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

newscientist.com

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

#151

Post by thebruce87m »

simonask wrote: post #23
thesmtsolver2 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you assume that everyone you know will be dead? Won't some of them also be preserved. As for "everything you knew is history", who wouldn't want to witness and be a part of a new world?

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…

> You will be an audience member to a show you don’t understand, until you die.

I mean - I barely understand what I’m seeing in the world now. Maybe I can look back on now and understand it with the benefit of unclassified files and whatnot?

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

#152

Post by netsharc »

canadiantim wrote: post #68
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 to mention the tricky question of what happens to your consciousness during and after this process? Most likely they're just preserving the tissue, but not the consciousness

Isn't consciousness more like what emerges out of the neurons firing? If I turn off my calculator, I can't input calculations into it and get an answer, but if I turn it on, the electricity running in the circuitry will react to the button presses, and I can say "the calculator is working".

So the consciousness is the "computing session", and if we can persist the state of the hardware before shutdown, then booting it back up will give us that consciousness.

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

#153

Post by BobbyJo »

allajfjwbwkwja wrote: post #150
BobbyJo wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

True.

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

#154

Post by DoctorOetker »

gambiting wrote: post #93
throw310822 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> grey market for brains to be used for hybrid AI and meat bag workflows ... is still the cheapest way to run many workloads. It's an absolute nightmare scenario, but luckily it has become completely implausible since 2023. We're actually on a trajectory for human brains becoming the most expensive option for basically any job. Not saying this would make me comfortable with brain cloning, but at least the simple econ…

>> We're actually on a trajectory for human brains becoming the most expensive option for basically any job. Unless RTX9000 with 16PB of ram needed to run basic Gemini2077 model costs more than a house, but a brain jar with electrodes is cheaper than that. Then the economic incentives will shift the other way.

It's the other way around, while initially it will only be available to elites and prisoners (if you are innocently convicted for life, the digitized brain can set the record straight and provide another life, some will take that option, others wont).

As the technology improves, it will be mostly just for the rich and less for prisoners, and as costs fall further there will even be financial pressure for the rest of the population to "go digital": insurance on digitized lifeforms will be much cheaper, replacement robot body parts, replacement electronics, versus expensive healthcare.

Look up the fraction of GDP in developed nations that goes to healthcare and insurance. People will be shamed by the economy as if they are uppity for hanging on to their slow, expensive to feed and maintain meatbag bodies.

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

#155

Post by scotty79 »

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…

Does the thread of you your consciousness end when you go to sleep?

Does the thread of someone elses consciousness ends when they experience grand mal seizure and thrir electrical brain activity goes wrong all at once and then resets?

How's "waking up" in the virtual different from waking up from grand mal seizure? (assuming that all relevant biochemical data of neurons was read correcly and their behavior is simulated correctly)

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

#156

Post by la64710 »

scotty79 wrote: post #155
birdsongs wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Does the thread of you your consciousness end when you go to sleep? Does the thread of someone elses consciousness ends when they experience grand mal seizure and thrir electrical brain activity goes wrong all at once and then resets? How's "waking up" in the virtual different from waking up from grand mal seizure? (assuming that all relevant biochemical data of neurons was read correcly and their behavior is simulat…

No because you know it was you who was in deep sleep And just woke up

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

#157

Post by kingkawn »

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…

All the information to replicate the structure we have delineated. But what else?

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

#158

Post by caditinpiscinam »

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…

Am I right in thinking that even if you had all of the connections and weights mapped out for a brain, the specifics of synaptic plasticity are still pretty poorly understood?

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

#159

Post by pink_eye »

kakacik wrote: post #39
birdsongs wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

Electrostatic Therapy is the key to immortality. An external energy source, charging capacity. Adenosine Triphosphate production freely available, Telomere Magnetic Shielding improvements.

- Imperative Pink Eye

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

#160

Post by caditinpiscinam »

cjbgkagh wrote: post #25
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

While the connections are important I think the individual cell behavior is also very important and that is driven by DNA. Brain cells last a lifetime and can modify their own DNA so each one ends up being unique. I do wonder how much of behavior/consciousness is encoded in the cells DNA versus the connections between the cells.

Surely all of behavior and consciousness are encoded in the connections between cells. I think the question you want to ask is how much those connections are determined by DNA.
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