A pig's brain has been frozen with its cellular activity locked in place • Hacker News Board

Re: A pig's brain has been frozen with its cellular activity locked in place

#141

Post by coppsilgold » Sat, Mar 21, 2026, 11:04 PM UTC

harperlee wrote: post #119

coppsilgold wrote: post #91

A thought experiment: One by one your neurons are replaced by their digital counterpart as a nano-scale computer in-place, with equivalent functionality. After which neuron number are you no longer you? You remain conscious throughout the process, the process may last however long with pauses for sleep. After the replacement is complete, one by one these neurons are switched off with their functionality offloaded to…

Another thought experiment: One by one your neurons are replaced by water. At which neuron are you no longer you? The fact that there is no clear time to pinpoint for a change doesn't imply that there is no such change... so your thought experiment doesn't really prove that the 'you' is kept. In the end, Theseus ship is, and is not, the original ship, and both things can be true at the same time.

> One by one your neurons are replaced by water. At which neuron are you no longer you?

You have described an aspect of ageing & decline.

> doesn't imply that there is no such change

I made no such assertion, obviously something is changing. The question is whether or not that change matters to your core identity. The thought experiment in my opinion shows that as long as continuity is maintained and as long as you are happy with the results you remain yourself and gained something in the process.

Re: A pig's brain has been frozen with its cellular activity locked in place

#142

Post by generic92034 » Sat, Mar 21, 2026, 11:05 PM UTC

birdsongs wrote: post #24

DennisP wrote: post #14

More of a digital copy scenario. The article says the process involves toxic chemicals that lock everything in place so the connectome can be examined. There's no known way to reverse the chemical process in the biological brain. https://archive.is/SMcX5

Not that I think this is anywhere close in actuality, but It's reminding me of MMAcevedo. ( https://qntm.org/mmacevedo ) What server will I wake up on? Who is running the infrastructure? What will be asked of me to be allowed to continue to exist on that server? Given our current societal trends, I can't imagine I would enjoy any existence where a copy of me is spun back up. And of course, my original thread of consc…

> And of course, my original thread of consciousness will still be ended, so this is some alternate copy of me.

Mine ends several times every night. I am probably generic92034#60000 and counting.

Re: A pig's brain has been frozen with its cellular activity locked in place

#143

Post by deadbabe » Sat, Mar 21, 2026, 11:07 PM UTC

What does it mean to “continue with your life”?

Even if you are raised from the dead, it means you just go back to work at some point, where you prompt an AI Agent all day, collect a paycheck, pay bills, and occasionally do some dopamine stimulating activities, until you die again?

This tech will only be used on people who are considered too important to die: demagogues and dictators, mass influencers.

Re: A pig's brain has been frozen with its cellular activity locked in place

#144

Post by throw310822 » Sat, Mar 21, 2026, 11:09 PM UTC

gambiting wrote: post #129

throw310822 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No I don't think so. We can already create LLMs that are highly efficient and infinitely more knowledgeable than any single human being, completely tuned to the task, without ego or distractions, and they are cheap enough that you can run tens of them in parallel for a few hundred dollars per month. They are also way faster than any human being. And we're three/ four years in this. Imagine 50 years from now.

>>Imagine 50 years from now. That's the whole point though - I can't, and I don't think anyone can. Right now the LLMs are just getting bigger and bigger, we're bruteforcing the way out of their stupidity by giving them bigger and bigger datasets - unless something fundamental changes soon that tech has an actual dead end. Hence my (joke-ish) prediction that you'll eventually need a 16PB GPU to run a basic gemini mod…

Yeah, well, we have a very different view on this- and I know there are two diametrically opposed camps, and I am in the awe-struck one. LLMs are getting bigger and bigger and they're getting much smarter, and all in the space of a few years. They went from making up erratic articles about unicorns to writing complex PRs in codebases of millions of lines of code, solving math olympics level problems, speaking fluently in tens or hundreds of languages and exhibiting a breadth of knowledge than no human being possesses. Considering their size, they are monstrously efficient compared to the human brain. But anyway, this is a matter for a different discussion.

Re: A pig's brain has been frozen with its cellular activity locked in place

#145

Post by allajfjwbwkwja » Sat, Mar 21, 2026, 11:12 PM UTC

himata4113 wrote: post #139

kakacik wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You will not wake up on any server. At best possible theoretical far future scenario better or worse copy of yours will. If you would survive such process, you yourself, the human instance that wrote that will be just looking at somebody else living their now-fully-digital (prison) life. I don't understand why people don't get this simple fact. We are all gonna die, make inner peace with that (it isn't that hard, dep…

I don't really think you're correct on that one. To begin with, what makes us whole is mostly memories and our subconcious. What makes it obvious are illnesses like dementia and general decay of neural activity as we get older. If we implant the same memories into something or someone that person/entity would become you, like waking up from a long nap. You might not feel the same, think the same, or act the same, but…

It's a copy with your memories, not you. Is one of them still you, if we make three copies?

Re: A pig's brain has been frozen with its cellular activity locked in place

#146

Post by smj-edison » Sat, Mar 21, 2026, 11:16 PM UTC

vercaemert wrote: post #42

kingkawn wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The depth of complexity and innumerable interacting variables of biology make attempts to map brain function always seem like an absurdity

I worked on the Human Connectome Project. If they freeze the vesicles that deliver transmitters and make them analyzable, you've got all the information you need. In terms of a modern ANN, it's the connections (axons) and the weights (transmitters/receptors in tandem). That said, this article doesn't get to the point in the free section. How are they collecting the information? Slicing is inherently destructive. Some…

What is the state of the art in regards to how neurons learn over time? Do existing neuron models account for that? Being trapped, unable to learn anything, sounds terrible.

Re: A pig's brain has been frozen with its cellular activity locked in place

#147

Post by crummy » Sat, Mar 21, 2026, 11:16 PM UTC

tapoxi wrote: post #131

kakacik wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You will not wake up on any server. At best possible theoretical far future scenario better or worse copy of yours will. If you would survive such process, you yourself, the human instance that wrote that will be just looking at somebody else living their now-fully-digital (prison) life. I don't understand why people don't get this simple fact. We are all gonna die, make inner peace with that (it isn't that hard, dep…

I highly recommend playing Frictonal Games' Soma from 2015. It is an extremely critical examination of this entire concept. Without spoiling the plot, a digitized consciousness doesn't imply just one, but an infinite number of copies, some just subjected to torture as they are essentially disposable.

All of the concepts SOMA explored were already familiar to me, but the experience of exploring the through the game was so much stronger than reading about them in a text book. Such a strong, lasting effect, I wish I could play it again for the first time.

Re: A pig's brain has been frozen with its cellular activity locked in place

#148

Post by DoctorOetker » Sat, Mar 21, 2026, 11:19 PM UTC

vercaemert wrote: post #57

roarcher wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If they freeze the vesicles that deliver transmitters and make them analyzable, you've got all the information you need. How can we possibly know that the non-connectome details of the brain don't influence computation or conscious experience? It seems we ignore these only because they don't fit neatly into our piles of linear algebra that we call ANNs.

Take a gander at the OpenWorm project. It's a great example of how simple neuronal activity is (given details like the connections, number of receptors, and transmitter infrastructure). SOTA models of neuronal activity are simple enough for problem sets in undergraduate biomedical engineering programs. Sure, to your point, we don't know. But the worm above (nematode) swims and seeks food when dropped into a physics e…

Why would axons be unimageable?

There's research on the translation process where cells are basically flash-frozen (to avoid water crystals), then imaged with cryoelectronmicroscopy / AFM etc. where they image the translation process (RNA to protein) in order to get snapshots and get a better understanding of how the folding proceeds and is aided.

If we can image sub-cellular features, what makes you believe we can't trace all the axons, dendrites and the synapses?

It seems more like a question of how to do it cost effectively at scale, not so much a question of "can we or not?".

Re: A pig's brain has been frozen with its cellular activity locked in place

#149

Post by graypegg » Sat, Mar 21, 2026, 11:30 PM UTC

thesmtsolver2 wrote: post #35

simonask wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can recommend the comic “Transmetropolitan” by Warren Ellis, which deals with this and many other questions. You have to imagine what it would be like for someone who lived in 1826 too wake up today, in a world where nothing they know is relevant, they have no connections, no idea what to do with any of it. Historians might want to interview you, or the first couple of people like you, but then what? You will be an…

If a large number of people get reanimated, I don't think this will be their fate. I can imagine "educators" who can get them up speed. In a future where people get reanimated, I would think this shouldn't be a problem long term. Any existence may be better than non existence.

Retraining people once they're alive again not only requires logisitics and hiring N-centuries from now, but also requires that anyone really cares. You could imagine a world where 100s of people are being reanimated at once, but I don't think the economics would ever let that event happen.

Once this passes through a few generations of people responsible for tending to the needs of rich people's frozen brains, the empathy and money will be gone. Imagine inheriting a business funded from people wanting to skip over the entirety of your lifetime because they assume your time is too boring for them. Plus, your impact on that business will be null. There is nothing you can do except keep it going and get more rich people's brains in there. The only "innovation" that's going to drive business is bringing someone back to life... which for a large span of brain custodians, will only be possible AFTER their death. Maybe you need to model it after a religion; humanity has kept stuff going for long spans of time under that framing... but are you still just a servant to these ancient people who you have not met, and will actually NEVER meet since you'll die first... having spent precious time in your life taking care of them? Seems like an uninspiring religion.

Or... you do some fraud, which is much easier. They're already functionally dead, and you presumably have access to a lot of their money. Money that is worth more in your lifetime, than in their future.

People have historically cared very little about the personal feelings of the pharoah as they dust off his bones and take his nice things. Doesn't even need that long. Guess what, T+200 years, the brains are getting dumped in a river.

Re: A pig's brain has been frozen with its cellular activity locked in place

#150

Post by allajfjwbwkwja » Sat, Mar 21, 2026, 11:33 PM UTC

BobbyJo wrote: post #51

kakacik wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You will not wake up on any server. At best possible theoretical far future scenario better or worse copy of yours will. If you would survive such process, you yourself, the human instance that wrote that will be just looking at somebody else living their now-fully-digital (prison) life. I don't understand why people don't get this simple fact. We are all gonna die, make inner peace with that (it isn't that hard, dep…

Anesthesia impairs the electrons transport in your brain, effectively ending that thread of consciousness, and, depending on the procedure, your brain can be altered by chemical/oxygen saturation changes. You wake up very subtly different, but most people are ok with that. People have strokes or accidents and wake up missing memories and with changed bodies, but their families still call them by name. You still being…

Anesthesia does not cause complete cessation of brain activity.