On 3/5/2010 1:29 PM, Charles wrote:
--- On Wed, 3/3/10, Stathis Papaioannou<[email protected]> wrote:
I'm not sure if you overlooked it but the key condition in my paper is that the
inputs to the remaining brain are identical to what they would have been if the
whole brain were present. Thus, the neural activity in the partial brain is by
definition identical to what would have occured in the corresponding part of a
whole brain. It is of course grossly implausible that this could be done in
practice for a real biological brain (for one thing, you'd pretty much have to
know in advance the microscopic details of everything that would have gone on
in the removed part of the brain, or else guess and get incredibly lucky), but
it presents no difficulties in priciple for a digital simulation,
The only fundamental difficulty I can see with this is if the brain
actually uses quantum computation, as suggested by some evidence that
photopsynthesis does (quoted by Bruno in another thread) - in which
case it might be impossible, even in principle, to reproduce the
activity of the rest of the brain (I'm not sure whether it would, but
it seems a lot more likely).
Charles
That would keep you from cloning the state of the brain, but it should
still be possible to reproduce the functionality. So it be like
replacing part of your brain with that same part from some other time;
you'd lose memories, or have them scrambled, but it wouldn't affect
whether or not you had qualia.
Brent
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