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Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd
The startup accelerator Y Combinator is known for supporting audacious companies in its popular three-month boot camp.
There's never been anything quite like Nectome, though.
Next week, at YC's "demo days," Nectome's cofounder, Robert McIntyre, is going to describe his technology for exquisitely preserving brains in microscopic detail using a high-tech embalming process. Then the MIT graduate will make his business pitch. As it says on his website: "What if we told you we could back up your mind?"
So yeah. Nectome is a preserve-your-brain-and-upload-it company. Its chemical solution can keep a body intact for hundreds of years, maybe thousands, as a statue of frozen glass. The idea is that someday in the future scientists will scan your bricked brain and turn it into a computer simulation. That way, someone a lot like you, though not exactly you, will smell the flowers again in a data server somewhere.
This story has a grisly twist, though. For Nectome's procedure to work, it's essential that the brain be fresh. The company says its plan is to connect people with terminal illnesses to a heart-lung machine in order to pump its mix of scientific embalming chemicals into the big carotid arteries in their necks while they are still alive (though under general anesthesia).
The company has consulted with lawyers familiar with California's two-year-old End of Life Option Act, which permits doctor-assisted suicide for terminal patients, and believes its service will be legal. The product is "100 percent fatal," says McIntyre. "That is why we are uniquely situated among the Y Combinator companies."
(Score: 2) by Snow on Monday March 19 2018, @04:51PM (6 children)
What is our consciousness? Can it be resumed after all electrical activity has been lost?
If you brain is like a computer, and your consciousness lives in RAM, you can power down the computer and the electrical connections are all still there, but the 'program' would be lost.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday March 19 2018, @05:00PM
Unless you're talking about non-volatile RAM, but we've pretty much gone down the volatile RAM path. I assume mostly, because it's cheaper.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 19 2018, @07:21PM
I don't think the math we use in current computers has anything to represent consciousness or qualia.
Consciousness and qualia might turn out to be generated by our computers as an emergent thing due to the laws of our universe, but there's really no reason for it to be generated based on the actual math used.
Imperfect analogy- like doing some math generates heat. The math could in theory be done without any heat being generated in a purely mathematical universe but in our current universe doing enough math on a computer normally generates heat. And that's because of the laws of the universe and not the math itself.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Immerman on Tuesday March 20 2018, @04:25AM (3 children)
I believe there have several cases of extreme hypothermia where the brain was basically electrically metabolically dead before revival - and they didn't come back a blank slate.
I think it's quite widely assumed that somewhere between "much" and "all" of the "software" of the brain is encoded in the neural interconnections, your "connectome" - and the fact that vaguely analogous computer "neural" networks can in fact do so many wonderous tasks lends credence to that assumption. Basically the software is encoded in the wiring of the brain itself. That is to say the brain is far more like a traditional purpose-built electronic circuit, than it is like a general purpose computer that runs some kind of software.
Where else could the "software"of personality, memories, etc. reside?
RNA was a popular idea for a while, though its seems to have fallen out of favor. I recall reading that if you train a flatworm to navigate a maze, and feed it to another flatworm, the second worm will be able to navigate the maze far faster than its "unfed" peers. Which certainly suggest that memories can be stored as chemically-encoded data, and RNA is on a short list of candidate molecules. Though that's for flatworms - human cognitive mechanics might have evolved in a very different direction.
Standing-wave neuron firing patterns is another possibility - though those hypothermia patients, and others who have recovered from "brain death" with relatively little loss to personality and memory is a strong counter-argument. Of course the brain might just be *really* good at maintaining the minimum standing wave needed.
That's all I can think of, barring some sort of "soul" or analogous metaphysical element.
To return to the connectome: For a very rough estimate of the information content of your connectome - there's estimated to be ~100 billion neurons in the brain, and around 5000 synapses per neuron. A little combinatorics tells us that just the first neuron alone has (10^11 choose 5000) possible unordered sets of connections, which Wolfram Alpha calculates as ~2x10^38674 possible states - or about 16kB of data. In the synapse-set of one neuron, under the grossly oversimplifying assumption that all synapses are identical. Multiply by 100 billion neurons (that'll overestimate, but I'm too tired to figure out the proper math. Anybody else?) and you're looking at something on the order of 1 PB (1,000,000GB) of data just to map your connectome at the crude level of "A connects to B", before even considering that neurons weight each input synapse differently.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday March 20 2018, @11:24AM
However how the neurons are connected to each other is not completely random; therefore one might hope that the data is highly compressible (or in other words, that there's much less than 1PB of information in the brain connections).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1) by Muad'Dave on Tuesday March 20 2018, @01:49PM (1 child)
~2x10^38674 is more like 38,675 decimal digits long!
In binary, that's 1.011001110011..._2×2^128473 or a number 128,473 bits long.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday March 20 2018, @06:09PM
Exactly. And 128,473 bits /8 = 16,059 bytes, or 16 kB.