Terren Suydam wrote:
I definitely agree that getting from there to a situation in which
packages of information are being inserted into germ cell DNA is a
long road, but this one new piece of research has - surprisingly -
just cut the length of that road in half.
Half of infinity is still infinity ;-]
It's just not a possibility, which should be obvious if you look at
the quantity of information involved. Let M be a measure of the
information stored via distributed methylation patterns across some
number of neurons N. The amount of information stored by a single
neuron's methylated DNA is going to be much smaller than M (roughly
M/N). A single germ cell which might conceivably inherit the
methylation pattern from some single neuron would not be able to
convey any more than a [1/N] piece of the total information that
makes up M.
Now you're just trying to make me think ;-).
Okay, try this.
[heck, you don't have to: I am just playing with ideas here...]
The methylation pattern has not necessarily been shown to *only* store
information in a distributed pattern of activation - the jury's out on
that one (correct me if I'm wrong).
Suppose that the methylation end caps are just being used as a way
station for some mechanism whose *real* goal is to make modifications to
some patterns in the junk DNA. So, here I am suggesting that the junk
DNA of any particular neuron is being used to code for large numbers of
episodic memories (one memory per DNA strand, say), with each neuron
being used as a redundant store of many episodes. The same episode is
stored in multiple neurons, but each copy is complete. When we observe
changes in the methylation patterns, perhaps these are just part of the
transit mechanism, not the final destination for the pattern. To put it
in the language that Greg Bear would use, the endcaps were just part of
the "radio" system. (http://www.gregbear.com/books/darwinsradio.cfm)
Now suppose that part of the junk sequences that code for these memories
are actually using a distributed coding scheme *within* the strand (in
the manner of a good old fashioned backprop neural net, shall we say).
That would mean that, contrary to what I said in the above paragraph,
the individual strands were coding a bunch of different episodic memory
traces, not just one.
(It is even possible that the old idea of flashbulb memories may survive
the critiques that have been launched against it ... and in that case,
it could be that what we are talking about here is the mechanism for
storing that particular set of memories. And in that case, perhaps the
system expects so few of them, that all DNA strands everywhere in the
system are dedicated to storing just the individual's store of flashbulb
memories).
Now, finally, suppose that there is some mechanism for "radioing" these
memories to distribute them around the system ... and that the radio
network extends as far as the germ DNA.
Now, the offspring could get the mixed flashbulb memories of its
parents, in perhaps very dilute or noisy form.
This assumes that whatever coding scheme is used to store the
information can somehow transcend the coding schemes used by different
individuals. Since we do not yet know how much common ground there is
between the knowledge storage used by individuals yet, this is still
possible.
There: I invented a possible mechanism.
Does it work?
Richard Loosemore
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agi
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