[HN Gopher] Mind Emulation Foundation
___________________________________________________________________
Mind Emulation Foundation
Author : gk1
Score : 54 points
Date : 2020-09-01 17:53 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mindemulation.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (mindemulation.org)
| mcculley wrote:
| How does having the connectome get you the mind? Don't you need
| the weights in the neurons? I thought I also read that neurons
| are not discrete units, that there might be weights within the
| dendrites/axons.
| dsiroker wrote:
| The connectome includes the weights.
| mcculley wrote:
| Do you have a reference somewhere that says that? The
| Wikipedia entry for connectomics does not imply that and I've
| not read of anything that can get the weights out of neurons.
| dsiroker wrote:
| Connectome: How the Brain's Wiring Makes Us Who We Are [1]
|
| [1] https://www.amazon.com/Connectome-How-Brains-Wiring-
| Makes/dp...
| dsiroker wrote:
| (I'm the founder & CEO of the Mind Emulation Foundation)
|
| Flattered to see this hit the front page! This is a project I've
| been passionate about for a while and been keeping it mostly
| under the radar.
|
| Now that it's public, I'm happy to answer any questions the HN
| community has.
| mchusma wrote:
| My feedback. I think if I were to donate I would like to see a
| clear roadmap for even getting in the ballpark of doing this.
|
| I have donated to SENS for years, and particularly when they
| started, they didn't really say exactly "donate to cure aging",
| they said "these are the important known problems that we need
| to spend time/money on to make progress here."
|
| I believe there are multiple large known problems doing brain
| emulation. What are they? How will donating to you progress
| those?
| lawlessone wrote:
| How do you think SENS is doing, sorry to go off topic.
|
| I like them, and they give me hope, but i am not sure where
| they are.
| RobertoG wrote:
| Do you have any affiliation or contact with
| https://www.brainpreservation.org/ ?
| vicnicius wrote:
| > This digital emulation could then interact with the rest of
| the world using a simple text interface or a more sophisticated
| robotic avatar with digital representations of taste, sight,
| touch, smell, and sound.
|
| I found this to be the most intriguing bit of the described
| process. I can digest the (theoretical) idea of reproducing the
| mind, mostly agreeing with a materialistic perspective of it.
| What I got myself imagining was the process of adaptation this
| mind would have to go to be capable of interacting with the new
| kinds of inputs and outputs it would have. Imagine you freeze a
| computer while it was running a VR game with max resolution
| settings. You then go on and move the machine to a different
| setup, with a CRT monitor and a keyboard to interact with it.
| How can any meaningful interaction happen in such a context?
| Unless you provide a virtual environment to interact with it
| and allow it to adapt... But then, how would such an
| environment look like to a copy of a mind? Would you have any
| insights on that?
| lachlan-sneff wrote:
| Can you be clearer about what's going on behind the scenes
| here? Additionally, are you aware of the humanityplus and
| ##hplusroadmap communities?
| anvandare wrote:
| Not really a question, more of a remark: both the destructive
| and non-destructive approaches result in the same thing: a copy
| of 'you', not actually 'you'. (The same is true when you go to
| sleep, of course. Whoever wakes up isn't you either)
|
| What you would need is a Ship of Theseus approach - preserving
| the consciousness stream while neuron after neuron is being
| replaced by a digital version, slowly, to convince the stream
| into thinking it's still the same. You can't just take a single
| scan; you have to keep scanning continuously and keep a running
| feedback stream between the (decreasing) wetbrain and the
| (increasing) bitbrain to ensure the illusion of continuity.
|
| (But to be honest, I don't actually believe in consciousness or
| a Self. Whoever started writing this short comment wasn't 'me',
| and neither am I, nothing is)
| dsiroker wrote:
| The gradual replacement approach (as you describe it) is a
| useful thought experiment that gets people more comfortable
| with the possibility of mind emulation but the end state is
| the same for both approaches. One just intuitively _feels_
| more _you_ than the other, but as you said, it 's likely all
| an illusion so doing it while you "sleep" is probably enough
| to make _you_ sufficiently happy to be alive when you wake up
| non-biologically.
| [deleted]
| PaulHoule wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Annals_of_the_Heechee
| gverrilla wrote:
| is this troll content?
| mcculley wrote:
| I am always amused at this kind of approach to immortality. While
| the copy of me that is reborn would appreciate my preparedness,
| that doesn't make this copy any less unhappy about dying.
| dsiroker wrote:
| When you wake up in the morning billions of your cells have
| changed from the night before. Are you any less you?
|
| It is possible one day you will go to sleep biologically and
| wake up non-biologically. It's just a matter of sufficiently
| emulating the processes that were present when you were the
| biological you.
| mcculley wrote:
| I have meditated enough to be unconvinced that even the me
| that goes to sleep is the same guy who woke up that morning.
|
| I try to be good to the guy who wakes up with my memories and
| body the next morning. That makes me no less unhappy about
| dying.
| dsiroker wrote:
| That is a refreshing perspective.
| Trasmatta wrote:
| What if you and the non biological copy both wake up? Which
| one is "you"? I'm obviously going to care more about the one
| that I appear to actually be, and won't be happy if me copy
| decides to kill me.
|
| The idea of a continuous self is probably an illusion, but if
| your body dies that illusion does too. Your copy just lives
| its own version of that illusion.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| > the body will be partitioned such that it could be scanned with
| an electron microscope
|
| "Partitioning" the brain will destroy some of the nanometer-scale
| tissue as it is sliced.
| darepublic wrote:
| Once you become immortal, someone can put you in hell
| WealthVsSurvive wrote:
| I think there is a fundamental paradox at the root of
| consciousness and thought: once we succeed in alleviating
| suffering by discarding the body, we are already in hell. What
| is the purpose of a mind without a body? To witness? To what
| ends? There's a reason that the lower brain is at the seat of
| the throne. Maybe we should focus more on cooperating and less
| on becoming a purposeless husk. If the string is too tight it
| breaks, if it is too loose it will not play.
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| If you can emulate a brain, you can _probably_ emulate a
| body.
| RobertoG wrote:
| >>"[..]What is the purpose of a mind without a body?[..]"
|
| What's the purpose of a mind with a body?
| joeberon wrote:
| To help the body survive
| Trasmatta wrote:
| Yep, this kind of terrifies me. The human mind has an
| incredible capacity for suffering. An emulated mind might have
| many orders of magnitude higher capacity for suffering, on top
| of being effectively immortal. At least the human mind will die
| after 80 or 90 years or so.
| ivan_ah wrote:
| Focussing on synaptic connections seems rather simplistic. For
| full "emulation" they would probably need to emulate the electric
| fields and neurotransmitter concentrations, otherwise just-the-
| spikes simulation will probably capture only a small percentage
| of brain dynamics.
| ravi-delia wrote:
| You're probably right, at least in terms of neurotransmitter
| concentration, but I doubt that synaptic connections are only a
| 'small percentage' of brain dynamics.
| keiferski wrote:
| Recent work in philosophy has called into question the notion
| that the mind/cognition/identity is entirely independent from the
| body.
|
| https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/embodied-cognition/
|
| Personally I think Western culture in particular has neglected
| the physical aspects of existence. The idea that our bodies are
| simply vessels for our minds seems more the result of cultural
| neglect than anything.
| joeberon wrote:
| Recent? Buddha taught all this 2500 years ago
| dsiroker wrote:
| We are not claiming they are entirely independent, quite the
| contrary. The mind is an emergent property of the body. Just
| like music is an emergent property of sound waves.
| keiferski wrote:
| But if your mind and self is formed by and dependent on your
| body, how can you transfer it to a bodyless existence without
| losing that self?
|
| The mind as an emergent property of the body is also not an
| established philosophical or scientific fact, and is quite
| dependent on positivism, which has plenty of issues.
|
| It seems to me that at best, you're creating a surface-level
| copy, but one inherently limited to contemporary scientific
| knowledge. Not to say that this isn't interesting or useful,
| but it's certainly not the same 'self.'
| dsiroker wrote:
| The notion of self is an illusion the mind creates. (There
| are many benefits for doing so, not least of which is self-
| preservation which is helpful to producing progeny and so
| therefore is selected for during natural selection.)
|
| To answer your question directly: one can transfer an
| emergent property of a system to another system by
| sufficiently transferring the mechanism that produce that
| emergent property in the first place. A good analog would
| be emulating the hardware of the Nintendo Entertainment
| System (NES) entirely in software [1].
|
| [1] https://jsnes.org/
| keiferski wrote:
| The self is far more complex than the simplistic
| positivist notion of it. And again, this only works if
| you assume that at the time of the mind creation, your
| knowledge is complete. That seems fairly ignorant
| considering the history of science, not to mention the
| inherent limitations of empirical knowledge.
|
| The NES example is not really a good one because it's a
| created object and knowledge of it is complete, therefore
| replicating it is possible.
|
| Even then, assuming all of this didn't matter- I still
| don't see how the mind maintains itself in a new body.
| It's not as if a human mind is a static entity-it
| constantly comes into contact with the world through its
| embodied form and this reinforces and extends this notion
| of identity. Assuming you could emulate it on a computer,
| it would seem logical that the mind would change to adapt
| to its new body, thus no longer being the same self.
|
| Ultimately any "transfers" will actually just be the
| creation of new minds, which IMO is more interesting
| anyway.
| dsiroker wrote:
| > The NES example is not really a good one because it's a
| created object and knowledge of it is complete, therefore
| replicating it is possible.
|
| One could replicate the NES hardware without any
| knowledge of how it was built by reverse engineering it
|
| > Ultimately any "transfers" will actually just be the
| creation of new minds, which IMO is more interesting
| anyway.
|
| I actually agree but in the same way that you have a "new
| mind" when you wake up in the morning. The continuity of
| self is an illusion. "I" would be very happy to one day
| wake up having been transferred into a non-biological
| system the same way that "I" would be very happy to wake
| up tomorrow.
| keiferski wrote:
| Sure but the mind is reinforced by its constant
| embodiment. If you woke up in another body, or with no
| body, then that identity would seem difficult to
| maintain.
| simion314 wrote:
| >One could replicate the NES hardware without any
| knowledge of how it was built by reverse engineering it
|
| Not sure if one could do that if that person is not very
| familiar with similar projects. Give the NES system to a
| scientist from 1800 and tell me what they could conclude.
| jesselawson wrote:
| Thank you for saying this. It's always so strange to me that
| there are people obsessed with prolonging the inevitable, as if
| immortality itself could be an end-state.
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| All of life is prolonging the inevitable. This would seem to
| be an argument for suicide.
| zzzeek wrote:
| It's been done:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainstorm_(1983_film)
| camdenlock wrote:
| My hesitation with mind emulation is not so much with the
| technical side; I think it's fairly clear that we'll get there.
|
| However, the question of responsible stewardship looms large, and
| is rarely addressed. With whom am I entrusting my mind? How can I
| be sure that such stewardship won't be transferred to another
| party at some point? Who's to guarantee that my mind won't be
| installed into an eternal torment sim?
|
| The stewardship questions have always bothered the hell out of
| me, and the lack of convincing answers has always led me to avoid
| buying completely into the preservation of my body for future
| scanning and uploading into a sim.
| prerok wrote:
| I'm not convinced.
|
| 1. We still don't know what the memory engrams truly are (
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engram_(neuropsychology) ). I
| once read that aside from relying on the interconnections of the
| neurons they also rely on specific proteins created during memory
| creation. They are then vital for memory recollection.
|
| 2. We know that the connections between neurons are important but
| we just realized that the support cells (glia) also affect the
| firing mecanism: they are not only support but a filter as well (
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glia )
|
| 3. Inhibitory interneurons provide a way for synchronous firing
| of neurons to form a learning experience:
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-13170-w
|
| All in all to replicate the brain functionality we would need to
| fully replicate the chemical composition of the brain to the
| lowest level (molecules).
|
| I'm not holding my breath.
| dsiroker wrote:
| > They are then vital for memory recollection.
|
| Even if specific proteins are needed for memory creation (which
| is debatable [1]) it doesn't mean you need to model those
| proteins to retrieve the stored memories from the structures
| that they created. You can read data from a hard drive without
| modeling the CPU or memory bus of the computer that stored the
| data.
|
| > support cells (glia)
|
| Glia cells are the order of 40-50 microns [2] and can easily be
| seen with an electron microscope. In fact, they are present in
| the Lichtman paper [3] linked from the Mind Emulation website.
|
| [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2745628/ [2]
| https://psych.athabascau.ca/html/Psych402/Biotutorials/4/par...
| [3] https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(15)00824-7
| prerok wrote:
| Glia cells can be seen, sure. But to my knowledge we still
| don't understand their impact.
|
| Anyway, my point is that even if you are able to recreate the
| structure you would need to replicate the functionality.
|
| A better analogy would be that even if you have the data on
| the hard drive you would need a special program that would
| know how to interpret it. In this case the data also contains
| a time variant exactly when the data applies which is not
| captured within the structure unless you go to the molecular
| level.
| adeledeweylopez wrote:
| Memory engrams are thought to be DNA methylation patterns in a
| neuron's DNA.
|
| http://learnmem.cshlp.org/content/23/10/587.full
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-14498-4
| prerok wrote:
| Wow, have not read this before. Thanks for sharing!
| lamename wrote:
| I'm not as critical of these goals as some, but to not even
| mention another dimension of complexity beyond connections:
| electrophysiological firing pattern, is quite an
| oversimplification.
| dsiroker wrote:
| With a sufficiently robust representation of the connectome
| including its spatial orientation one can also emulate the
| electrophysiology.
| new_realist wrote:
| Looks like a bunch of kids have watched too much Westworld.
| mrkstu wrote:
| This is so ahead of the curve of reality that it's easy to
| dismiss- BUT at the least it's possible that it could lead to
| some interesting basic research being done. Hopefully that,
| rather than misleading rich marks and separating them from their
| cash is the real goal.
| dsiroker wrote:
| Thank you for your optimism. The goal is to fund and conduct
| basic research.
| lawlessone wrote:
| >a reasonable estimate for the first human brain being mapped
| would in 2084.
|
| :(
| drewbug wrote:
| Any major difference from the Carboncopies Foundation?
| smoyer wrote:
| Reading this reminds me of a great Cory Doctorow / Charlie Stross
| book - "The Rapture of the Nerds"
| (https://craphound.com/category/rotn/)
| VikingCoder wrote:
| My favorite books about mind emulation:
|
| * "Fall, Or Dodge in Hell" by Neil Stephenson [1]
|
| * "Permutation City" by Greg Egan [2]
|
| [1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07PXM4VMD/ref=dp-kindle-
| redirect?...
|
| [2] https://www.amazon.com/Permutation-City-Greg-Egan-
| ebook/dp/B...
| greatquux wrote:
| Yes, "Fall" was really great! It was after reading it that I
| decided I didn't want to emulate my mind anymore. :)
| Trasmatta wrote:
| And for games, SOMA is probably the best example.
| NickM wrote:
| I really loved Permutation City, and loved the beginning of
| Fall, but man it felt like Fall just turned into a really hard
| slog after a certain point. I have definitely enjoyed some of
| Neal Stephenson's other novels too, even slower-paced ones like
| Anathem, but for some reason Fall just didn't do it for me.
| microtherion wrote:
| I agree that the middle of the novel was dragging, but after
| a while, the story was picking up speed again for me.
|
| Stephenson's early novels suffered from weak endings, IMHO.
| His newer ones (Fall, Seveneves) suffer from bloated
| midsections).
| abecedarius wrote:
| Whole Brain Emulation Roadmap
| http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/Reports/2008-3.pdf
|
| The Age of Em https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0198754620/
| jarinflation wrote:
| this could effectively lead to the creation of heaven, an
| afterlife that would eliminate the notion of death. I never quite
| understood why the entire human species, once made aware of the
| non zero probability of this working, not diverted most of its
| entire global energy, time and resources towards this effort. I
| can only imagine it is because most people have no capacity to
| really imagine, or outright refuse to ever imagine, death. In a
| way I do envy them.
| gallerdude wrote:
| You're basically arguing a techno-religious Pascal's Wager, so
| my contra-argument is the same: if the nonzero probability is a
| 0.1% chance, would you really risk your one and only life
| dedicated to something that has a 99.9% chance of not
| happening, whether it be real or techno-heaven?
| jasperry wrote:
| How can you be sure that if we could eliminate death, we would
| also be able to make life so great that our mind would find it
| worthwhile to keep living century after century? In other
| words, if we enabled people's minds to continue forever, how do
| we know it would be heaven and not hell?
| dontreact wrote:
| So the C. Elegans connectome was done in 1986, and we still
| haven't made a fully functional model of the c. elegans brain.
| I'm not sure that this bottom up approach (synapses -> model ->
| behavior) will work better than a top down approach that has been
| making a lot of progress in AI (behavior -> model)
| dsiroker wrote:
| OpenWorm [1] has made a lot of progress toward building a fully
| functional model and when it simulates a worm's behavior it is
| almost indistinguishable from the real thing. Here is a video
| they produced in 2013 of C. elegans moving:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaovWiZJUWY
|
| [1] http://openworm.org/
| Barrin92 wrote:
| _" While we are far from understanding how the mind works, most
| philosophers and scientists agree that your mind is an emergent
| property of your body. In particular, your body's connectome.
| Your connectome is the comprehensive network of neural
| connections in your brain and nervous system. Today your
| connectome is biological. _"
|
| This is a pretty speculative thesis. It's not at all clear that
| everything relevant to the mind is found in the connections
| rather than the particular biochemical processes of the brain.
| It's a very reductionist view that drastically underestimates the
| biological complexity of even individual cells. There's a good
| book, _Wetware: A Computer in Every Living Cell_ , by Dennis Bray
| going into detail on how much functionality and physical
| processes are at work even in the most simplest cells that is
| routinely ignored by these analogies of the brain to a digital
| computer.
|
| There is this extreme, and I would argue unscientific bias
| towards treating the mind as something that's recreatable in a
| digital system probably because it enables this science-fiction
| speculation and dreams of immortality of people living in the
| cloud.
| ebg13 wrote:
| > _It 's not at all clear that everything relevant to the mind
| is found in the connections rather than the particular
| biochemical processes_
|
| I wouldn't expect anyone to consider the connectome to be
| absent the processes inside each of the individual neurons that
| are connected. I consider this to mean just that it's an
| emergent property of the collection working in concert. After
| all, everything is just connections all the way down, even deep
| inside individual cells.
| mkolodny wrote:
| > everything is just connections all the way down
|
| Is that true? Could the "biochemical processes" also include
| relationships between cells?
| dsiroker wrote:
| Correct, in order to emulate a mind we might need to
| include that as well so that is in scope.
| __tg__ wrote:
| I hear the term 'emergent property' bandied about in relation
| to the mind as if using it somehow explains anything. It says
| nothing more than mind exists, somehow, yet we have no clue
| about its nature.
|
| Scientists and philosophers agreeing on something means nothing
| as they have agreed on utter bunk before. The short of it is
| that we know little about the mind and have no idea how to even
| start expanding on the little we know.
| tasty_freeze wrote:
| > Scientists and philosophers agreeing on something means
| nothing as they have agreed on utter bunk before.
|
| That is an extremely cynical position to take; one could use
| it to dismiss anything, even things obviously true. For
| instance, "I don't believe the Sun is powered by fusion --
| nobody has ever gone there to take a sample. Sure, they claim
| to have all sorts of indirect evidence, and there is 99.9999%
| consensus on it, but scientists have backed things before
| that were utter bunk."
|
| > It says nothing more than mind exists,
|
| It makes a much stronger claim than that. There are many
| people who believe that consciousness exists outside the
| mind, and the brain is a kind of consciousness receiver, akin
| to a radio receiver, that picks up the signal and relays it
| to the body. The claim of emergent behavior is an explicit
| rejection that that mystical explanation that is compelling
| to many people.
|
| > The short of it is that we know little about the mind and
| have no idea how to even start expanding on the little we
| know.
|
| This is entirely at odds with reality. Is it your position
| that brain researchers haven't learned anything over the past
| 10, 20, 30 years? Clearly they have, so obviously they do
| have ideas about how to expand on that knowledge.
| dsiroker wrote:
| I've posed this claim to dozens of neuroscientists. If you
| consider the connectome just the static connections then you
| might be right. If you include the dynamics of the brain (the
| biochemical processes) as part of the connectome then most
| neuroscientists would agree that is sufficient to produce the
| emergent property of mind. The honest answer is we don't know
| yet. That said, it's likely not necessary to model every atom's
| interaction with one another so there must be a level of
| abstraction sufficient enough to emulate a mind. Our foundation
| is trying to identify what is the minimal level of abstraction
| necessary to emulate a mind.
| jchrisa wrote:
| In support of the requirement for high-fidelity (atom-for-
| atom) modeling is the notion that an evolved computer would
| converge toward behaviors that supervene on specifics of the
| host environment. If porting a binary to another CPU
| architecture is tough, how easy will it be to port a mind to
| a simulated simple physics? How many edge cases will it have
| to get right to even run at all? If brains are hacks designed
| over millions of generations to surf overlapping fitness
| functions, it makes sense they'd find implementation (real
| physics) dependent optimizations that compound in ways which
| fall apart in toy physics. That's not to say we can't add
| cool peripherals.
|
| ps even with atom-for-atom modeling, how do you know the
| behavior doesn't depend on relations which are not
| computable? If physics ranges over the reals, some of those
| edge cases might be hard to find with a simulator.
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| On the other hand, the brain is famously warm and wet.
| There's a limit to how much local state the brain can
| practically use to compute, given how messy it is.
| dsiroker wrote:
| > If porting a binary to another CPU architecture is tough,
| how easy will it be to port a mind to a simulated simple
| physics?
|
| It will be very difficult, but we shouldn't underestimate
| what is possible decades from now. As an analogy, consider
| when the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) came out in
| the 1980s. Did anyone ever imagine it could be fully
| emulated in JavaScript in a browser [1]? Certainly not
| since those technologies hadn't been invented yet.
|
| [1] https://jsnes.org/
| indrax wrote:
| What's JavaScript? What's a browser?
| jjaredsimpson wrote:
| >If physics ranges over the reals
|
| I thought this was ruled out by
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bekenstein_bound
| cylon13 wrote:
| I can hit myself in the head and I don't lose my train of
| thought, instantly lose consciousness, or die. If
| consciousness relied on the precise positions of individual
| atoms (as far as that makes sense with moving particles) it
| would be way more fragile than we've observed it to be. The
| fact that your brain is resilient to being knocked around a
| bit is evidence towards the underlying mind being at least
| slightly higher level than where strong quantum effects
| live and also fairly redundant.
| im3w1l wrote:
| I agree, but I think there is a case to be made that
| there is important state separate from just which cells
| connect to which and how strongly, but is also more
| coarse grained than single atoms floating around.
|
| The cytoskeleton may be found out to have a role to play.
| The number and locations of ion pumps. Or epigenetic
| changes in clusters of brain cells.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| What if we find that the gut, which has 100 million nerve
| cells, also plays a part in the emergent property of mind?
|
| https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/09/your-gut-directly-
| co...
|
| "In a petri dish, enteroendocrine cells reached out to vagal
| neurons and formed synaptic connections with each other. The
| cells even gushed out glutamate, a neurotransmitter involved
| in smell and taste, which the vagal neurons picked up on
| within 100 milliseconds--faster than an eyeblink."
| phreeza wrote:
| People who have large parts of their gut removed surgically
| don't lose their mind.
| ggreer wrote:
| If that were true, then quadriplegics would have cognitive
| issues, as would those who have their vagus nerve severed.
| Those people don't suffer from impaired cognition or
| drastic personality changes, so we can be sure that the
| nerves in the gut are not important for brain emulation.
|
| Also human brains have an average of 86 billion neurons, so
| emulating an extra 100 million cells (0.1%) would be
| trivial in comparison.
| dsiroker wrote:
| That is one reason why I was very careful to name this the
| Mind Emulation Foundation and not the Brain Emulation
| Foundation. I also use the word 'body' instead of 'brain'
| throughout and define a connectome as: the comprehensive
| network of neural connections in your brain _and nervous
| system._
| Causality1 wrote:
| Indeed. We humans largely create devices that function either
| through calculation or through physical reaction, relying on
| the underlying rules of the universe to "do the math" of, say,
| launching a cannonball and having it follow a consistent arc.
| The brain combines both at almost every level. It may be
| fundamentally impossible to emulate a human personality equal
| to a real one without a physics simulation of a human brain and
| its chemistry.
|
| A dragonfly brain takes the input from thirty thousand visual
| receptor cells and uses it to track prey movement using only
| sixteen neurons. Could we do the same using an equal volume of
| transistors?
| Glorbutron wrote:
| No one is saying a neuron is a one to one equivalent with a
| transistor. That behavior does seem like it's possible to
| emulate with many transistors, however.
| westurner wrote:
| Was just talking about quantum cognition and memristors (in
| context to GIT) a few days ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24317768
|
| Quantum cognition:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_cognition
|
| Memristor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor
|
| It may yet be possible to sufficiently functionally emulate
| the mind with (orders of magnitude more) transistors.
| Though, is it necessary to emulate e.g. autonomic
| functions? Do we consider the immune system to be part of
| the mind (and gut)?
|
| Perhaps there's something like an amplituhedron - or some
| happenstance correspondence - that will enable more
| efficient simulation of quantum systems on classical
| silicon pending orders of magnitude increases in coherence
| and also error rate in whichever computation medium.
|
| For abstract formalisms (which do incorporate transistors
| as a computation medium sufficient for certain tasks), is
| there a more comprehensive set than Constructor Theory?
|
| Constructor theory:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructor_theory
|
| Amplituhedron: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amplituhedron
|
| What _is_ the universe using our brains to compute? Is
| abstract reasoning even necessary for this job?
|
| Something worth emulating: Critical reasoning.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_reasoning
| sieste wrote:
| That plot half way down the page where they fit a straight line
| through 2 points and predict to be able to map human brains by
| 2084 made me laugh.
| dsiroker wrote:
| The y-axis is logarithmic so it's actually representing
| exponential improvements which is a fair upper-bound assumption
| given the rate of improvement in cost to map a human genome was
| better than exponential.
| sieste wrote:
| I get that. It's just that for an excel-trapolation 2x
| outside the observed range based on only 2 data points, 2084
| is a strangely precise estimate. I find it hard to take this
| seriously.
| dsiroker wrote:
| Pull requests welcome. :)
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