We don’t know if unfreezing the brain will let it start up where it left off. And we won’t for a long while, since my understanding is that cryonics doesn’t even preserve the meat that well. He should get back to us when person #1 has been revived successfully.
Whether of not the brain is a physical machine, the computer is, and your method doesn’t even work for that. Reproducing the hardware through scanning (even if possible) does not restore the state of the process running on it.
Ice crystals rip the cell membranes to shreds.
The working of the brain is a phenomenally complex system, the degree to which we are still only beginning to understand. The notion that we can take a connectome and some fairly loose understanding of neurotransmitter function and turn it into a working simulacrum of the human psyche is like suggesting that you could make a functioning particle accelerator from LEGO[SUP]TM[/SUP] blocks. (The appeal to authority of being a neuroscience graduate student and having taken every class available in artificial intelligence are someone risible given the fact that one of the leading authorities in the biochemistry and neurophysics of cognition, a Nobel laureate who’s name is instantly recognizable to everyone working in the field and who authored the preeminent textbook on the principles of neuroscience, freely admits that we still don’t understand memory and cognition at any scale higher than the interaction of a few neurons in very simple animals such as sea slugs.)
We are at a state where we can currently only diagnose gross pathological dysfunction from brain scans, and we still don’t understand how to correct or often even categorize such problems other than trial and error use of various neurotransmitter reuptake inhibitors and oxidase inhibitors which produce manifest undesirable side effects and sometimes permanently degrade cognitive function. The claim that we are anywhere close to replicating normal cognitive function in any artificial medium or simulation is far away from reality, and in fact, this is exactly what the article linked in the first post says. The purpose of the Machine Intelligence from Cortical Networks initiative isn’t to produce a working model of the brain; it is to perform more detailed study of how neural function works beyond our fairly crude ‘neural network’ models of a massively interconnected state machine to provide new insight and approaches to machine intelligence that give it more human-like abilities such as recognizing a dog. As the article notes near the end:
Even then, however, we will remain far from answering all the questions about the brain. Knowing neural circuitry won’t teach us everything. There are forms of cell-to-cell communication that don’t go through the synapses, including some performed by hormones and neurotransmitters floating in the spaces between the neurons. There is also the issue of scale. As big a leap as MICrONS may be, it is still just looking at a tiny piece of cortex for clues about what’s relevant to computation. And the cortex is just the thin outer layer of the brain. Critical command-and-control functions are also carried out by deep-brain structures such as the thalamus and the basal ganglia.
Regarding the topic of “replacing the brain” to prevent the effects of aging, the essential point is that the brain continues to change through life as part of its natural function and development. If you created an artificial brain that did not undergo such changes, it would very likely not present the same experience, the qualia, for the ‘resident’. It isn’t clear that this would be desirable or fruitful even if it permitted one to extend lifespan indefinitely, and would certainly represent a new area of cognition and psychology. Since this is all hypothetical we can’t really make any qualified guesses as to what it would be like to be held in a physiological stasis of neurological development, but offhand we’d expect increasing problems with memory and associated cognition faculties since the human mind is not evolved to maintain memory for well over a century. Such an indefinite extension might end up being a tortured muddle of increasingly jumbled memories and timelines without a radical retooling of the functions of the brain which, again, we understand only very poorly and incompletely.
Stranger
Your criticisms I take to heart, but they aren’t really very relevant to the question posed by this thread.
If you can solve 90% of the problem by duping the brain’s major electrical signaling, you can by definition solve the last 10% by duping concentration gradients of the various regulatory molecules.
Similarly, while the complexity of how the brain adds extra wiring and connections may be, well, complex compared to simplistic neural nets, it’s not exactly impossible to one day figure out a decent duplication of that. You can trivially slam in some Python code into a neural net implementation that will cause new links to be formed, you just have to figure out exactly the rules the biological brain uses so that you can dupe it correctly. (and then, once you have it working, you have to do an enormous amount of engineering work to make the new algorithm fast enough to use)
If you can even replicate someone as a digital replica, you literally have centuries to solve the neurological problems. You do realize that you don’t have to make just 1 copy, you can keep images of every state of the process. You don’t have to solve the neurological problems associated with someone living for centuries right away, if things go wrong you can just rollback to a previous state…
And you seem to be completely forgetting about, well, forgetting. The brain works just fine with a fixed amount of memory by simply prioritizing what it wants to retain. It would work the same way if you had a million years of life as if you had 100. The million year old brain would simply have forgotten a lot more.
The reason this won’t ultimately work is to somehow show that freezing a brain with intact synapses visible on an STM still doesn’t mean you could recover the data from it.
Unless the freezing is very rapid or cryo-protectants are used or the brain is plastinated first. All things that could be perfected if instead of being defeatist about this, our civilization actually funded the research with the priority it deserves.
Why do we spend, as a civilization, 20% of every dollar we make on medical care when it has diminishing returns? Why don’t we spend just 10% on keeping healthy adults healthy and on treatments that grant a substantial improvement in total lifespan and the other 10% perfecting preservation?
Again - your thread title is a lie. We don’t have this technology, therefore it is NOT feasible to “end death”.
We can preserve a brain as a hunk of meat. We can’t preserve a work mind.
Because less than perfect people want to live, too.
You’ve ignored my point that having huge numbers of old people are likely not good for the advancement of society.
And what about the population problem? If no one dies, are we somehow going to eliminate reproduction? Now there’s a drive that will be hard to do away with.
Anyway, why should we spend a ton of money on keeping people alive indefinitely – because it is bound to cost a great deal to convert people into your new digital brains, not to mention creating replacement parts as the rest of their bodies wear out – when it’s relatively cheap (not to mention fun) making all the brand new shiny replacements we need?
The arguments are bad and you should feel real bad. That’s really all I need to say about that.
But if you insist,
a. People with new, digital brains, wouldn’t be old people. The main reason “old people” are so frustrating to deal with is their brains are degraded.
b. Obviously you have the overpopulation problem whether people live as long as fruit flies or live forever. It’s an unrelated issue.
That is not a valid argument in this forum. If you are going to support your position you need to do better than that.
Arguably, they wouldn’t be human beings at all… which is a whole ‘nother can o’ worms.
Nonsense.
Population grows when the number of births in a given time period exceeds the number of deaths. If people no longer die then the population will DEFINITELY grow if people reproduce at all.
Wow, for a smart guy you really seem to have some basic gaps in your knowledge.
It’s past time to bring Sidney Harris into this.
It has already been pointed out by those more knowledgeable than myself the many ways why what you propose is mere fantasy, but even if you could accomplish what you propose via a magic wish the bad consequences would vastly outnumber the good. It would be like magically solving the problem of health-related issues due to pollution by making humans immune to said pollution and disregarding the subsequent killing off all other life on Earth as an “unrelated issue”.
Why do you think our descendants would want us? Except as a source of protein. Or fodder for the participants in a zombie apocalypse.
“They’re still coming Luke! Keep on defrosting!”
There are a lot better ways of spending our research dollars, thanks. And I’m a lot closer to death than you are.
I suppose you have never worked on any real projects. If you did, you’d know that 90% of the time is spent on the first 90% of the work, and the other 90% of the time is spent on the last 10%. But in this case it would be more like 900% to be optimistic.
For things like fusion the last 10% seems to be taking infinite time.
Wrong. Lots of old people’s brains work fine. They’re just SET. Their views/opinions/believes have become deeply embedded and are based on the world as they knew it as they were growing up. How many people are really open to changing their views, even on something as trivial as what type of music they want to listen to?
And it seems to me that your process will further freeze these views into place, with your recording of their brain as it was, and duplicating it magically somehow, not to mention reloading and refreshing and rebooting and whatall you’ve suggested as ways to keep the brains from going bad.
Take a look at how much the attitudes of society have shifted over just the past 50 years, as to what the ‘proper’ roles are for women, for blacks, for homosexuals, for anyone who isn’t your basic WASPy male. Now consider if, oh, 85% of all the people currently alive (need to allow for some new births, I guess) were plasticized people who had been born and grown up in the 1800s. Do you think we’d have made anywhere near to the progress we’ve made?
And that’s just with people having lived an extra hundred years. Your system would basically fossilize us for century upon century.
Sounds to me like making immortal bodies with brains that are copies of copies (and thus not quite as “sharp” as the original) is a pretty good way to make a zombie apocalypse.
You’re actually technically correct here. In the system I propose, the solar system (and I guess over a long time, the galaxy) would be owned and settled by human emulations who would be carrying baggage from, well, humanity and earth and all that. They’d be less efficient than they could be, but efficient enough to function.
What you are suggesting - a perpetual cycle of death - is just going to result in humanity and all life on earth soon dying and being replaced by something more efficient.
But there’s another way to look at this problem. Do any of you who are still reading this thread actually believe that your grandchildren, and their grandchildren, and so on in a perpetual cycle of brief lives followed by death, are all going to just keep on accepting their fate? As technology gets better and better, and what I have described becomes easier and easier, I just don’t see it. There’s going to be a generation of humans who are the last ones to die. And the one after that will exist for thousands of years at the least.
So what kind of moron states that they want to make sure they are part of the last generation that dies? Now, yeah, we may not have any choice. Preserving the brain using methods we have in 2017 may just not be good enough. We may need nanotech snake-magic* from the year 2300 in order to actually do this. But that’s no excuse for being actively defeatist.
*Imagine a cuboid robot that can crawl around on legs on all 6 faces. It can share power and data by connecting it’s little legs to adjacent robots. Each robot is the size of a bacterial cell. They can form into tendrils by stacking against each other, growing from an end. These tendrils could in theory invade a human body, each tendril growing from the tip, and supplied with a constant supply of power, data, and additional cuboid robots from a host system that drives it.
In theory these tendrils could tamper with biology and basically surgically fix any problem, though like I said, this would be basically magic compared to current capabilities. I only mention it because there are compelling reasons to think such technology is in fact possible.
I’m older now, and have lost loved ones very dear to me. Even if this technology actually existed in my lifetime, I wouldn’t want it if it allowed me this privilege, and not them.
That’s a terrible argument and you don’t believe that in other parts of your life, or you wouldn’t be on this message board.