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MIT severs ties to company promoting fatal brain uploading

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Re: MIT severs ties to company promoting fatal brain uploading

#131

Post by cryoshon »

kelnos wrote: post #61
cryoshon wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it isn't feasible. here is why: imagine that we create a perfect copy of a person who is alive. there is now person A, and person B, who are identical. but being identical does not imply shared sensations. if you pinch person A, person B won't feel it. the reverse is true. they're two separate entities, even if they behave similarly. if person A dies, person B is very similar to person A -- but they're not person A.…

All this does is get you into a philosophical debate of what constitutes "you". We don't know the answer to that. There's a similar conundrum around the idea of teleportation: if it were to work by recording the quantum state of every particle in your body, transmitting that information elsewhere, and then simultaneously creating a new copy of "you" at the destination while destroying the original, is the new copy ac…

well, let's just cut the philosophical debate in half here.

"you" have a chain of consciousness that is unique to your body. you destroy that body, and that chain of consciousness ends. re-assembling it elsewhere perfectly doesn't re-start that chain. it creates a new chain which from inside of its own perspective is consistent with the original chain. and it is. but the original chain has no further consciousness, as it was destroyed.

this isn't a "nobody really knows" situation so much as a "we know, but people refuse to accept what we know" situation. the semantics of what is "you" really don't matter when faced with reality.

Re: MIT severs ties to company promoting fatal brain uploading

#132

Post by cryoshon »

aurellem wrote: post #128
etrautmann wrote: post #26

Brain uploading is a misleading description of what nectome is proposing. We don’t know enough about what needs to be preserved yet to accurately save a snapshot of a brain’s “state”. It’s not theoretically impossible, just much further than this company’s marketing implies.

We’re proud of the progress we’ve made so far—demonstrating that the ultrastructure (connectome) is preserved. The connectome is a necessary starting point upon which models of the brain can be built [0]. We intend to continue researching and validating preservation of important biomolecules as we explore the efficacy limits of ASC. We intend to develop these tools on a timeline to allow proper feedback from the neur…

sigh, what about the active patterns, yo. brains aren't static connections of neurons when they're alive.

they have hojillions of firing patterns, some of which are cyclical and constant, other of which are transient and tiny. these stop when the brain is dead. you're not gonna capture these from a dead brain.

what if there's some essential aspect of consciousness that's depending on circles of five or six neurons holding a pattern of action potentials in perpetuity?

i doubt that this is the case, but if it is, cracking the connectome -- which is already an achievement that would require an effort greater than the human genome project -- wouldn't be very helpful at all.

oh yeah, and as far as preserving those circuits go, do you have a solution for clearing neurons from excess sodium or potassium after it accumulates there during death? depending on which ion pump fails from lack of energy first (and my bet is that it's the sodium-potassium ion pump, because it's responsible for some absurd percentage of the body's total energy usage), neurons could very easily be left logjammed with a glut of charged particles that prohibits making action potentials in any capacity even when energy becomes available. you don't wanna be assuming that all those excess ions are signal when they're noise.

finally: have you considered your philosophical disposition wrt substance dualism or materialism? you're gonna have to have a damn good case for some philosophical angle when dennett comes a knockin or he'll immolate your entire project.

Re: MIT severs ties to company promoting fatal brain uploading

#133

Post by nostromo95 »

aperrien wrote: post #118
nostromo95 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there are a few explanations: (1) The idea that the ultra-rich may be able to survive into the future cryogenically while 90+% of the rest of the world dies is morally abhorrent. (2) Fearing death so much is viewed as cowardly. (3) This is a bit more abstract, but the implicit assumption in cryogenics that death is a universal bad is troubling. Thousands of years of human thinking have determined that the pro…

> Thousands of years of human thinking have determined that the prospect of death is an integral part of the human experience and may be the thing that provides life meaning. I don't know about anyone else, but the idea that the coming natural death of me and probably everyone else in this thread is on par with a genocide is upsetting To me, this sounds like the naturalistic fallacy. Is there a better argument than t…

How about a utilitarian one: it's most likely that everyone alive right now is going to die, so from a quality-of-life perspective most people should try to accept their death.

Re: MIT severs ties to company promoting fatal brain uploading

#134

Post by nostromo95 »

jimrandomh wrote: post #119
nostromo95 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there are a few explanations: (1) The idea that the ultra-rich may be able to survive into the future cryogenically while 90+% of the rest of the world dies is morally abhorrent. (2) Fearing death so much is viewed as cowardly. (3) This is a bit more abstract, but the implicit assumption in cryogenics that death is a universal bad is troubling. Thousands of years of human thinking have determined that the pro…

(1) You could have said the same thing about cell phones, cars or any other technology which started out expensive before it scaled to the point where most people could afford it. (2) If you fear death to much, you might not fight to the death in a war. Not everything in our culture makes sense in the modern world. (3) https://nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html

(1) Yes, but from a utilitarian perspective cell phones, cars, and any other technology offered finite utility over their alternatives, whereas immortality offers infinite utility over the alternative of death.

(2) ? unsure about what you're saying here.

(3) Okay yeah, sure, I've read that before. I don't think he offers a (currently) practical alternative to "resignation coupled with an effort to achieve closure in practical affairs and personal relationships." The harsh reality is that we'll probably die--why would I choose to conceptualize this as a violent death from a dragon? That'd surely lead to despair in my last years.

Re: MIT severs ties to company promoting fatal brain uploading

#135

Post by kelnos »

cryoshon wrote: post #131
kelnos wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All this does is get you into a philosophical debate of what constitutes "you". We don't know the answer to that. There's a similar conundrum around the idea of teleportation: if it were to work by recording the quantum state of every particle in your body, transmitting that information elsewhere, and then simultaneously creating a new copy of "you" at the destination while destroying the original, is the new copy ac…

well, let's just cut the philosophical debate in half here. "you" have a chain of consciousness that is unique to your body. you destroy that body, and that chain of consciousness ends. re-assembling it elsewhere perfectly doesn't re-start that chain. it creates a new chain which from inside of its own perspective is consistent with the original chain. and it is. but the original chain has no further consciousness, a…

Says who? That's just your opinion on what consciousness is.

Even if I agree with your interpretation, again, I'm not sure it matters. Perhaps my physical body dies and my brain becomes digitized and I "wake up" in a computer simulation, or perhaps in an artificial brain attached to a replacement body. Even if the new me has a new consciousness that isn't just a continuation of the old one, perhaps that's an outcome I'm ok with and welcome.

Re: MIT severs ties to company promoting fatal brain uploading

#136

Post by tene »

s73v3r_ wrote: post #122
tene wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There will be challenges and struggles and costs to be paid to significantly reduce death, but my personal philosophy is that involuntary death is bad and should be fought, and that the costs of increased crowding are worth paying to cut down on the deaths of billions. The general principle, to me, is that whatever the "ideal" rate of death is, for any given set of values and preferences, it would be an astonishing c…

"would you start by advocating for mass executions" The very idea that this would cross your mind after reading my comment shows that you are not interested in having any kind of serious discussion about this topic.

Re-reading your comment, I did overreact, and assumed that you were implying a position that you didn't actually assert. I'm sorry for assuming that you were advocating for a pro-death position.

If your comment wasn't intended to advocate for pro-death policies, I'm very confused about what you were trying to communicate here.

My reading of your comment is that you first asked the reader if they can imagine what the planet would be like if nobody died, then implied through what appears to be rhetorical questions that it would be much more crowded and much more of a strain on the earth's resources.

There's a lot of diversity in the use of English, so we may have experience with different rhetorical traditions, but my experience is that rhetorical structures like that are pretty exclusively intended to express condemnation of the subject and anyone who would support it, implying that they're ignoring the disastrous consequences of their policy.

The assumptions I inferred from your questions, stated directly, are something like the following. If you're uninterested in engaging with me after my earlier reply, I understand, but if not I'm curious which of these you disagree with.

1) If life-extension technology manages to dramatically reduce nonconsensual death, we will have a population explosion on Earth.

2) If we have a population explosion on Earth, quality of life for most humans will drop significantly.

3) If we have a population explosion on Earth, consumption of nonrenewable resources will increase dramatically, leading to resource shortages dangerous to human civilization.

4) In order to avoid a population explosion, we should stop work on life-extension technology.

5) It is better for the majority of currently-living humans to die after less than 100 years of life than for Earth civilization to undergo a population explosion.

By my best attempts at moral reasoning, withholding life-saving medical technology is morally equivalent to murder, and although I've fortunately never been in a situation to make such a decision, I hope that I can be the kind of person who would never decide for people to die through inaction that I wouldn't be theoretically willing to kill myself for the same benefits.

I hope that's given you enough perspective on my position that it doesn't seem completely hostile to serious discussion.

[edited for formatting]

Re: MIT severs ties to company promoting fatal brain uploading

#137

Post by SomeNeuroGuy »

fixermark wrote: post #105
ahelwer wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have the technology to simulate a brain, it seems pretty trivial to simulate a body, environment, and associated sensory inputs as well.

I'm reminded of the 'hybrot' experiments where rat brain cells in a nutrient solution are allowed to wire up their own neural network on top of electrodes that send and receive data wirelessly from a robot body [ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/401756/rat-brained-robot/ ] The question of doing something similar with a strata running a human brain doesn't seem impossible, just extremely technologically daunting whe…

The number of connections is high, but the bandwidth is surprisingly low. Modern edge routers could do it a couple times over.

Re: MIT severs ties to company promoting fatal brain uploading

#138

Post by SomeNeuroGuy »

cryoshon wrote: post #132
aurellem wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We’re proud of the progress we’ve made so far—demonstrating that the ultrastructure (connectome) is preserved. The connectome is a necessary starting point upon which models of the brain can be built [0]. We intend to continue researching and validating preservation of important biomolecules as we explore the efficacy limits of ASC. We intend to develop these tools on a timeline to allow proper feedback from the neur…

sigh, what about the active patterns, yo. brains aren't static connections of neurons when they're alive. they have hojillions of firing patterns, some of which are cyclical and constant, other of which are transient and tiny. these stop when the brain is dead. you're not gonna capture these from a dead brain. what if there's some essential aspect of consciousness that's depending on circles of five or six neurons ho…

You can electroshock a brain, completely scramble the "active patterns" and the person will... well, reboot, for lack of a better term. If you could get the weights without activity, I see no reason you couldn't just initialize in a random state and let it figure itself out. Figuring out the weights is a technical problem, but technical problems are made to be solved.

Finally, dualism is juvenile bullshit. A neuroscientist who thought the mind WASN'T the brain would be absolutely useless.

Re: MIT severs ties to company promoting fatal brain uploading

#139

Post by SomeNeuroGuy »

glorkk wrote: post #21

> “Fundamentally, the company is based on a proposition that is just false. It is something that just can’t happen,” says Sten Linnarsson of the Karolinska Institute in Sweden. That sounds a lot like the "heavier than air flight is impossible" quote from 1895.

I fundamentally don't understand those comments.

Like, I get that these guys might be - maybe even probably are! - snake oil salesmen, but what about brain digitization is actually impossible? There are certainly a fixed number of neurotransmitter types, a fixed number of channels, a fixed structure to a particular operating brain, and so on. Anything that exists can be reverse engineered and, in principle, rebuilt.

Re: MIT severs ties to company promoting fatal brain uploading

#140

Post by m-p-3 »

Raphmedia wrote: post #47
makepanic wrote: post #3

First time seeing a website checking for private mode: > Hello, > We noticed you're browsing in private or incognito mode. > To continue reading this article, please exit incognito mode or log in. > Why we made this change > Visitors are allowed 3 free articles per month (without a subscription), and private browsing prevents us from counting how many stories you've read. > We hope you understand, and consider subscr…

That's so stupid. There's nothing stopping anyone from browsing 3 articles and then clear the cookies...

What's even more stupid is that it's even possible to detect you're browsing incognito.

The server should never be able to know.

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