything like this, then….”
That’s where they ‘shut him off’. And, there was a lot of consternation. ‘You killed him,’ shouted one of the nurses. ‘No we didn’t’, the head experimenter explained. ‘We could switch him on again and he’d pick up right where he left off.’
So, you see the pickle they’d gotten into. Now, they knew that the earlier papers the man had signed were irrelevant. And, they then decided to go ahead and reanimate him.
One question remained: should they add, during the final part of the ‘brain repair’, memories of the ‘emulation conversation’? After long debate, and considering the legal ramifications of ignoring the document he’d signed, they decided that it would be safer to ‘leave the memories of the conversation in’. And that’s what they did.
Now, we ‘fast forward’ to reanimation day. He wakes up, in a ‘young body’, and is really happy to ‘be back’, but there’s a problem. His brain must have been damaged, he says. His memories are terribly sluggish, his thinking is cloudy, as compared with his most recent memories.
“How can it be?” he asks. “A moment ago I could see memories flashing before me like magic. I could think like I was flying a jet plane, and now… it’s like I’m stuck on a muddy road, barely able to move. What’s wrong?”
And this poses a problem for them. Are they going to tell him about the little bit of ‘extra memory’ they put in, or not? Of course, they do tell him, and his first reaction is:
“Oh, no! This is awful! You mean I’ll never have a fantastic mental experience like that again?”
The experimenters talk about this, not for a day or two, but for weeks, They figure out how they might be able to come up with an ‘IM’ and interface it into his body. They even work out ways for him to ‘switch back and forth’, updating both the ‘biobrain’ and the ‘hyperbrain’ so the contents were exactly the same. Then they could compare.
In the end, they decided to go ahead with the jump to IM for him, and it took months to bring it off. Later, a lot of the experimenters said, ‘If this really works out, we want to do it ourselves.’ Ultimately, they did.
[][][][][]
That's not much more than a 'glimmer' of the story, however, I've told it in about that way to many people at cryonics gatherings and they seemed to 'get it', so I thought I'd throw it in here, 'for the record' if nothing else. The longer work in which it is 'embedded' is, among other things, an exhaustive exploration of the 'uploading' idea, far beyond that earlier (1980's) attempt linked up above, or any other the other LifeQuest stories. It could be that it's too 'fragmentary' to be of interest here, but each individual will 'take it' differently anyway.
Again, I want to say how encouraged I am to see Jordan Sparks moving in the direction he's indicated, up above.
Boundlesslife