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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

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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). This is exactly what I’m doubting, how can you be so sure?

Same question answered under other comment.

Yeah but it wasn’t though. I found your answer unconvincing. I suppose “we don’t know” is an answer but that is nothing like “we have all the information we need”

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

#72
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…

> You will not wake up on any server ... I don't understand why people don't get this simple fact.

Did you even read my comment? In the last paragraph I discuss this and the teletransportation paradox, and how it will not actually be me but a copy, my thread of consciousness dies with me.

Please give me the courtesy of at least a full read before replying.

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

#73

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.

Fry found a way to make it work

Just beware of the suicide booths

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

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you have a citation for the notion they can modify their own DNA? I would fairly easily believe they can modify its expression, but I’m skeptical of the idea they can modify the sequence.

[deleted]

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

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you have a citation for the notion they can modify their own DNA? I would fairly easily believe they can modify its expression, but I’m skeptical of the idea they can modify the sequence.

It is half true in that they can modify their epigenetics.

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

#76

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…

Fall, Or Dodge in Hell (Neil Stephenson) and The Waves (Ken Liu) are two other good stories about brain scanning and transhumanism. The first one is a ridiculously long novel about a future where the cloud is increasingly used for uploading souls of scanned brains, and the second one is a short story where people on a spaceship eventually evolve into noncorporal beings.

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

#77
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…

> Can anyone guarantee those things?

No one can guarantee those things.

No one can guarantee anything in this world.

You are free to choose non existence but others are equally free to be brave enough to wake up in a worse world.

They may even feel responsible enough to try and fix it rather than requiring a "guarantee".

> The assumption being that, this "new world" is a better place than where you are now.

No one is assuming that. At least, I am not assuming that. Even if the world gets worse, I think it is rational to want to live longer and try and fix that.

Even if it is provably 100% unfixable and worse, any existence is better than non existence (certain forms of Hindu/Buddhist meditation teach you how to get into a state where that is obvious).

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

#78
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I guess I'm not making a judgement of what other people should or shouldn't do. Just making up a goofy example to illustrate that the choice is not so obvious to a lot of people, which I think you also illustrate pretty well with your examples. It really depends on the individual. I do think it's worth looking at the incentives of the people funding these companies, because that does give a picture of the probable outcomes.

People will continue working on this sort of thing, that's fine, it really doesn't bother me. If I was forced to make a judgement, I think it's maybe a little silly, but I'm also not out there saving the planet from climate armageddon so I shouldn't cast stones. As a species we are extremely bad at prioritizing for our collective survival and there are a million worse things to be working on.

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

#79
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…

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 accep…

> I wouldn't call that degrees of change but degrees of damage.

If you define any change from a previous state that loses some state as damage, then that's a tautology, not an argument.

> The thing is, past a certain degree of damage people stop having opinions, so how would you know the individual is comfortable with it?

We don't. I didn't say everyone was ok with every change. Some people aren't ok with being mildly inebriated, hence my "different strokes for different folks" take. Some people are comfortable losing a decade of memories, and some people would mourn a day lost.

> 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.

You're equivocating death with the end of the self. The core conversation here is whether or not that is true, and my opinion is that it is a manner of degree. This goes back to the earlier mention of the teletransportation paradox. Different people how different opinions on what constitutes the self.

> The question is, does society accept a complete switchero?

Society has generally been pragmatic and taken the approach of "if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it's a duck".

> 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.

Again, you're assuming your opinion on what constitutes an individual is the one and only interpretation, which isn't the case.

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

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Groundhog day was perhaps the wrong phrase to use. In any case I don't believe people would spontaneously attempt meaningful self-improvement with any seriousness if there was no expected finality to our existence. Don't forget, Bill Murray's character has to kill himself numerous times before he makes any kind of worthwhile progress.
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