If technology allowed an interface, would the mind be readable after death, or is it 'volatile'?

Answer 1

The mind is the sum of natural electrical activity in the brain AND the sum of the history of brain activity. When the brain dies, the electrical activity that comprises mind is irrevocably lost. Even electrically stimulating the dead brain will not simulate the activity of a living brain.

Measuring the connections of the neurons will not help, every brain is different and even if two, improbably, had the same connections the life experience of the brains would still give them totally different responses.

It might eventually be possible to measure, record and reproduce the electrical activity of a living brain via some sort of interface and thus download the personality, experience, memories etc into a 'computer'.

Answer 2

You would have to have something that read the mind and recorded it upon death (similar to what one answerer already mentioned, 2000 AD Magazine's Rogue Trooper, or Roger Zelazny's recording plate, which turns the mind and memories into a piece of recording tape, in his novel Isle of the Dead.)

The only alternative to that is Larry Niven's "corpsicles", people who were frozen for medical reasons immediately before death. The bodies were too badly damaged by the freezing process to be revived, but the memory RNA could be extracted and pumped into the body of a criminal whose entire memories and personality had been 'wiped' (using technology as yet undiscovered) for unspecified crimes. Thus the State could make use of the body of the criminal and the personalities of the corpsicles. You would simply wake to find yourself in another body that didn't have your fatal disease any more. No citizenship was conferred upon these revived corpsicles, however.

For more details, see Niven's A World Out of Time (a novel which covers nearly all the naturalistic methods of immortality) and the subsequent State-based novels The Integral Trees and The Smoke Ring.

At room temperatures, the mind is too volatile. Look what happens to our minds when we just go to sleep!

Answer 3

I would say yes - if there was such an interface it would no doubt be designed to record electrochemical impulses while the person is alive to allow reading of this involatile technology after the death of the person when the brain and its memories and functioning will decay.

Answer 4

so has it been figured out how memories are stored in the brain? i thought scientists are still looking for the answer...

well brain is highly vulnerable and readily died under hypoxic environment(without oxygen perfusion) within a fraction of minute(or 1 minute or so).... the fact tht we must consider b4 brain tech is made possible... my opinion tho...

Answer 5

no, brain deteriorates quite quickly after death.
People who spend even few minutes in clinical death state (heart stopped) often suffer from memory loss.

Answer 6

it will probally happen