It loses any data that is not structural in the neurons’ physical shape—whose importance is not currently known. We can presume that electrical signals can be rebooted, but can chemical ones? Will the brain fail as badly as a drunkard or someone who drinks twenty espressos, if shorn of its chemical context?
This is particularly plausible because the brain is full of low-level feedback loops controlling endocrine stuff—I could fully expect them to go completely bugfuck if their sensor inputs suddenly read “0.0”.
To give an example here: “gonadotropin-releasing hormone analogue” drugs are used to block secretion of sex hormones. They were originally designed to increase them. GNRH is the “on switch” signal, the drugs mimic it. And indeed they do initially increase hormones—then the brain’s regulatory feedback slams on the brakes, all the way to zero. Nobody knew that particular feedback was there before they poked it with a drug.
This tech may make testing the above much easier though.
Freeze, slice, stain, and microscope can check chemicals in the way this cannot.
There are few enough degrees of freedom in the endocrine system that having it arbitrarily reset to some normal level… won’t alter your identity, it’ll just alter your mood.
Especially since this is going to have to be emulated anyway.
That works fine if it’s just the endocrine system whose information you lose. It works less well if there are a hundred systems, each with several degrees of freedom, whose joint state needs to be in some relatively narrow region in order to preserve one’s identity.
Yeah, but my point being, you don’t know all those feedbacks. There are probably scads of them. And realistically the only way to find out would be to boot up a great many nonhuman animals first, and watch them bug out in informative ways. Which is likely to be cruel work, and not fun at all.
Also “only alter your mood”? Well, only as much as being hypoglycemic, or hypoxic, or panicking for breath, or ravenous, or various other hormone or feedback linked things alter your mood, especially with them all firing at OHSHITGONNADIE levels all at once—ie, it would be instantly and horribly incapacitating.
No, it would not. Those meds rebalance an unbalanced system, they don’t rebuild a completely undercut system. And you are assuming that simulating the chemical effect of the meds would be easy—lest you forget, we’ve thrown away the chemicals, that’s the problem.
Your claim seems important if true. My personal tendency is to preserve data where I don’t understand what’s going on, and my impression is that lots of data is stored in the biochemistry itself… precisely which receptors exist, how deeply they’re embedded in membranes, what kinds of fatty acids a membrane is made of, and so on. Dendrites and axons engage in chemotaxis where they follow genetically programmed ion and/or protein gradients. If you wipe out the chemical gradient information then how do you know what sorts of ways that the dendrites should regrow in the weeks and months post-resuscitation?
A divergence of opinions here could be due to different assumptions about what kind of knowledge will be available in the context of resuscitation. If your resuscitators have vast and deeply tested knowledge of the operation of many kinds of brains, then they might be able to mock up plausible values for all the chemistry and produce someone “similar enough” (and its certainly better than nothing but a bunch of letters and photos and Madeleines). If they’re doing this for the first time in a sort of “1950′s plucky engineer mode”, then I would naively suspect that plastination pushes someone closer to information theoretic death than even membrane-damaging no-vitrification cryonics of the sort that was standard operating procedure in the mid-1970s.
If you wipe out the chemical gradient information then how do you know what sorts of ways that the dendrites should regrow in the weeks and months post-resuscitation?
If I wake up and I feel like myself on a second to second basis, I will not be upset if my path through mind space is drastically altered on a time scale of weeks and months, so long as it doesn’t lead me to insanity. Hell, I hope I’ll be able to drastically change my mind on that time scale anyway once I’m uploaded.
This will end up being important if the details of these systems are important for encoding the differences between humans rather than just important for having a properly functioning brain. If it’s just important for proper functioning, we can just figure it out once and then assume that the brain you’re reconstructing has these systems in good working order. If it’s important for encoding the differences between humans then we’d have to preserve these systems to preserve “you”.
I’m reminded of Charles Stross on space colonization, where he talks about how it’s a bit too late to realize you forgot the (insert essential mineral here) supplement when your interstellar generation ship starts coming down with the purple polkadot scurvy at 0.001c and boosting. There’s a reason we can’t reliably provision a generation ship, and it’s that we have never yet tried to completely and permanently sever ourselves from Earth’s ecology and biosphere. We may think we’ve got it all covered, but if there’s a leak in the cycles somewhere, or something missing we never knew was important, our intrepid astronauts are going to be in for a hard time, either immediately or generations later.
This by analogy strikes me as a general problem with uploading, but a specific problem with anything that throws away a lot of “body biosphere”. There will be an initial shakedown period, mostly on animal models, where we learn the obvious breakages (some of which are likely to only show up in human uploads because they create subtler kinds of mental illness). But it’s going to be hard to be sure we have eliminated all the deficiencies and closed all the feedback loops. It will just plain take time, and a lot of unpleasantness and health scares.
There’s a reason we can’t reliably provision a generation ship, and it’s that we have never yet tried to completely and permanently sever ourselves from Earth’s ecology and biosphere. We may think we’ve got it all covered, but if there’s a leak in the cycles somewhere, or something missing we never knew was important, our intrepid astronauts are going to be in for a hard time, either immediately or generations later.
So redo Biosphere 2, for longer. Even the first time it was done, it worked remarkably well! They did make some mistakes but recovered, and came out healthier than they went in. That suggests a multi-generation-capable version is not as far off as one might pessmistically conclude. The most valuable information is always the first information—if a problem doesn’t appear quickly, then it probably isn’t that important...
if a problem doesn’t appear quickly, then it probably isn’t that important...
I agree completely, especially about how close we probably are to a successful Biosphere, but just to throw out an example where this is wrong: vitamin B-12 deficiency usually takes a decade to demonstrate symptoms, and is fatal.
It loses any data that is not structural in the neurons’ physical shape—whose importance is not currently known. We can presume that electrical signals can be rebooted, but can chemical ones? Will the brain fail as badly as a drunkard or someone who drinks twenty espressos, if shorn of its chemical context?
This is particularly plausible because the brain is full of low-level feedback loops controlling endocrine stuff—I could fully expect them to go completely bugfuck if their sensor inputs suddenly read “0.0”.
To give an example here: “gonadotropin-releasing hormone analogue” drugs are used to block secretion of sex hormones. They were originally designed to increase them. GNRH is the “on switch” signal, the drugs mimic it. And indeed they do initially increase hormones—then the brain’s regulatory feedback slams on the brakes, all the way to zero. Nobody knew that particular feedback was there before they poked it with a drug.
This tech may make testing the above much easier though.
Freeze, slice, stain, and microscope can check chemicals in the way this cannot.
So… set a reasonable endocrine state, not 0.
There are few enough degrees of freedom in the endocrine system that having it arbitrarily reset to some normal level… won’t alter your identity, it’ll just alter your mood.
Especially since this is going to have to be emulated anyway.
That works fine if it’s just the endocrine system whose information you lose. It works less well if there are a hundred systems, each with several degrees of freedom, whose joint state needs to be in some relatively narrow region in order to preserve one’s identity.
Yeah, but my point being, you don’t know all those feedbacks. There are probably scads of them. And realistically the only way to find out would be to boot up a great many nonhuman animals first, and watch them bug out in informative ways. Which is likely to be cruel work, and not fun at all.
Also “only alter your mood”? Well, only as much as being hypoglycemic, or hypoxic, or panicking for breath, or ravenous, or various other hormone or feedback linked things alter your mood, especially with them all firing at OHSHITGONNADIE levels all at once—ie, it would be instantly and horribly incapacitating.
It wouldn’t be nice at all, but it wouldn’t be death, and it would be fixable even with current psych meds.
No, it would not. Those meds rebalance an unbalanced system, they don’t rebuild a completely undercut system. And you are assuming that simulating the chemical effect of the meds would be easy—lest you forget, we’ve thrown away the chemicals, that’s the problem.
Your claim seems important if true. My personal tendency is to preserve data where I don’t understand what’s going on, and my impression is that lots of data is stored in the biochemistry itself… precisely which receptors exist, how deeply they’re embedded in membranes, what kinds of fatty acids a membrane is made of, and so on. Dendrites and axons engage in chemotaxis where they follow genetically programmed ion and/or protein gradients. If you wipe out the chemical gradient information then how do you know what sorts of ways that the dendrites should regrow in the weeks and months post-resuscitation?
A divergence of opinions here could be due to different assumptions about what kind of knowledge will be available in the context of resuscitation. If your resuscitators have vast and deeply tested knowledge of the operation of many kinds of brains, then they might be able to mock up plausible values for all the chemistry and produce someone “similar enough” (and its certainly better than nothing but a bunch of letters and photos and Madeleines). If they’re doing this for the first time in a sort of “1950′s plucky engineer mode”, then I would naively suspect that plastination pushes someone closer to information theoretic death than even membrane-damaging no-vitrification cryonics of the sort that was standard operating procedure in the mid-1970s.
That’s pretty much my take on it, though with different details.
Is the idea to upload the record on to a generic brain? Do the details of DNA and its methylation matter to identity?
If I wake up and I feel like myself on a second to second basis, I will not be upset if my path through mind space is drastically altered on a time scale of weeks and months, so long as it doesn’t lead me to insanity. Hell, I hope I’ll be able to drastically change my mind on that time scale anyway once I’m uploaded.
This will end up being important if the details of these systems are important for encoding the differences between humans rather than just important for having a properly functioning brain. If it’s just important for proper functioning, we can just figure it out once and then assume that the brain you’re reconstructing has these systems in good working order. If it’s important for encoding the differences between humans then we’d have to preserve these systems to preserve “you”.
I’m reminded of Charles Stross on space colonization, where he talks about how it’s a bit too late to realize you forgot the (insert essential mineral here) supplement when your interstellar generation ship starts coming down with the purple polkadot scurvy at 0.001c and boosting. There’s a reason we can’t reliably provision a generation ship, and it’s that we have never yet tried to completely and permanently sever ourselves from Earth’s ecology and biosphere. We may think we’ve got it all covered, but if there’s a leak in the cycles somewhere, or something missing we never knew was important, our intrepid astronauts are going to be in for a hard time, either immediately or generations later.
This by analogy strikes me as a general problem with uploading, but a specific problem with anything that throws away a lot of “body biosphere”. There will be an initial shakedown period, mostly on animal models, where we learn the obvious breakages (some of which are likely to only show up in human uploads because they create subtler kinds of mental illness). But it’s going to be hard to be sure we have eliminated all the deficiencies and closed all the feedback loops. It will just plain take time, and a lot of unpleasantness and health scares.
So redo Biosphere 2, for longer. Even the first time it was done, it worked remarkably well! They did make some mistakes but recovered, and came out healthier than they went in. That suggests a multi-generation-capable version is not as far off as one might pessmistically conclude. The most valuable information is always the first information—if a problem doesn’t appear quickly, then it probably isn’t that important...
I agree completely, especially about how close we probably are to a successful Biosphere, but just to throw out an example where this is wrong: vitamin B-12 deficiency usually takes a decade to demonstrate symptoms, and is fatal.