[clip useful dialogue]
Kevin Aylward
[email protected]
http://www.anasoft.co.uk
SuperSpice, a very affordable Mixed-Mode
Windows Simulator with Schematic Capture,
Waveform Display, FFT's and Filter Design.
Anyways, some idle conjecture ...
[1] A few months ago I was somewhat annoyed to realize that "I" exist as no
more than a kind of interlinked collection of general purpose 'graphic'
style primitives. Earliest memories through to those of a few seconds ago
being regenerated on command and (critically), 'on the fly' from an assembly
of stored, linked, universal piece parts and coloured in with some artful
general purpose 'textures' who's sole purpose is to cheaply flesh out my
mental image by adding a convincing taste of reality. (The games proggers
will know exactly what I mean).
Essentially 'I' is just heavily (lossily) compressed collections of simple
data points. They're pretty static. Any interesting stuff will be linked in
at lower compression ratios and accumulate with time. The boring stuff gets
massive lossy compression hence 'forgotten' quickly.
[2] Last week I had fun playing with a plastic product casing that had been
formed 'from nothing' inside a tank of liquid resin. The resin hardens at
the precise point of contact of 2 scanned laser beams and an exceedingly
accurate, 3D component can be generated straight from a computer CAD
package.
So, if "me" is pretty much physically static in my head, (disregarding any
machine support stuff like vision, taste etc) it doesn't seem beyond reason
that "me" can be electrically copied micron^3 by micron^3, using some kind
of dual/quad electromagnetic scanning method.
A precise, sensitive, XYZ scan probe would be a hiqh quality, possibly
unsolvable, technical problem but a scan (working at the micron stepping
level) could generate valid results even on a subject laying/sitting there
(very patiently!) for a day or two.
Were only dealing with a GB or so of data points but the time consuming
element would be in the stimulus test and establishing of numerous 'linked
lists'.
We're all issued with one of these memory things, so it's quite easy to
look in, give it some work to do and try figure what these 'memories' may
really consist of.
I looked in mine and could see only bits of fluff
john