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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