Hi Stephen,
On 18 Aug 2011, at 17:26, Stephen P. King wrote:
On 8/18/2011 10:31 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
Hi Stephen,
On 17 Aug 2011, at 16:08, Stephen P. King wrote:
Hi,
Recently a link was referenced that discussed how serial
sectioning of brains is being automated: http://www.mcb.harvard.edu/lichtman/ATLUM/ATLUM_web.htm
I have a question about this. Will this technology yield a model
of the dynamics of brain activity or will it be another taxonomy
of brain structures? It seems that dynamics are completely missing
from the narrative about scanning and uploading our brains into
Turing Machines. How exactly is a topological map of the structure
of the brain contain any information about the specifics of brain
activity?
At best it might allow us to toss out models of dynamics that
have implications that would contradict the topology structure,
but nothing at all about how the topologies evolve.
I don't find the references now, but I remember having read that
some animal, like frogs, can freeze and resume the brain activity
after that. Some experience on rat shows that long term memory is
preserved in freezing, and that during freezing the activity of the
brain is really near zero. Short term memory is not. A cryogenized
person might survive with an amnesia of the last 5-6 minutes.
The dynamic of the brain is coded in the neurotransmitter
concentrations, not in the ionic potential along the axions. That
might be an argument for saying that the comp subst. level *might*
be high.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Hi Bruno,
Freezing would not always destroy the potentials that generate
the dynamics, thus momentum information is preserved. The microtome
is measuring pure positions of the neurotransmiters, etc. Even if we
have a precise map of all the molecules, that information is
conjugate to the momentum information. To copy a mind we need both,
thus the conjugacy makes faithfull copying and uploading impossible.
It makes faithfull copy and uploading of our body impossible, but comp
bet that we can still copy the mind. We don't need to copy the
indeterminate body, only what is relevant for the relative
continuations. It comes from comp, not from the position/momentum
conjugacy.
There is an inherent upper bound on the resolution of the scan thus
indeterminacy and therefore, as you argue, we only bet that the copy
has 1p continuity (bijective isomorphism or faithful homeomorphism)
with the original. I believe that this is a key feature of your
result.
A 1-machine cannot know-for-sure which 3-machine she is. But she might
still do relatively correct bet. Now, could a machine save its own
instantaneous state at the right level? She can. There is no paradox,
but she can't do it with pure scientific evidence, she has to bet, and
be lucky.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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