When you think about it, the brain is really nothing more than a collection of electrical signals.
Statements like this make me want to bang my head against a wall. No, it is not. Brain is a collection of neural and glial cells, the role of which we only partially understand. Most of the neurons are connected through various types of chemical synapses, and ignoring their chemical nature would fail to explain the effects of most psychoactive drugs and even hormones. Some of the neurons are linked directly. Some of them are myelinated, while others are not, and this is kinda big deal, since there’s no clocking in the nervous system, and the entire outcome of the processing depends on how long it takes for the action potential to propagate through the axon. And how long it takes for the synapse to react. And how long the depolarization persists in the receiving neuron. And all of that is regulated by the chemistry of regulating gene expression patterns. And we’re not even talking about learning and forming long-term memories, which are due to neuroplasticity, entirely controlled by gene expression patterns. It’s enough to suppress RNA synthesis to cause anterograde amnesia—although it will also cause some retrograde amnesia too., since apparently merely using neurons causes them to change.
Also, C. elegans doesn’t even have a brain; it has ganglia.
Look, I understand that this is some interesting research, but calling it “brain uploading” is like comparing the launch of a firework to interstellar travel: essentially, they’re the same, but there are couple of nuances.
Agreed this is not brain uploading. Actually this research is not that much different from what has previously been done in computer simulations. The advance is having embedded it in a physical substrate vs a computer.
However, are you implying that C. elegans uploading wouldn’t count as uploading because it’s so much simpler that a human brain? If so, I disagree with you there. A lot of people think that it would be basically impossible to encode preferences from a C elegans organism (eg learned patterns) into a computer. It certainly hasn’t been done yet AFAIK. Doing it would be a conceptual advance and would allow us to tweak our models of how certain types of neurons, electrical synapses, and chemical synapses work, inter alia.
Also, whether you call the C. elegans nervous system a “brain” or a “ganglia” is a question of semantics. Many and perhaps most researchers do call it a brain, see eg here.
My primary concern is that the model is very simplified. Although even on this level it may be interesting to invent a metric for the accuracy of encoding the organism’s behavior—from completely random to a complete copy.
Statements like this make me want to bang my head against a wall. No, it is not. Brain is a collection of neural and glial cells, the role of which we only partially understand. Most of the neurons are connected through various types of chemical synapses, and ignoring their chemical nature would fail to explain the effects of most psychoactive drugs and even hormones. Some of the neurons are linked directly. Some of them are myelinated, while others are not, and this is kinda big deal, since there’s no clocking in the nervous system, and the entire outcome of the processing depends on how long it takes for the action potential to propagate through the axon. And how long it takes for the synapse to react. And how long the depolarization persists in the receiving neuron. And all of that is regulated by the chemistry of regulating gene expression patterns. And we’re not even talking about learning and forming long-term memories, which are due to neuroplasticity, entirely controlled by gene expression patterns. It’s enough to suppress RNA synthesis to cause anterograde amnesia—although it will also cause some retrograde amnesia too., since apparently merely using neurons causes them to change.
Also, C. elegans doesn’t even have a brain; it has ganglia.
Look, I understand that this is some interesting research, but calling it “brain uploading” is like comparing the launch of a firework to interstellar travel: essentially, they’re the same, but there are couple of nuances.
Agreed this is not brain uploading. Actually this research is not that much different from what has previously been done in computer simulations. The advance is having embedded it in a physical substrate vs a computer.
However, are you implying that C. elegans uploading wouldn’t count as uploading because it’s so much simpler that a human brain? If so, I disagree with you there. A lot of people think that it would be basically impossible to encode preferences from a C elegans organism (eg learned patterns) into a computer. It certainly hasn’t been done yet AFAIK. Doing it would be a conceptual advance and would allow us to tweak our models of how certain types of neurons, electrical synapses, and chemical synapses work, inter alia.
Also, whether you call the C. elegans nervous system a “brain” or a “ganglia” is a question of semantics. Many and perhaps most researchers do call it a brain, see eg here.
My primary concern is that the model is very simplified. Although even on this level it may be interesting to invent a metric for the accuracy of encoding the organism’s behavior—from completely random to a complete copy.
I doubt that the experimenters themselves wrote the article. Someone has to popularize science to mere humans
The experimenters never write the popular articles. I’ve learned not to attack the messenger (too much).