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

newscientist.com

61–70 of 186 posts

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

#61

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…

I saw a putative 3D animation of a fly whose brain had been digitized and then run in a simulation. It buzzed around, sipped food it had found on the ground, even rubbed its forelegs together as flies do. A true Dixie Flyline. We live in strange times...

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

#62
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this scenario, the alternative is “you die”. Let’s make sure we’re including that in the question.

Brains 'R Us recently filed for chapter 11 and has been cut up and sold for scrap to private equity. The new PE firm has your brain. In 2208 there's a large grey market for brains to be used for hybrid AI and meat bag workflows. It's technically illegal in many jurisdictions due to "ethical implications", but is still the cheapest way to run many workloads. The method used to harness the brain involves reanimating it…

> Each time the brain fails a captcha, the brain receives an electric impulse which simulates the most excruciating pain that the brain can respresent, but the brain cannot scream or run away.

What percentage of your life being enjoyable vs horrible suffering makes it worth living?

Maybe you're 80 years old at the time of storing your brain.

Suppose after being revived that regime with capitalist incentives holds for another 200 years during which you live as a brain in a jar, but some cultural revolutions later you are liberated and then proceed to live 10'000 years across any number of bodies and circumstances, which means that in your lifespan of ~10'280 years (not accounting for being in storage) you experienced horrible suffering for about 2% of your life.

This is as much of a contrived example as yours, aside from maybe good commentary on your part on human ethics being shit when profit enters the scene.

Or maybe after 200 years you expire, having at least tried your best at a non-zero chance of extending your lifespan, instead leading to your total lifespan of 280 years being about 71% suffering. Is it better to not have tried at all, then? Just forsake ANY chance of being revived and living for as long as you want and conquering biology and seeing so much more than your 80 year lifespan let you? Should absolute oblivion be chosen instead, willingly, a 100% chance of never having a conscious though after your death again (within our current medical understanding)?

What about the people dealing with all sorts of horrible illnesses and knowing that each next year might be spent in a lot of pain and suffering, even things like going through chemo? Should they also not try? Or even something as simple as all of the people who look for love/success in their lives, and never find any of it anyways and possibly die alone and in squalor? They knew the odds weren't good and tried anyways. A more grounded take would be that those preserved brains are just left to thaw and you probably die anyways without being turned into some human captcha machine, at least having tried. Is it also not worth it in that case, knowing those both potential alternatives?

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

#63

Would people want this? Imagine waking up to a world where 200 years has passed, everyone you knew is dead, everything you knew is history.

I've thought about this a bunch

I don't necessarily want to live forever. But I am very curious about Humanity's ultimate fate. I want to see how things play out

I want to know if there is life out in the universe, if humanity ever meets other intelligent life, or even if we ever meaningfully leave Earth

I don't know. I love the good in humanity, I hope we eventually wind up more good than bad, and I just want to see.

Edit: Also, if we ever actually build a society that is a lot more meaningfully ethical and good than our current society, maybe I would want to live forever in it, or at least a very long time. Maybe it would just be nice to have the choice of when I go

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

#64
post #51
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…

I wouldn't call that degrees of change but degrees of damage. The thing is, past a certain degree of damage people stop having opinions, so how would you know the individual is comfortable with it?

In this case, the damage is total. The degrees end here, it reaches a binary state: from alive to dead. And then something else entirely says they are the dead person and they are alive.

The question is, does society accept a complete switcheroo? The individual died in the process, they cannot give an opinion on this. The copy is another entity. There are no degrees, it's all absolutes with this process.

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

#65

Would people want this? Imagine waking up to a world where 200 years has passed, everyone you knew is dead, everything you knew is history.

Even worse, imagine waking up in a world where 200 years have gone by and nothing has changed, everyone is still here that you knew in your 'first' life. All the self-serving bosses, all the mendacious politicians, all the mediocre entertainers. Like a groundhog day from hell, forever.

The beauty of groundhog day is what we can accomplish when we have unlimited time and no real responsibilities

People overemphasize the "time loop trap" piece but seem to overlook the fact that he eventually uses the time to better himself in almost every way. He's a much better, much more enriched and happy person by the end.

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

#66

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…

> But the worm above (nematode) swims and seeks food when dropped into a physics engine.

Nematode worms have an oxytocin analogue called nematocin that is known to influence learning and social behaviors like mating. As far as I can find, the project doesn't account for this, or only minimally, but aims to in the future.

It's not surprising that immediate short-term behaviors like movement depend mostly on the faster signaling of the connectome. But since we know of other mechanisms that most definitely influence the connectome's behavior, and we know we don't account for those at the moment, it is not accurate to say that the connectome is "all the information you need".

I agree that mapping the connectome of the human brain is impractical to the point of impossibility. But even if we could, the resulting "circuit diagram" would not capture all the details needed to fully replicate human cognition. Aspects of it, sure. Maybe even enough to make it do useful tasks for EvilCorp LLC while being prodded with virtual sticks and carrots. But it would be incomplete.

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

#67
post #39

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…

> it isn't that hard, depends mostly on your ego

This feels like an odd cope, sure I might not be able to do anything about my mortality, but I still view the fact that I and other people are mortal as a damn tragedy (and often the gradual decline and non-dignified end of people's lives). If someone held a gun at my head and I knew that within a minute they're going to pull the trigger, I'd be rightfully quite disturbed. Now knowing that a metaphorical trigger will be pulled at a random time decades later doesn't make it any less disturbing. The only solace there is ignorance.

> do it either via exceptional deeds or via well-raised children

Both of those are worthy pursuits, but are also categorically different from you being here. So sure, you can and probably should say that living a good life is what people should do instead of losing sleep over their mortality - but that also moves the goal posts in a sense. You could have cut it short at the equivalent of "you'll never be immortal".

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

#68
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

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

#69
post #51
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…

[deleted]

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

#70
post #52

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?

> who wouldn't want to witness and be a part of a new world? Me? This view is grounded in the assumption that the future will be better than today. There is no guarantee of that. This is, in my opinion, the same flaw in the thought process of wanting to live forever. The assumption being that, this "new world" is a better place than where you are now. That it is compatible with you as you are. That you will never gro…

> This view is grounded in the assumption that the future will be better than today. There is no guarantee of that.

It could be better, it could be flawed in the same ways, it could be flawed but in different ways, or it could be worse altogether. Compare our current lives with someone a century ago. Two centuries. A millenia. Plus hey if you wake up and the oceans have boiled off, there's solutions to your continued existence then.

> I know for a fact that I will grow tired of existence.

I think that's the main part - ceasing to exist should be a choice. It wasn't one to be brought into this world, but inhabiting it and going out of it should be done on one's own terms and when having lived as good of a long life as one might want to. For some people that will be close to a century. For others that might be a thousand years. Who knows, for some it might be a million years.

If this is all thought experiments, why not? At that point, why even care about waking up in a capitalist dystopian hellhole? Might take a few centuries to overthrow them but it's not like that sort of life is the end point of humanity. And if it is, at least you'd know that for sure. Or maybe it's nuclear winter. Or something closer to a utopia, or at least something where everyone's basic needs are more or less met. Asking for guarantees doesn't work either way.

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