Eugen Leitl writes:
[quoting Stathis]
> > point in human evolution. But while we have been discussing the rich
> > philosophical issues raised by this possibility, and touched on some of
>the
> > social issues in a world where copying is common, nobody has really
>talked
> > about how these copies will actually be made. It seems to me that our
>old
>
>This has been discussed in other places though, ad nauseam. Of current
>relevance is only one: building numerical models from crysectioned
>cryopreserved (vitrified) human tissue. We won't see anything else within
>our
>lifetime.
>
>There you have a number of issues arising: loss of a few hour window
>(everything not yet consolidated into long-term memory), destruction of the
>original (destructivey copy), creation of an abstracted copy (or several
>copies), based on a different substrate yet isofunctional.
This may be getting a little off topic for this list, but it has always
seemed to me hopelessly naive to think that a person's mind could be
emulated from cryopreserved brain tissue. It would be like trying to
recreate a telephone conversation by examining a diagram of a city's
telephone network. Even if you could get the anatomy correct, which would
mean knowing every neuron's connection with every other neuron, you would
have nowhere near enough information to model a human brain, let alone a
particular human brain state at the time of death. You would also need to
know the electrical potential at every point of every cell membrane; the
ionic gradients (Na, K, Ca, pH and others) across every cell membrane,
including intracellular membranes; the type, position and conformation of
every receptor, ion channel and other proteins; the intracellular and local
extracellular concentrations of every neurotransmitter; the workings of the
cellular transport, synthetic and repair mechanisms for each neuron and
probably also for each supporting glial cell; the intracellular and
extracellular concentration of other small molecules such as glucose, O2,
CO2; how all of this is changing with respect to time; and probably
thousands of other paramemters, many of which would currently be unknown.
Most of this information would probably be lost post-mortem, but even if
some process could be found that preserves it, the sort of technology needed
to scan a brain at this sort of detail would probably not be far short of
atom for atom matter duplication and teleportation.
--Stathis Papaioannou
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Received on Wed Jul 06 2005 - 08:34:33 PDT