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Engineered material can reconnect severed nerves

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Re: Engineered material can reconnect severed nerves

#101

Post by nehal3m »

momento wrote: post #97
Geee wrote: post #92

If I understand correctly, this allows nerve-to-digital and digital-to-nerve conversions. This means that we're soon able to replace our bodies with robotic ones. The remaining problem is to figure out how to keep a brain alive in a vat, and making the life-support devices small enough to fit inside the body. It's probably not too difficult; you need to circulate blood, remove carbon dioxide, add oxygen, add glucose.…

> This means that we're soon able to replace our bodies with robotic ones. Talk about jumping to conclusions.

Jumping using high performance hydraulic actuators instead of legs, of course. Flesh is a prison!

Re: Engineered material can reconnect severed nerves

#102

Post by otikik »

Geee wrote: post #92

If I understand correctly, this allows nerve-to-digital and digital-to-nerve conversions. This means that we're soon able to replace our bodies with robotic ones. The remaining problem is to figure out how to keep a brain alive in a vat, and making the life-support devices small enough to fit inside the body. It's probably not too difficult; you need to circulate blood, remove carbon dioxide, add oxygen, add glucose.…

My hopes are smaller in scope. I hope this helps people with severed nerve damage, or perhaps to implement better prosthetics for people with missing limbs (perhaps with motion and tactile sensors?)

One that I would personally be very interested in would be improving human-computer interactions. Preferably with no quirurgical procedures, or something extremely non-invasive and quick.

Re: Engineered material can reconnect severed nerves

#103

Post by d-lisp »

Geee wrote: post #96
lordnacho wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Find a way to distil whatever process the brain does, emulate it on a computer.

You can do this with atom level simulation and growing the brain all the way from DNA, but it needs a lot of compute (> 50 years). However, and in the end you'd be bored, because you could get rid of all of your human flaws, which is what makes life interesting. It'd be really depressing and boring to be a superintelligent computer.

Being flawed is the new being sentient.

Re: Engineered material can reconnect severed nerves

#104

Post by sparrowInHand »

achileas wrote: post #19
rpmisms wrote: post #2

I'm not a medical person, can anyone who knows more than me explain exactly how cool this is? Fixing spinal cords, or just repairing simple nerve severance?

Too early to tell. Might make less invasive neurostimulation therapies, may or may not make them more effective (not all neurons can grow back or grow back to where they are supposed to be).

Supossed to? Which means, with neuro-plasticity, you retrain the usage of a body part?

Re: Engineered material can reconnect severed nerves

#105

Post by Geee »

otikik wrote: post #102
Geee wrote: post #92

If I understand correctly, this allows nerve-to-digital and digital-to-nerve conversions. This means that we're soon able to replace our bodies with robotic ones. The remaining problem is to figure out how to keep a brain alive in a vat, and making the life-support devices small enough to fit inside the body. It's probably not too difficult; you need to circulate blood, remove carbon dioxide, add oxygen, add glucose.…

My hopes are smaller in scope. I hope this helps people with severed nerve damage, or perhaps to implement better prosthetics for people with missing limbs (perhaps with motion and tactile sensors?) One that I would personally be very interested in would be improving human-computer interactions. Preferably with no quirurgical procedures, or something extremely non-invasive and quick.

Helping disabled people is probably the most important near-term application of this. I just like to ponder about long-term "sci-fi" implications, in terms of how and when these kinds of ideas will become actually plausible.

Some applications, like digital eyes, which connect directly to the optic nerve, would be first used to cure blindness, but soon people would start replacing their functioning eyes too, if it allows feeding pixels directly into the brain. Same with prosthetics, if they'd be better than biological ones. Then if you have cyborg eyes, arms and legs, why have a biological 'core' which is pretty much useless at this point.

Storing the brain in the body would actually be a bad idea. Human brains could be stored in a warehouse and they'd control robotic bodies remotely. You'd be able to jump into different bodies all over the world, and choose from different form-factors (ant, whale, dragon, etc.) This would actually be easier to implement, because the life-support system for the brain could be larger and consume more energy and other resources. You'd also be able to choose whether you want to live in a simulated world or a physical world through robots.

I think this is where we're quite realistically heading in less than 50 years.

Re: Engineered material can reconnect severed nerves

#106

Post by kwhitefoot »

Geee wrote: post #96
lordnacho wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Find a way to distil whatever process the brain does, emulate it on a computer.

You can do this with atom level simulation and growing the brain all the way from DNA, but it needs a lot of compute (> 50 years). However, and in the end you'd be bored, because you could get rid of all of your human flaws, which is what makes life interesting. It'd be really depressing and boring to be a superintelligent computer.

> you could get rid of all of your human flaws,

I take it you have never written any large applications or simulations.

Re: Engineered material can reconnect severed nerves

#107

Post by mindstorms6 »

Geee wrote: post #105
otikik wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My hopes are smaller in scope. I hope this helps people with severed nerve damage, or perhaps to implement better prosthetics for people with missing limbs (perhaps with motion and tactile sensors?) One that I would personally be very interested in would be improving human-computer interactions. Preferably with no quirurgical procedures, or something extremely non-invasive and quick.

Helping disabled people is probably the most important near-term application of this. I just like to ponder about long-term "sci-fi" implications, in terms of how and when these kinds of ideas will become actually plausible. Some applications, like digital eyes, which connect directly to the optic nerve, would be first used to cure blindness, but soon people would start replacing their functioning eyes too, if it all…

I've interviewed with / been to the facility of this place: https://science.xyz/products/vision/

They're exploring the "digital eye" concept you mentioned. Really cool stuff. Probably less than 50 years for the fixing some types of blindness.

Re: Engineered material can reconnect severed nerves

#108

Post by kwhitefoot »

azalemeth wrote: post #49
tsavo wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can speak from personal experience. Traumatic incident which severed the nerves to my leg in multiple places. Nerves eventually regrew and reconnected within the leg, and then again where they were severed in the foot. Motor and senory nerves reacted differently. When motor nerves reconnected, I still couldn't contract the muscles and went through a series of steps to relearn how to use the limb. First I was trying t…

I've had exactly these experiences following a spinal injury -- fracture of a vertebra but with minimal cord damage and quite a lot of disruption to the dorsal root ganglia. You can't put into words how weird it is to fall over because your brain thinks your foot is somewhere it isn't. Or how suddenly you become incredibly aware of how the front of your calf feels. Or how overjoyed you are to be able to move your toe…

This and the parent comment really should be at the top of this page. They are the best descriptions of how this sort of thing works in practice I have encountered. And while they tell how difficult and slow it all is I feel that they could give hope to others that some sort of recovery can be possible even without new advances in treatment.

Re: Engineered material can reconnect severed nerves

#109

Post by kwhitefoot »

grishka wrote: post #91
Nextgrid wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that was not designed by our civilization To the best of our knowledge, it wasn't designed at all. It's more like giving a monkey a typewriter and millions of years, with a very crude feedback function (evolution/natural selection) that makes it very hard to backtrack out of a local maximum. It's quite hard to interface with it because it's not designed to be interfaced with and the whole thing works pretty much by…

> it wasn't designed at all Obviously. There is no functional separation between components (some proteins do multiple unrelated jobs), there's no distinct hierarchy (layers just kinda flow into each other), and there's way too much global state that works seemingly something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5mwVv5NjhA

That was seriously cool! And so much work!

Re: Engineered material can reconnect severed nerves

#110

Post by taway1a2b3c »

lordnacho wrote: post #94
Geee wrote: post #92

If I understand correctly, this allows nerve-to-digital and digital-to-nerve conversions. This means that we're soon able to replace our bodies with robotic ones. The remaining problem is to figure out how to keep a brain alive in a vat, and making the life-support devices small enough to fit inside the body. It's probably not too difficult; you need to circulate blood, remove carbon dioxide, add oxygen, add glucose.…

Why? Find a way to distil whatever process the brain does, emulate it on a computer.

Never wish for this. The amount of (emulated, but still real to the emulatee) suffering has no practical limit. Emulation/Uploading is every sadists wet dream. The only way to stay free is to live your life in the real and embrace (and hope for) the permanence of death.
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