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posted by CoolHand on Wednesday March 16 2016, @05:46PM   Printer-friendly
from the ghost-in-the-machine dept.

While many tech moguls dream of changing the way we live with new smart devices or social media apps, one Russian internet millionaire is trying to change nothing less than our destiny, by making it possible to upload a human brain to a computer, reports Tristan Quinn. "Within the next 30 years," promises Dmitry Itskov, "I am going to make sure that we can all live forever."

It sounds preposterous, but there is no doubting the seriousness of this softly spoken 35-year-old, who says he left the business world to devote himself to something more useful to humanity. "I'm 100% confident it will happen. Otherwise I wouldn't have started it," he says. It is a breathtaking ambition, but could it actually be done? Itskov doesn't have too much time to find out.

"If there is no immortality technology, I'll be dead in the next 35 years," he laments. Death is inevitable - currently at least - because as we get older the cells that make up our bodies lose their ability to repair themselves, making us vulnerable to cardiovascular disease and other age-related conditions that kill about two-thirds of us.

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35786771

Horizon: The Immortalist, produced and directed by Tristan Quinn, will be shown on BBC 2 at 20:00 on Wednesday 16 March 2016 - viewers in the UK can catch up later on the BBC iPlayer

Dmitry Itskov, Founder of 2045 Initiative


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by TheLink on Wednesday March 16 2016, @06:20PM

    by TheLink (332) on Wednesday March 16 2016, @06:20PM (#319103) Journal

    At best for many decades it's just going to be conmen swindling rich, desperate and stupid/ignorant people of their money.

    Why I say so, check this out: https://www.caltech.edu/news/single-cell-recognition-halle-berry-brain-cell-1013 [caltech.edu]
    http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/one-face-one-neuron/ [scientificamerican.com]

    Responses varied with the person and stimulus. For example, a single neuron in the left posterior hippocampus of one subject responded to 30 out of 87 images. It fired in response to all pictures of actress Jennifer Aniston, but not at all, or only very weakly, to other famous and non-famous faces, landmarks, animals, or objects. The neuron also (and wisely, it turns out) did not respond to pictures of Jennifer Aniston together with actor Brad Pitt.

    In another patient, pictures of Halle Berry activated a neuron in the right anterior hippocampus, as did a caricature of the actress, images of her in the lead role of the film Catwoman, and a letter sequence spelling her name. In a third subject, a neuron in the left anterior hippocampus responded to pictures of the landmark Sydney Opera House and Baha'í Temple, and also to the letter string "Sydney Opera," but not to other letter strings, such as "Eiffel Tower."

    And that's just "anything with Halle Berry", there are probably neurons that fire for various types of _relationships_ e.g. "A _eats_ B" and "D fits into E". And different people may have different interpretations of "fits into". And some people might have neurons that respond to Jennifer Aniston even when she's with Brad Pitt.

    Not everyone has a Halle Berry neuron and they aren't all in the same places. And the triggering pattern for Halle Berry at the brain level may not be the same for each person.

    So how are you going to transfer all of this? You can't just sit down and talk to the "patient" about everything
    1) that's very low bandwidth - there isn't enough time, and the accuracy/precision may not be so great.
    2) the patient may not remember all of what he/she actually knows. There are things you will remember when given the appropriate trigger (smell, sound, etc) that you might otherwise not remember. Or it may even take a while before you remember it again.

    Our memory doesn't work like a PC, you can't just go through all the addresses and read all the memory values.

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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday March 16 2016, @06:31PM

    by takyon (881) <{takyon} {at} {soylentnews.org}> on Wednesday March 16 2016, @06:31PM (#319109) Journal

    Let the Russian man spend his wealth. Maybe there will be advancements in neuromorphic computing to show for it.

    Certainly the biological aspects of human intelligence, like hard-coded neurons or an endocrine system, would be difficult to emulate in software or hardware. But it probably won't be impossible. Any system should be possible to simulate given enough time and resources, and a human brain is a lot smaller than say, the universe. And if you use brain-like hardware to mimic how neurons work, it may be much easier that trying to copy the "memory values".

    Will it happen within this Russian millionaire's lifetime? Maybe not, but he shouldn't put all his eggs in the mind uploading basket when the anti-aging approach is more down to Earth.

    --
    [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 16 2016, @06:42PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 16 2016, @06:42PM (#319120)

    At best for many decades it's just going to be conmen swindling rich, desperate and stupid/ignorant people of their money.

    This describes 99.99% of medical research.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by theluggage on Wednesday March 16 2016, @06:55PM

    by theluggage (1797) on Wednesday March 16 2016, @06:55PM (#319131)

    Our memory doesn't work like a PC, you can't just go through all the addresses and read all the memory values.

    No, best guess is it works like a neural network, and computers can simulate those. So the question is, if a future scanning technology could actually map all of the neurons in the brain and their interconnections and that could be simulated on a computer (or some other form of electronics) would the result be conscious? If you did a "destructive" scan would it be "the same person"? If not, what if you incrementally replaced someone's brain with a digital simulation?

    Definitely still Science Fiction (... and SF has analysed the shit out of the philosophical/ethical angles of this, particularly if you read Greg Egan*) and current scanning tech certainly can't do it - but maybe not as irrevocably SciFi as, say FTL travel where we know fundamental physical reasons why it may be impossible.

    So, confining immortal souls manipulable only by His Noodley Appendage to the realms of non-falsifiability - (A) what about the brain might be uniquely uncopyable by any future technology (Heisenberg to the rescue?) and (B) if so, can someone nice patent it before the MPAA does?

    (* or Richard Morgan if you want less talk-talk and more bang-bang-splat-gristle-boom)

             

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Wednesday March 16 2016, @07:15PM

    by Immerman (3985) on Wednesday March 16 2016, @07:15PM (#319139)

    Those neurons almost certainly don't individually do any recognition, rather they're one tiny part part of a larger interrelated pattern of firings - as a very bad analogy, it would be like saying one bit in an image-recognition program's memory was recognizing an individual just because it's state correlated well with that individual's presence. That may make its state a useful output, but it's not individually doing the work.

    Individual neurons do seem to remember and process past inputs, so they're a lot more sophisticated than a single transistor, but you could still conceivably analyze its response properties and make a small CPU that nearly perfectly mimicked it's behavior. Do that for every neuron in the brain, and interconnect the resulting billions of mini-CPUs in the same pattern as the original, and you could conceivably create a high-fidelity duplicate of the original. I suspect it would take technology considerably beyond anything we currently have to do that effectively, but in principle it seems viable. At least assuming that there's no unduplicatable "soul" necessary to breathe consciousness into the brain.

    Of course there's also the challenge of taking a "snapshot" of the internal state of every neuron at once, so that it can be copied into the artificial brain - otherwise you risk copying the persons "hardware" but not their "software". It doesn't really help you to have a technically identical new laptop if the only copy of your 400-page thesis was lost with the original one.

    On the other hand, it might be much simpler. It might be that all neurons of a given type function virtually identically - essentially being "standardized" parts whose specific functionality is determined entirely by how they're interconnected with the rest. In that case you need only develop simulations of the various types of cells, and then scan an individual brain to determine the "wiring diagram", and then assemble your virtual brain using that. You still risk losing the "software" if you can't take a simultaneous snapshot of every neuron's internal state, but it's possible that the "software" is actually encoded entirely in the wiring, and "cold starting" the virtual brain with default (or random) internal neuron states would be similar to waking a biological human from a deep coma - a possible sense of discontinuity, but basically they're still "all there".

    We really won't know until we try it. Now, we just need a bunch of volunteers for the ievitable early failures, where their mind-clones will likely be stillborn, crippled, or mad because of insufficient simulation fidelity. No ethical problems there, because they're not actually human until you succeed, right? Right?!?

    • (Score: 2) by TheLink on Thursday March 17 2016, @03:56AM

      by TheLink (332) on Thursday March 17 2016, @03:56AM (#319427) Journal

      To me some parts of the brain are probably like a Bingo Hall, with "stream of thought/input" being "called out". So when certain brain patterns appear and various neurons recognize them they yell "Bingo!" and that creates another different pattern which triggers another bunch which creates a different pattern and so on.

      Now due to different arrangements of neurons and different history/memory after the immediate sensory bits, the locations of the neurons and what patterns they respond to and create could be very different.

      On the other hand, it might be much simpler. It might be that all neurons of a given type function virtually identically - essentially being "standardized" parts whose specific functionality is determined entirely by how they're interconnected with the rest.

      But do we even truly know what neurons are capable of? This is what single celled creatures can do: https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=450&cid=11384#commentwrap [soylentnews.org]

      We can predict the behaviour of someone like Stephen Hawking 90% of the time (since he doesn't move very much ), but the 1% of the time when Stephen Hawking talks about something really interesting, we see a big difference, even though the rest of the time he' could be replaced by a robot. :p

    • (Score: 2) by TheLink on Thursday March 17 2016, @04:36AM

      by TheLink (332) on Thursday March 17 2016, @04:36AM (#319437) Journal

      "Those neurons almost certainly don't individually do any recognition,"
      What makes you so sure? After all you do say: "Individual neurons do seem to remember and process past inputs, ".

      See also:
      https://www.braindecoder.com/jennifer-aniston-neuron-redux-memory-formation-study-1226899628.html [braindecoder.com]

      For example, one study participant had a neuron that responded specifically to an image of the White House but not to that of beach volleyball player Kerri Walsh. So one of that participant's composite images was Kerri Walsh at the White House.

      Next, the researchers tested participants' memories of the composite images by asking them to match a celebrity face to a pictured location or to name the person corresponding to an image of a place. Finally, they again showed the patients the individual images. The researchers found that after participants viewed the composite images, the neurons that had previously only responded to the preferred stimulus now responded to both preferred and non-preferred stimuli: The "White House neuron" began firing not only in response to the image of the White House but also to that of Kerri Walsh.

      http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/archive/newsrel/health/02-04AffectedNeurons.asp [ucsd.edu]

      “I think it’s fair to say that in the past it was generally believed that a whole cortical region would change when learning occurred in that region, that a large group of neurons would show a fairly modest change in overall structure,” said Tuszynski, who is also director of the Center for Neural Repair at the UC San Diego and a neurologist at the Veterans Affairs San Diego Health System.

      “Our findings show that this is not the case. Instead, a very small number of neurons specifically activated by learning show an expansion of structure that’s both surprisingly extensive – there’s a dramatic increase in the size and complexity of the affected neurons – and yet highly restricted to a small subset of cells. And all of this structural plasticity is occurring in the context of normal learning, which highlights just how changeable the adult brain is as a part of its normal biology.”

      So it seems to me a neuron does a lot more than being a dumb component in a "neural network".

  • (Score: 2) by RamiK on Wednesday March 16 2016, @11:00PM

    by RamiK (1813) on Wednesday March 16 2016, @11:00PM (#319299)

    Step 1: reverse engineer neuron functionality.
    Step 2: figure out nanotech to the point you can build small stuff easily.
    Step 3: design pseudo-neuron that doesn't degrade or is easily replaceable\maintainable.
    Step 4: flood the brain with magic nonobots and iv nutrients\raw materials to gradually replace decaying neurons with pseudo-neurons.
    Step 5: enjoy an immortality of contemplating the Ship of Theseus paradox.

    Personally, I'm fine with a cremation. But really, not my problem.

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