Re: Automated serial sectioning of brains
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/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Automated serial sectioning of brains
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. 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. Onward! Stephen -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Automated serial sectioning of brains
On Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 10:26 AM, Stephen P. King stephe...@charter.netwrote: 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.htmhttp://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/ http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/%7Emarchal/ 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. 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. Minds can recover from states of sleep, anesthesia, seizure and coma. I think if the cells begin behaving normally then what they were doing at the time they were frozen has little importance as to whether or not the mind can come back. I do agree with Bruno that memory formation of the prior few minutes would probably be lost, as occurs when strong electric currents are applied to the brain. The essence of the person would not be lost though, and you would be as much you as the person who will wake up in your bed tomorrow morning. Jason -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Automated serial sectioning of brains
On 8/18/2011 8:26 AM, 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. 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. Onward! Stephen But this is exactly the point Tegmark addresses in his paper. The temperature of the brain is such that the thermal induced uncertainity of orders of magnitude above the QM limit. So faithful copying at the quantum limit cannot be relevant. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Automated serial sectioning of brains
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/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Automated serial sectioning of brains
On 8/18/2011 1:40 PM, meekerdb wrote: On 8/18/2011 8:26 AM, 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. 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. Onward! Stephen But this is exactly the point Tegmark addresses in his paper. The temperature of the brain is such that the thermal induced uncertainity of orders of magnitude above the QM limit. So faithful copying at the quantum limit cannot be relevant. Brent This is not even a quantum limit issue! The point is that the scanning will only capture position information. That is insufficient to define the potentials, gradients, etc. that are the dynamics, momenta, etc. aspects. The HUP is just a version of the conjugacy that exists in the classical regime that we see in the case Fourier transforms; the conjugate of a collection of delta functions is not a *single* specific set of sine curves. At best we have an equivalence class... My point is that if we cannot even define the Hamiltonian from the position data, how can we even start talking about unloading using microtome data? Onward! Stephen -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Automated serial sectioning of brains
On 8/18/2011 11:30 AM, Stephen P. King wrote: On 8/18/2011 1:40 PM, meekerdb wrote: On 8/18/2011 8:26 AM, 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. 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. Onward! Stephen But this is exactly the point Tegmark addresses in his paper. The temperature of the brain is such that the thermal induced uncertainity of orders of magnitude above the QM limit. So faithful copying at the quantum limit cannot be relevant. Brent This is not even a quantum limit issue! The point is that the scanning will only capture position information. That is insufficient to define the potentials, gradients, etc. that are the dynamics, momenta, etc. aspects. The HUP is just a version of the conjugacy that exists in the classical regime that we see in the case Fourier transforms; the conjugate of a collection of delta functions is not a *single* specific set of sine curves. At best we have an equivalence class... My point is that if we cannot even define the Hamiltonian from the position data, how can we even start talking about unloading using microtome data? Onward! Stephen That's true and that's why you would not capture short term memory information. But the characteristics of the mind and long term memory are coded in the physical connection topology - at least that's the working hypothesis. If you replicated it the replica would start-up with no short term memory but would be like the original following a concussion. Brent Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Automated serial sectioning of brains
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. Onward! Stephen -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Automated serial sectioning of brains
Thank you Stephen for raising this point, I very rarely see it discussed, despite how obvious it is in retrospect. I sometimes wonder what it would be like to inhabit a construction based on a static brain scan... one that could not evolve. I think it would be very much like a stuck record. And yet, the one would not realize it! Clearly, scanning a brain down to the synapse would be an incredible achievement. FWIW I don't think specific firing patterns are all that important, as these get reset every night during sleep, at least in the neocortex. But how the topological model evolves in response to experiencing/imagining/learning/dreaming etc is probably crucial for reconstructing believable personae. Another aspect of the replication idea that is usually overlooked or minimized is the importance of situatedness or embodiment and how difficult (or shocking, from the perspective of the one who inhabits) it would be to be suddenly switched to a simulated/robotic body and environment... and the resulting effects this would have on the replicated/simulated person. Terren On Wed, Aug 17, 2011 at 10:08 AM, Stephen P. King stephe...@charter.net 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. Onward! Stephen -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
