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Brain Prosthesis Ready For Testing
jhouserizer writes "New Scientist is reporting that an artificial hippocampus is ready to undergo testing. The leader of the team of scientists is Theodore Berger of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. They hope these artificial hippocampuses can replace damaged (stroke, Alzheimer's, etc.) portions of your brain. I wonder what portions of 'you' would be noticeably different to your family & friends? I wonder how long it will be before we can have HUDs, such as in this story by Cory Doctorow?"
It would start a market, particularly in college, when you need to know something. Just implant a piece of brain with some knowledge, kinda like the matrix.
You: I need a bubble sort.
Tank: Comin right up
* Eyes flutter *
You: Lets go!
What, me Tweet?
...sounds like the name of a geek college.
It just has to say "I don't understand and "Where's my tea?".
A dyslexic man walks into a bra.
So i can tell if my armor suit is wearing down, or if im getting sick.
Seriously, i think it would be great to have some stuff built in provided:
A: It has a fucking meaningfull offswitch. I dont need a virus flashing popups at me that i cant turn off.
b: Open source, and the hardware eqivalent. I wont sign a eula for something thats going into my body.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
Fun stuff...on the path to Kurzweil's future.
We can all upload our brains into Neural Net Hardware.
Scarrrry......
Where the Music Matters
Sounds kinda sorta like The Man With Two Brains w/Steve Martin. "I couldn't fuck a gorilla."
Most people would waste a brain extension. Any expansion in intellectual power must be preceded by an expansion in social capacity for learning.
I thought it said "Brain Prostitute." Was I the only one?
o/` Everybody wants prosthetic
foreheads on their real heads o/`
So lets say they get this working. Would it then be possible to record every moment of your life and store it away?
is how long before someone overclocks one of these things? How many tops (thought operations per second) could you get? How would you cool something like that?
That's not a soda... it's a caffeine delivery device!
(But you'll have to get in line behind me!)
Anyone else think of Igor limping off and drooling while mumbling Brains...my master needs brains....
I wonder how far away we are from actually linking the brain to a computer via a neurocannulae? If we can recreate parts of the brain, why not enhance them or make them interfaceable with computers? Think of the possibilities! Lifelike graphics (rendered by your brain, not by a puny graphics card), MMORPGs with true movement, getting shot in FPS games and actually feeling it (would eliminate those dumbasses who run at you all guns blazing just to get your health down to 50% before they get themselves killed in the process) and then there's the good old porn industry that's just waiting for something like this :D
Yes, with the ever increasing student body, ASU is slowly becoming a hypocampus... ...and I think several of the students need some brain work done as well...
*was that out loud?*
"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams."
I wonder how long it will be before we can have HUDs
That would be wonderful. Script kiddie h4x0r5 your in-brain HUD and makes it so all you can see is the goatse.cx guy. No thanks, I'll keep my HUDless brain.
Trolling is a art,
"Forgetting is the most beneficial process we possess," Williams says. It enables us to deal with painful situations without actually reliving them.
Okay, it might be handy, but the MOST beneficial process we possess? I think REMEMBERING might rank up there somewhere.
"Forgetting is the most beneficial process we possess," Williams says. It enables us to deal with painful situations without actually reliving them.
I am very interested in seeing how the brain would adapt to this. Would the brain always remember things or, in the case of trauma, learn to halt impulses before they reach the implanted area so that they are "forgotten"?
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
Now I can drink all I want, and never have to worry about how many braincells I destroy.
Hell, I bet I can sit as close to the T.V. as my heart desires too !
--Ne auderis delere orbem rigidum meum, non erravi pernicose!
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
uh oh...
Abby, Abby Normal.
Click here or here.
now THERE is a sci-fi book I read years ago .. forgot all about that one :) :)
Thanks
--Ne auderis delere orbem rigidum meum, non erravi pernicose!
*taps prostetic arm*"I lost my arm in Nam.."
*taps prostetic leg*"I lost my leg in Korea.."
*taps head* "I lost my brain voting for Bush.."
I have a feeling this will be modded down.. heh.
Anyone remember that episode of DS9 where that ambassador is hit by weapons fire that starts to degrade his brain, so they replace parts of his brain with artifical memory things.
;-)
You ever see that ?!
HAH! Talk about Art Imitating Life! Thats crazy!
let George W. Bush be the first recipient.
two things: #1: is it open source??? #2: can i run slackware on it? just think of how you family and friends react when you have your very own artificial hippopotamus. do you get an intel inside tattoo on your forehead?
Isn't that why we have 'power of attorney'? When you're of sound mind, you appoint someone that you can trust to look out for *your* best interest(s).
Case closed in my books...
For crying out loud, reaction here to his stories ranges from apathetic to appalled. Isn't there some other writer Slashdot could pimp incessantly?
Me, I want a HUD like Bud had in this book.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
they are working out a prosthetic brain before a natural appearing prosthetic penis?
...
Not that I need one, just sayin'
Back in the day when I was studying to be a cognitive scientist (whatever that means), we did a lot of talking about what the nature of intelligence / mind actually is. There was a "strong anti-AI" camp which believed that Artificial Intelligence couldn't happen - even if you created a perfect simulation of a brain, you'd just be "simulating" intelligence, whatever that means.
So, we proposed an experiment. Let's say you took a guy who had completely lost function in a very small, localized area of the brain, and built a machine capable of reproducing its function entirely. You stuck it inside the guy's head, and he was magically fixed.
Now, make the area affected progressively larger - lets say, by replacing the whole hippocampus. Or the entire left hemisphere of the brain. Or, what the hell, the whole thing. At what point do you say that it's no longer a mind, and is "just" a machine?
So, that's the first thing I thought of when I saw this story. Once we can perfectly replicate the functionality of every last bit of the brain, do we just have a really nifty toy, or a genuine mind?
Why are these stories all based upon making the disabled normal? What about making the normal more powerful?
But in the end there is no debate. Those who stand in the way of progress will be killed by the products of progress (implanted guass rifles). Those who make the disabled normal will be killed by those who make the normal something more.
Sure but don't you _EVER_ try to play it back! That'd be circumvention and a serious DMCA violation! The RIAA would be dragging your ass to court before you even finish remembering Britney's latest master*cough*crap*cough*piece..
Learn from the mistakes of others. There isn't enough time to make them all yourself.
I can think of a few political leaders that could use one.
;-)
As a Texas Liberal, you can imagine who one of my first choices for leaders-needing-more-than-room-temperature-IQs is.
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
Now we'll have a bunch of people running around and saying things like "Stapling machine, Mrs Zambesi"
Yet Another Web Site
All those who have emotional and illogical to progress will be killed by those who don't. Too bad for the moralists and ethicists, guass rifles hurt.
"If you lose your hippocampus you only lose the ability to store new memories,"
/. were just an oversight!
And I thought duplicate stories on
... wait, what? They stick an artificial sea horse in your head?
What's that all about?
Ich werde nie wieder denken
Soon we'll be more hippocampus than human.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.
This post is serious. Don't laugh.
If they could reverse the process and take the memories and store them to another medium (e.g. hard drive), that would be cool.
I wonder what portions of 'you' would be noticeably different to your family & friends?
I don't think the word should be "different", but "better". Things like Alzheimer's can be disastrous to your family. You disappear, and a completely different, and usually unwanted, person is the replacement. It's a horrible disease.
Imagine what will happen if a chip goes bad! Total confusion.
I think we can guess where to find a website called "goatse.cx". Is it really necessary to actually link to goatse.cx? It's not like you were even trying to hide it, either. Amateur ;-)
Freedom: "I won't!"
Jim: Hey.
Bob: Hey, Hows it goin jim?
Jim: Just added some memory to my brain, long overdue.
Bob: Sounds good.
Jim: Whats your name again?
Bob: Sounds like bad memory.
Jim: oh no problem its cheap these days anyway.
I've left to find myself. If you happen to see me, please, keep me there until I return.
Sizzuck it !!!
consider:
- the hippocampus is a black box (they can't even see the "object code," if you will
- complex systems are notoriously difficult to debug
I find the claim that the scientists have considered every possible behavior and simulated it in firmware to be suspect.
How can they be sure they have considered every possible input/output? How can they be sure that what they observed was "correct" behavior?
Any biologists or neuroscientists care to elucidate? Also, how similar is the human hippocampus to the rat's? Couldn't the behavior differences require complete regression testing? It seems like this increase in precision in medicine demands a commensurate increase in the precision of testing.
In Kurzweil's future, I believe that he proposed uploading of the brain, but knew of no meaningful way to get 'you' into a computer.
What he meant by this, of course, was that if you were to copy an image of your brain into a computer, then the real 'you' would still be outside the machine, watching the image of you play with all the bells and whistles and fun things that their new digital life afforded them.
So, I would suggest the following:
1) nano-machines are placed into your brain, where they spread out and cradle every neuron.
2) as neurons die (old age, etc) the nano-machine become active, and emulate the neurons that they're cradling. These would be the Type I nano-machines.
3) eventually, you have a completely robotic brain, devoid of biological tissue, but the structure of the brain still encodes it's function, so... how do we 'upload' without having the problem of two copies of you?
4) the nano-machines are slowly replaced by a different kind of nano-machine... one that can only act as a transmitter/receiver of information, and cannot do any computation itself. These type II machines offload the processing that they would have to do to a computer outside your body, and as more and more type II's are introduced, more and more of the computing takes place outside of 'you'... now it's easy to see how 'you' could get into the machine...
And that's that. Of course, some would suggest the following:
1) make copy of person's brain in a computer
2) kill the person
But would that really transfer 'you' - your consciousness, and the perception of self? Or would it just be an emulation that thinks it's you?
I don't know. Neither does Kurzweil, as far as I can remember.
(Apologies to Mr. Kurzweil if I've misquoted or otherwise screwed up your ideas - it's been a while since I've read your work)
The rise in quality brought about by modern hydroponics has really put a hurting on my hippocampus. I hope the testing goes well. I will surely become a customer as I descend through middle age.
Who was I trying to call on this phone I picked up? What did I walk down to the basement for? Who put this pizza crust in my mouth? Why is the mouse pointer hovering over the submit button? Screw it. Just chew and click the damn button.
The hippocampus integrates short-term memory into long-term. People who have had their hippocampus damaged (or removed) are unable to form any new long-term memories. They live incredibly interesting lives, because everyone they meet is a new person - every time they meet them. Why would you want to actually have yours replaced?
I told my wife that if I had my hippocampus removed, I'd get to sleep with a new woman every night, and not even be cheating on her! She didn't appreciate the comment so much, though....
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
The difference between the brain and the heart is that we understand
how the heart works in detail. Treating the hippocampus like a "black
box" will probably not work. This just begs the question of how the
brain works, which we still don't know. I would never let someone
open up my skull and implant something if they couldn't explain how
and why it works. Sorry but this is not news, just some promising
research combined with wishful thinking.
...now I can get a partial brain transplant from a hippopotamus??????
Hippocampii is not the plural of hippocampus.
and
Hippopotamii is not the plural of hippopotamus.
Just want to head that one off at the pass.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these things!!!
"I wonder what portions of 'you' would be noticeably different to your family & friends?"
what all goes into the hippocampus? is your personality in there or just the bits that make it possible to remember where your keys are? if you have alzheimer's you're already a different person than your kids or spouse remember from a few years prior.
-
Don't get your hopes too high for this invention. The process overall is very, very cool, but the fact that they don't understand how the hippocampus works, they just worked out a neural net model of imputs and outputs in rats, leads one to believe there will be a lot of bumps down this road. In that way the model they worked out isn't nearly as interesting as how they interface the chip with living tissue, and how they mapped the pathways of the hippocampus in the first place (or, for that matter, if there is variability within hippocampuses or if it is predetermined by genes).
Of course, I want one, and I want to mod it. Record an encoding of a lecture, and play it back on the train ride home. Or do a 2 second loop of someone while they say their name, in order to remember those bloody things (why can't people just e-mail their names to my phone?). Or, as in the case of Daredevil, put an encoding on hold until the end of a film in order to know if it is worth wasting space on.
I can't wait until I get Alzheimers just to try this out! Fortuitously, that will be about the same time this chip comes out of beta.
The ______ Agenda
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these! hehe...
As long as brain tastes the same as before, I have no problem with it.
But would that really transfer 'you' - your consciousness, and the perception of self? Or would it just be an emulation that thinks it's you?
I think it would be you. Think of it this way: if the emulation is good enough so that no observer can distinguish between the original and the emulation, then that person has been transferred.
There's no reason to believe that the person being emulated is any more qualified an observer than anyone else. If it's good enough to fool outside observers, it's good enough to fool the person being emulated.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
While the hippocampus is critical in forming memories, it doesn't pass every single experience you have into memory. This device is the same... it merely mimics the hippocampus' behavior. The researchers even admitted that they didn't know how the hippocampus works. Rather they just reproduced the behavior that a working hippocampus would produce.
;-)
In other words, this device is to the hippocampus (a part of your brain involved in encoding data for storage) what Samba is to Windows....
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
It's called Project: George W Bush. Sadly we have to wait till the next election to close down that bad idea.
- hungry
hippocampus. you might loose your marbles.What are the chances that the hippocampii they modelled the chip from were somehow defective (maybe even just slightly), and they are going to pass those defects onto everything and everyone else that they insert the prosthetic into?
Just because I doubt myself does not mean I find your position compelling.
Johnny Mnemonic: "I can carry nearly eighty gigs of data in my head."
Another interesting thing to note is that drugs like alcohol and marijuana affect short-term memory by interferring with the hippocampus. One of the reasons that happens is because the hippocampus has a high number of cannabinoid receptors. But if this organic part of the brain were to be replaced with electronics, would the drug's effect on memory be diminished or disappear? Think about that the next time you decide to wear beer (or bud) goggles.
Basically, it seems they sent an input to it, got the output, and repeated that enough times to make a chip that produces the right response for each input. I see some problems with this:
First, isn't the brain a dynamic thing? This doesn't sound like something that can adapt.
Second, does this method work at all? If I say, sent bytes to a router, analyzed the output, and made a chip that produced that output with the input I sent, would it work? It just sounds way too simplistic.
Maybe somebody has better info on this?
Artificial hippo-campus? I wasn't aware that hippos attended college in nature...
"In a 32-bit world, you're a 2-bit user. You've got your own newsgroup, alt.total.loser." -Weird Al
sounds boring. when i go to the zoo, i want to see the real thing, dammit!
Yet again, the real world imitates one of his stories. He has a couple of stories based in a world where everyone's brain is swapped out for a crystal computer. Mindfuck stuff about the true seat of consciousness, mortality and the meaning of "human". Just remembered "Reasons to be cheerful", specifically about brain prosthesics and personality.
Home page with free stories
This is my third Greg Egan post in the last few months and they've all been ontopic. He thinks big thoughts about our near future and is a much better writer than Cory Doctorow, imho.
... and I can think of no better place to advertise them than on Slashdot!
to wire your brain like that. i mean, come on, we have people here talking about going online using nothing but their noodle, and yet no one has thought of how annoying those x10 ads could really get, when they're piped directly into your brain.
The wise follow a damned path, for to know is to be forsaken.
This screams 802.11... :-I I'd be afraid that this device would be queryable. If they managed to fit a webserver in a fly, why not.
As a smashed hippocampus, (b9 cancer @ 6 inutero), I'm drooling to get a replacement and see just what makes the rest of the population so fucking stupid...
The hippocampus opperates like the ribbon cable of your brain between your HD0, the FSB, and HD1. It's not the hardrive, or RAM, maybe a little like the bus and cache for the CPU.
Boy, between this, lamprey brain powered cyborgs, escaping robots, remote controlld roaches, cloning and rogue bioweapons, it's a great time to be a wild-haired crazy-eyed visionary.
Tampering in God's domain has never been more fruitful!
They said I was mad, the fools. Now, I will crush them all!
There's no reason to believe that the person being emulated is any more qualified an observer than anyone else. If it's good enough to fool outside observers, it's good enough to fool the person being emulated.
That may be, but it won't fool the person being killed: The original.
A copy is a copy. The consciousness (spirit, soul, whatever it's called) must be moved along with everything else.
Oh no! How do I keep Alan Ralsky out of my head!?
Spam King Lives Large off Others' E-Mail Troubles
Heisenberg may have been here.
duh.
This definitely brings up an interesting argument. IIRC, human adult neural cells do not reproduce, right? Maybe this is for a reason, or maybe lack of neural reproduction is a sign of aging?
"It's a very tangled subsystem." --Windows kernel guru
Personally I'd be happy stopping at 3. I now have a self-repairing, programmable brain (and possibly a self-repairing, programmable body). Why would I want to move into VR? The possibilities in the real world would be endless.
Whatever happened to that scientist that was going to record his brainwaves while he moved his arm around, and then play the signals back into his brain to see if his arm would make the same movements? Anybody remember this? I saw it on Wired a year or two ago.
In both methods you mention, it's the pattern of thought and memory that's perceived as important, since Kurzweil discards brain tissue so easily in favor of nano-machines and machine processing. Personally, I agree with this assessment on both logical and religous grounds, as well as ethical grounds.
If that's true, that means that both the 'you' inside your brain and the 'you' inside the computer in the 'copy and kill' method would both really be you. Both have memories, emotions, and preferences of the original. It would be unethical and immoral at that point to destroy either one.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Successful "transferring" of conscience should go a little more like this:
At some point in the future, we will create a device that can interface a human brain with a computer.
With enough pathways to the network, the user should "feel" and "think" the computer, more and more.
Eventually, the lines between that person's "self" and the computer "continuum" will be increasingly blurred. The human will become less and less aware of what's going on in his brain vs. the computer, and maybe not even care.
I would expect at some point, the body will die, and if enough "blending" of computer/human has occurred, you might not even notice the difference.
Neat.
Yes, to an observer it would appear to be 'you'. But where would 'you' be? What is it that makes you, you? Sure, your brain maybe 100% emulated in another form, but that doesn't mean your "essence" would be transfered as well. The emulated 'you' would be self aware of itself, but that in itself would be emulated as well.
For example, pretend for a moment that a written piece of paper is intelligent and self aware. You photocopy the piece of paper and now have 2 self aware entities exactly mimicking each other. If you burn the original up it's life essence is gone yet, to you, the copy will replace the original. They are separate entities and are each individually self aware yet do not share the same synapsis...
We, as humans, have not figured out what makes us us. This is where religion comes into the picture, which may be nothing more than a simple way to explain 'you'...
This also leads us down the path of human commodities. If we could have cloned past geniuses via emulation we would have an abundant resource pool. But, those individuals ceased to be when they died. A software Einstein would not be Albert...
There's no way. How many neurons does the rat hippocampus have - about 300,000 or so, right? Consider that researchers modelling individual neurons to high degrees of accuracy run simulations that can take hours to model a few seconds of a single neuron's operation. What kind of computing power would it take to simulate hundreds of thousands of neurons accurately enough so that it can replace the wetware? Brains are way too complex for a single chip to replace any significant slices of them, at this point. Consider also that the hippocampal neurons are intricately and finely connected with neurons in other brain regions. How would you hook such a thing up? These researchers are sticking electrodes in and getting sum signals from large groups of neurons. That's very different from how the hippocampus is connected.
This has gotta be a hoax.
Sounds like fun, but I won't be signing up...
Imagine what kind of nastiness could happen if people decided to put pre-determined instructions on the bits of brain that are inserted into your head... "Buy Walmart!" etc... GREAT possibility for sponsorship by big companies into the research though...
These things are great. I just had one installed yesterday.
These things are great. I just had one installed yesterday.
These things are great. I just had one installed yesterday.
These things are great. I just had one installed yesterday.
These things are great. I just had one installed yesterday.
There is only your current state.
In the greater Los Angeles area, there are two Pac-10 schools: USC aka The University of Southern California - (a private school), and UCLA aka The University of California (at) Los Angeles (state school). They are two very different schools. The Trojans vs. the Bruins. I didn't read the article b/c this mistake was too funny to me, being a Californian and all.
What about all those wonderful chemicals that also affect our mind and how we think/feel? I think that having a purely electronic hippocampus could have some devious side affects.
WSo by your reasoning an advanced AI could never have a spirit, sould, whatever it's called with out killing/stealing someone else's? I think you've been reading too much Card and not enough Kurzweil. Remember Molly's friend George (which started as a digital assistant and ended up digitally merged with her)......i believe Kurzweil saw him as an entity who was a real and valid as a person who's been digitized even though he never han a physical self.
That's metaphysics; you are presupposing the existence of consciousness independent of a physical medium.
At present, there is no evidence to support (or refute) your hypothesis.
It's just as possible that consciousness is an epiphenomenon of chemical activity in a special configuration of neurons known as a "brain" - in much the same way that "Pac-Man" is an epiphenomenon of certain electrical impulses in special configuration of silicon known as a "Z80 CPU and EPROMs", or "P4 2.4GHz, hard drive, and MAME".
If the materialist viewpoint is the case, and the copy is destructive, then yes, one of me experiences death. And one of me experiences a lifetime before transfer to machine, followed by an odd transitional moment (which may not be "experienced" per se -- can a machine actually be said to be "running" code in the nanoseconds between clock cycles?), followed by life as a machine.
More interestingly, if the copying process is nondestructive, one of me experiences being the aforementioned weird transition from "running on meat" to "running on silicon", and the original experiences nothing worse than having some kind of funky scanner waved over me.
I'd like to run on silicon. fork() me a few times, plug my copies into space probes, and lob them off on random paths to star systems, and HLT me until there are enough photons bouncing off my solar panels to run my clock. It may take 500,000 years to go from star system to star system, but who cares? I cease to exist for half a million years at a time, but those are the boring parts of the trip anyways. Finally, I could see the galaxy on five Altarian dollars a day!
Someone's really got to be full-blown brain dead to think leaving Saddam Hussein in power is the best solution.
With Chomsky's support.
duh.
Acutally they have ends....as long as you are dependant on the physical world to define the rules (those of physics at the very least) to determine your existance there may be a large number of possibilities, but there would still be limitiations, moving into a virtual world would remove ALL limitations. However I tend to agree I would want those limitations.....as Kurzweil pointed out "Death gives meaning to life"....and as Quinn said "Immortality consists largly of bordom".
OK begin testing NOW !
testing testing 1 , 2 , ehh , ehh, 7?
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Because at geek schools it's like 10-1 guys to girls so all the girls balloon up - like hippos.
How long before a l33T bR41n hAxOr overclocks it?
Bayesian filtering! Eventually the "is this spam?" decision process can be encoded such that your brain can execute it offline, without bringing it to the attention of your senses or concious thought. Then it really is you deciding whether or not something is spam, only you won't actually have to hold it in your mind, consider, or remember.
Obviously
Heck, if Gore had one of these, he might have even been able to graduate and get a master degree.
I heard they were using old P-90 chips as prototypes. Oh great, we'll have wonderful memory, we'll just suck at math.
Or climb a hi-voltage tower.
Black box? Closed Protocol?
Isn't this what the Samba team have been doing for years? (Tickling an NT box to see how it responds and imitating it in open source?)
Kind of interesting. It could be the ultimate equalizing factor, if it were cheap enough. Problem is, it wouldnt be, simply because it would the ultimate equalizing factor.
I think the Hippocampus is used to decide what to remember and what not. This goes for both short term and long term memory. Now, if you take LSD for example, this kind of knocks out the Hippocampus or at least prevents it from functioning correctly. That's why you get the weird illusions and color sensations. The hippocampus can't sort out important from unimportant anymore. So I guess people with implants would be immune to LSD?
Um... I didn't do it!
If this brain device really works, then maybe someday we can build a brain attachment that supports modern notions of right and wrong. Then, we plug the attachment into the majority of Chinese. In this way, we can finally protect the human rights of Tibetans.
".. Do you know that the first memory implant was designed to give people perfect life? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. ..." :)
Some believed that we lacked the programming language to describe
Hm... Long term memory failure
Hyperom.com
"Forgetting is the most beneficial process we possess," Williams says. It enables us to deal with painful situations without actually reliving them.
LOL when I read this. I thought for sure the second sentence would read something like "it enables us to abstract over past experience, and is an integral part of categorizing and modeling our universe into a managable and queriable form." Probably that would be closer to what this Williams guy actually said.
Leave it to the press to find the emotional hook. Not that somebody who remember everything would be hopelessly impaired cognitively like the famous Russian "S" case, but rather, they would have to endure their last breakup without relief.
-- p
Isn't this exactly what happened to Michael O'Toole during the years he was at the Node? They raised some interesting philosophical questions about this procedure in that book. At one point near the end, IIRC, Nicole asks Michael if he's still the same person now that the Ramans replaced his hippocampus and "improved" his body quantitatively in so many ways. He is unable to give a straight answer, replying only that he still has the same memories, and that he feels like Michael O'Toole.
The point is that replacing parts of the brain opens up a whole new can of worms. I'm not unequivocally against it, but it's an interesting and thorny philosophical issue.
-- shayborg
Death does not give meaning to my life and I've never really understood how that can be so.
"Immortality consists largly of bordom"
Which would probably drive someone to do things like "...insult the Universe. That is, he would insult everybody in it. Individually, personally, one by one, and (this was the thing he really decided to grit his teeth over) in Alphabetical Order."[b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
One standard reply to the "it's only a simulation" criticism of AI is simply to ask the criticiser to prove that their own intelligence isn't "simulated".
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Yeah!!
I got a linux and a Phillip K. Dick reference in the same thought!
my work done, I am signing off...
personal attacks hurt, especially when deserved
Yet again we see the fruits of science fiction come to life.
Second Zambesi: Mince pie for me, please.
... our cruising speed is 610 miles per hour ... well well well porridge ... well well well, well, hello hello dear ... hello dear!
... (the salesman adjusts a switch)
... eight, seven, (he adjusts another switch) four.
... Einstone ... Einsteen ... Einston ... Einstin ... Einsten ... Einstein.
First Zambesi: What did she say that for?
Salesman: Quiet please. It's not adjusted yet. (he makes more adjustments)
Second Zambesi: Oh, I am enjoying this rickshaw ride. I've been a Tory all my life, my life, my life. Good morning Mr Presley. How well you look, you look very well
Salesman: Right, one, two, three
Second Zambesi:
First Zambesi: Oh, she never knew that before.
Salesman: Quiet please. Mrs Zambesi, who wrote the theory of relativity?
First Zambesi: I know! I know.
Salesman: Quiet, please! (he adjusts a tuning control)
Second Zambesi: Einstane
Salesman: Good.
Second Zambesi: Noël Einstein.
Salesman: Right. That'll be 13/6d please.
std::disclaimer<std::legalese> sig=new std::disclaimer; sig->dump(); delete sig;
And with regards to physics and the like, you might be able to regurgitate laws and theories, but one's ability to understand the laws & theory (and better yet conceptualize them) comes only with practice and dedication.
and this
Is the uncertainty that of the writer or of the researchers? I'm not comfortable with the idea of them splicing electronics into rat and monkey brains until they have a better grasp on the functions of the component they are bypassing. Perhaps they could experiment on lawyers or politicians instead?
Boy, some guys get to have all the fun....
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
For two hours of reasons to replace it, go see/rent Memento. It's fun to sleep with a new woman every night until you wake up one day with tattoo across your check that says "John Q raped and murdered your wife."
O~ Him that studies revenge keeps his own wounds green. -- Francis Bacon
I do see that it's from the New Scientist but it seems awfully unlikely. I remember seeing someting about Berger years ago and that was definitely in the "someday..." category.
Maybe we could all donate our income tax returns and buy one for our world leaders?
This could help a lot of people. However, one pressing question remains. Can you port Linux to it?
IAAL
Marvin Minsky wrote a novel (out of print according to Amazon) that contains this exact idea. The book is called: The Turing Option: A Novel
OK, this is far, far away, but I can't wait to overclock my brain.
-Hey dude, look, my brain is twice as fast as yours!
-Yeah, but it makes you behave irregulary.
We'll always be able to find cheese in a maze.
From the efficient screensaver dept.: POKE 53281,0:POKE 53280,0:POKE 646,0
Okay, I know poke 5328[01], 0 will set the screen black, but what does poke 646,0 do?
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
To:someguy@somewhere.com
Subject: Brain Enlargement!?!
Yes with our patented technique you can increase your I.Q. by at least 40 points!?! I myself didn't believe it when I first heard of this technique! But it works!!! (ad nauseum)...
Maybe they can somehow bootleg this into those Nigerian money scams.
What is music when you despise all sound?
How to Mod your head: new brain, blue LEDs for the case, hot to put your brain inside a NES case...
"There is no teacher but the enemy."-Mazer Rackham
Grrr...sometimes stuff like this annoys me. All over this article they bring up very significant ethical questions, as likely in an effort to appease as many varieties of fundamentalists as possible as to actually consider the side effects. But not once in the article did they consider that maybe the monkeys arent gonna be real happy with having their heads messed with. They recognize that it's great having these tests subjects that are at least somewhat similar to humans (relatively of course) but not that maybe these similarities have similar emotional/physical consequences for them as for us. I'm waiting for the next big evolution where humans get left behind and get to be the new race of test subjects. fun times. =P
Does this mean I now have a sure fire way of remembering where I put my car keys?
No one understands how the hippocampus encodes information. So the team simply copied its behaviour. Slices of rat hippocampus were stimulated with electrical signals, millions of times over, until they could be sure which electrical input produces a corresponding output. Putting the information from various slices together gave the team a mathematical model of the entire hippocampus.
I suppose it's nice they were careful to avoid infringing on the brain's IP. (Or should that be The Brain's IP; I imagine he has a number of patents under his evil little belt.)
And the brethren went away edified.
...a math co-processor installed.
2+2? 5, of course. Dammit, I got an Intel.
if(!toilet_paper) roll.replace(new roll);
Did I heard that right? They were going to test it on a monkey first? Bush is seeking this so bad he's agreed to be that first monkey. He looks like one already.
I wonder what you would get if you modelled the hippocampus of someone with "photographic" memory in silicon and transplanted it into someone else? The first "killer app" for wetware?
--Horse_pheathers
...about naked posts (NP) is that you don't HAVE to be first! You only have to be naked!!!
I am TOTALLY naked.
Homer: mmmmmmm......artificial hippocampuses
Bugs are just features that have been fixed.
Too bad your memory is not as good as your math. The P60, P66 and early P75 chips had the math problems. They were cleard up before the introduction of the P90.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
The problem is, I probably wouldn't be able to stand myself. And then it becomes a case of "him" vs. "me," and we all know how that plays out.
I just hope I'm not as wily as I think I am...
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
You can compare one variety of life to another, can't you?
So by your reasoning an advanced AI could never have a spirit, sould, whatever it's called with out killing/stealing someone else's?
I think his point is that the AI would have *a* spirit/soul/whatever; it just wouldn't be *your* spirit/soul/whatever. It's effectively a brand new and entirely seperate entity from you.
You make a perfect virtual copy of yourself. The copy is happy and immortal and everything, but *you* are still stuck in your body. *You* haven't gone anywhere. You've just been photocopied. Something nearly indentical to you would be immmortal, but *you* wouldn't and you'd eventually die. Which defeats the purpose of the whole exercise.
The best way to keep *you* going would be the gradual replacement that others suggested.
So how long before Hollywood forces them to add digital rights management so you can't steal the movie you just watched? I can see it now, you are only allowed to remember the movie for 3 days and then you have to go to the theatre again.
Imagine a world where you can have bio-upgrades like memory chips (programmable, usefull to pass exams)
Then later: communications chips using wi-fi or bluetooth with api to google.com the ultimate research solution! =)
While silicon tracks (or GaAs or whatever) may be laid down at a similar density, interfacing these silicon wafers does not happen at this high a density. Jerome Pine at CalTech has worked with making "neural wells" , chips with wells that neurons can grow into. Their density is not very high. I don't know what the density of this "artificial hippocampus" is or the number of connections it will make, so I can't literally say that I doubt it's density is high enough.
This is more a proof of concept, and a stepping stone, not anywhere near being able to "replace a hippocampus."
Compare it to replacing your retinal optics and neural circuitry with the Fisher-Price black-and-white video camera which recorded its low resoultion video onto audio cassettes. Imagine hooking up the output of the Fisher-Price camera to the optic nerve and daring to call it a replacement for the eye. Audacious, definitely. An amazing first step, perhaps. Once it works. But a replacement? I think not.
"Think of it this way: if the emulation is good enough so that no observer can distinguish between the original and the emulation, then that person has been transferred."
Except there would be differences between the two starting the instant the copy comes online. Each of them will have mutually exclusive experiences. While they'd be just about invisible at first, as the two live out their lives the differences will be come obvious.
I do research on hippocampal functioning --- more specifically, I build neural network models of how the hippocampus supports memory for specific events. I was surprised by the statement in the new scientist article that "we know nothing about how the hippocampus encodes memories". There is actually quite a lot of consensus among researchers as to how the different subregions of the hippocampus support its overall function of storing and retrieving memories. If you want more information, a good place to start might be this paper that I wrote with my colleague Randy O'Reilly. Go to:
e mo ry/
http://www.princeton.edu/~psych/PsychSite/compm
then click on the first article under "Review Papers". You can follow the references to find other, relevant papers. Also, I should say that I am extremely skeptical that the prosthesis described in the New Scientist article will be able to substitue for an actual hippocampus. One of the key properties of the hippocampus (and the brain more generally) is that it *changes* as a function of experience --- every time you store a new memory in the hippocampus, it changes the strengths of synapses, which in turn changes the input-output function. So I can't see how it would be possible to replace the hippocampus using a simple, static lookup table. I may be missing something, but I think we are still a very long way from building an artificial hippocampus, and I think that we won't be successful in this endeavor unless we build in some knowledge about how the structure actually works...
if i, um, remember correctly :-P
I am unique, just like you, and you, and you...
Nice idea but it is flawed because as soon as your fork()ed experiences start having different experiences from your original experience, as well as your other experiences, they will instantly be different experiences i.e. different persons.
He saw some dirty arabs and fired. Too bad it was just some friendly kurds, BBC reporters and his fellow cowboys.
So many people, so little common sense.
1) What is this "essence?" I think you just made it up just now. What makes you hypothesize an "essence"? Describe its properties please.
2) Religion doesn't explain anything any better than random descriptions do. What religion can describe consciousness properly, in a testable way that will allow us to change it, or create more or less of it? Or upload it? No religion does that.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Hmm... have you ever seen the Ghost in the Shell movie? Or, to a lesser extent, the anime series? They tackled a lot of these questions... with some interesting answers.
The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
--Aristotle
the person being killed: The original.
Interesting. So, exactly what are the thoughts of a person in the moment just after they are dead?
And what are the properties of this soul? What are its mass, volume, smell, texture, etc? What color is it? If it's just encoded information, then please tell me this: what is the difference between two bits on my hard drive, from the perspective of the bits?
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
There are more troubling concerns about this...
"In news today, Microsoft has brought out the Microsoft Neural Windows Operating Systems. Critics complain that the EULA stipulates that any data, including neural data, is signed over to Microsoft after being uploaded, but the company downplays any possibility of this being used to gain ownership over individuals..."
essence n.
The intrinsic or indispensable properties that serve to characterize or identify something.
The most important ingredient; the crucial element.
The inherent, unchanging nature of a thing or class of things.
An extract that has the fundamental properties of a substance in concentrated form.
Something that exists, especially a spiritual or incorporeal entity.
Got a better term? Spirit maybe?
2) Religion doesn't explain anything any better than random descriptions do. What religion can describe consciousness properly, in a testable way that will allow us to change it, or create more or less of it? Or upload it? No religion does that.
Quoting myself: This is where religion comes into the picture, which may be nothing more than a simple way to explain 'you'... If you follow any form of Christian religion you would realize that the belief in God is an explanation for human existance. And most, if not all, forms of Christianity preach that when you die your spirit will live on in some form of afterlife. Be it traversing Purgatory, sunning in Heaven or frying in Hell. So, in this respect your spirit can not be transferred to another being or entity. This is why human cloning is so hotly debated in the US. So, if you clone yourself does the clone have a spirit of its own? Does it have a spirit at all?
You're quote: There's no reason to believe that the person being emulated is any more qualified an observer than anyone else. If it's good enough to fool outside observers, it's good enough to fool the person being emulated.
The split second after your brain was transferred to another entity it would stop being you. There are now 2 entities with the same intelligence and memories up to X time. At that point any new memory would be unique to either entity... So, you're standing there looking at your new mechanical clone and you are no longer exact duplicates because your clone sees you and can not see the world from your perspective after the transfer. Unless, of course, you could stay linked to the clone, but then what's the point?
1. Create a brain.
2. ???
3. Profit!
You haven't described any of the properties of this spirit. The tooth fairy has a definition, but that doesn't mean that it actually exists.
Also, all Christianity says about human existence is that people have souls. It doesn't describe their properties, except to imply that they are made out of the same stuff they make airplane black boxes out of. i.e. they are indestructable.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
finally, a brain prosthesis. i know so many that this could help. starting with the person who took their time to scroll all the way down and read this post.
Become to borg?!!?!??! NO THANK YOU! heh....the borg are real i knew it...i knew it!
Finally we'll be able to decipher what Ozzy's been saying all this time.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
WSo by your reasoning an advanced AI could never have a spirit, sould, whatever it's called with out killing/stealing someone else's?
No, I'm saying that merely creating a copy one's mind does not move one's (awareness|consciousness|spirit|soul|self) to the copy...at least, there is no proof of this, and it doesn't seem likely that it would. You'd have two identical minds, would there be two souls? Why wouldn't the original soul stay with the original mind, and die when it's terminated? Or would the soul be in both copys? What happens when the thought processes of the two copys start to diverge?
It seems that bypassing neural connections to another physical medium that emulates the former would be a better bet for actually transferring. Theoretically the mind would not be altered by this.
Aexia explained my thoughts on this best.
In the movie the fly, the scientist gets in the first pod. The teleportation machine destroys the original and then re-creates it from the data scanned in the first pod. The scientist (copy) gets out of the second pod and looks at his lab monkey and says "is it real or is it memorex". The point being, if it talks like you, walks like you and is indistinguishable from you, from a the point of another person it really does not matter. From their point of view, it IS you. Of course how can you really prove it after the event occurs, not really knowing how somebody would of acted in the future say that a particular person would not of acted in a particular way. The original is destroyed, only the new one exists. So you really can't ask the original (In the movie)
The Buddhists believe (I think) the idea of "self" only exists in humans minds to reconsile time with conciousness. If all we are, I'm talking about "self" (minus the religious aspect) are the combined total of our experiences up to a point in time (is it really a point since you can split time infinitely?), then we are fundamentally a different person then we were in the past. There can never be two duplicate people with exactly the same experiences since time is always moving forward and as long as people are alive they are aquiring information or memories are disappearing as we forget or as nerons die.
So all this talk about what if we upload our brain and what do we do with the original could be the wrong way of looking at it. In order to accurately get a complete and indistinguishable copy of a brain you would have to stop TIME around the person, and then somehow take a snapshot and duplicate it, making sure that the new copy is also frozen in time. Once you did that, then you could say both are EXACT copies of one another.
As soon as you started time again, they would be different people (although highly similar) as since they occupy geographically different places in the universe their total sum experiences would slowly drift away from similarity of each other.
I am unique and there can never be another one like me. Possbily VERY similar, but never exactly the same.
It's late and I'm sure somebody will shoot holes through it. But it's my two cents worth after 3 beers!
Bzzzt. Close, but no banana...nana
It's "'What?' and 'I don't understand' and 'Where's the tea?'".
"What?"
"See what I mean? Ow!"
I really should get out more.
I don't claim to grok the nature of consciousness. Nobody knows the answers to those questions. I merely state that it's possible (and seems likely to me) that 'uploading' by creating a copy of someone's mind - then destroying the original - would result the original consciousness dying. The copy might be perfectly happy and think of itself as the original, but that wouldn't help the original.
Everybody wants prosthetic foreheads on their real heads...
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
``It could always be replaced,'' said Benji reasonably, ``if you think it's important.''
``Yes, an electronic brain,'' said Frankie, ``a simple one would suffice.''
``A simple one!'' wailed Arthur.
``Yeah,'' said Zaphod with a sudden evil grin, ``you'd just have to program it to say What? and I don't understand and Where's the tea? --- who'd know the difference?''
``What?'' cried Arthur, backing away still further.
``See what I mean?'' said Zaphod and howled with pain because of something that Trillian did at that moment.
``I'd notice the difference,'' said Arthur.
``No you wouldn't,'' said Frankie mouse, ``you'd be programmed not to.''
This whole machine-immitation v. real-thing reminds me A LOT of that book that was posted here on slashdot... "The Metamorphasis of Prime Intellect". This brings up another question, what if it's really slower than the real thing? What if an upgrade is necessary in the future because of expanding technology? what then?
This useless space for sale, inquire at front desk.
So, I would suggest the following:
1) nano-machines are placed into your brain, where they spread out and cradle every neuron.
2) as neurons die (old age, etc) the nano-machine become active, and emulate the neurons that they're cradling. These would be the Type I nano-machines.
3) eventually, you have a completely robotic brain, devoid of biological tissue, but the structure of the brain still encodes it's function
Stop! You're done.
'you' are now inside a computer: your new brain.
..for?
"It will be really interesting once this sort of prostetic brain surgery happens - to be able to interview the patients and see if they really feel as if their mental states are different as a result of the new 'tissue'."
The problem with that is the following: it'll have a percieved effect regardless of whether it has an actual effect.
To make things a bit more clear, I'll use the "placebo effect". It is commonly known that during studies, people who are given a placebo, a treatment that should have no effect whatsoever, often respond to this "treatment" with slightly positive results. The idea that they might be getting a treatment actually causes them to get better, in some cases.
My point being that if the new hippocampus is inserted into a persons brain and they have knowledge of it, there will be an effect on that person regardless of whether the hippocampus is actually different or not.
The only way to know for sure would be to replace the hippocampus without the persons knowledge, and I can't imagine there are too many places where that would be legal for humans.
So we're going to have to live with the fact that people who undergo this sort of surgery may not be the same after it is complete.
// harborpirate
// Slashbots off the starboard bow!
That's metaphysics; you are presupposing the existence of consciousness independent of a physical medium.
Somewhat. My thoughts on consciousness is that it's the result of a running neural network. The physical medium would not be relevant if that were true. It seems to make sense that duplicating this neural configuration would create two "souls". I don't see why the consciousness would migrate to the copy. But it might be in both.
My problem is with step 2 of the second method RedCard mentioned: kill the original person. That seems more like comitting suicide while leaving behind an immortal copy that thinks it's you, instead of gaining immortality.
Of course, this theory has no evidence to back it, but neither do any of the other theorys dealing with the nature of the soul (or whatever one chooses to call it).
What you failed to notice was that this vaunted "difference in experience" which separates the copy from the original after a few moments have elapsed - this is the very same difference which separates you as you are now, from you as you will be tomorrow.
It is logically necessary that mere experience either A:does or B:does not invalidate one's identity.
If (A) it does not, then you are you, your whole life long, and the copy *is* in all important respects as much the original as the original is itself.
But if (B) it does, then the future you is not you, and the organic survivor of a nondestructive upload is not the same person as he was before the upload any more than the emulation is.
In the latter case (which is the closest of these two propositions to what you are claiming in the above statement) there is really nothing to get upset about as far as uploading is concerned, because whether you participate or not, that "individual" you identify as yourself, housed in your natural body, will in just a few moments be utterly gone from the universe anyway and be replaced by somebody else whom you seem to regard as a relative stranger.
The continuity/identity fallacy you argued for is the same fundamental error that almost everybody makes when considering the question of whether uploading just creates a useless new copy or actually confers immortality (including, perhaps surprisingly William Gibson himself, as he once revealed during a TV interview).
I believe the error arises because of a class of category errors that (contemporary) humans intuitively make about the nature of the self. They treat the self logically as if it were a material thing and thus incapable of being duplicated while still retaining its basic individual properties. But the self is patently an immaterial thing: like a story, a song, an idea, a GPL'd linux kernel. All of these things can be copied indefinitely without altering their nature in the smallest degree. It's true that you can take a copy of any of these and modify both copies each in a different way, and then they are no longer the same. But it wasn't the duplication process that destroyed their identity with one another, it was what happened to each of them afterwards.
If you can grasp the significance of this point you will have made a huge leap forward in understanding both the nature of the self... and the contents of my sig :o)
Given all that, a great danger of giving a patient an artificial hippocampus is creating a severely depressed individual who can never learn where the bathroom is.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
Please read this comment which is an elaboration on this very question of identity and
this response which really ought to settle the question for anybody, once and for all. I hope.
The research described in the New Scientist article is just the tip of the iceberg.
Check out the conference notes from this 1999 (!!) NIMH Conference : Toward Replacement Parts for the Brain. The research reported on in the New Scientist article is in there, along with a boatload of other stuff.
It won't be all that much longer before "Intel Inside" has meaning in a more expanded context.
Now, will people with Palladium implants have their minds controlled by corporations?
...that touched on the same topic. Only the movie was kind of depressing. I wish I could remember the name of it. It was an old 70s movie. Basically this brilliant computer scientist has some kind of accident which causes him to have seizures that make him criminally violent. He winds up killing his wife and it lands him in prison. All of this happens before the movie starts and is expounded during the credits. However, throughout the movie he winds up looking more like a late 60s playboy with a leer that would make Jenna Jamison feel dirty. Anyway... my point here... He is the subject of an experimental brain implant that is supposed to prevent the seizures. Initially, the chip implant is successful. His seizures stop. But as the scientists monitor his progress, they notice that his brain starts making adjustments on it's own to bypass the behavior of the chip. In a way the chip is excercising his brain chemistry to make the seizures much stronger and longer. He escapes from the lab, kills a prostitute and then begins going after other people. The basic idea here is that this kind of thing doesn't work. Now... me being the pseudo-scientist that I am, I tend to disagree with that view. I think this is just the start of the inevitable conclusion: Man and machine MUST merge in order for both forms of life to evolve. Machines need our imperfection and we need their endurance and precision.
Un-news
If we do, would brain implants of the future force some people to remember things they would rather forget?
What kind of question is this? last I checked, you can't just 'forget' things you don't want to remember.
OTOH, with this device it would be possible to 'turn off' the ability to create new memories. You could murder someone, and completely forget that you did... (of course, you would still remember wanting to kill someone, and that they were dead...)
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
i haven't found out yet whether the brain prosthesis announced ~today uses the same dynamic synapse concept. i would guess that the answer is "yes, it does" (based on some of his papers i've read, and based on how long this prosthesis thing has allegedly been in the making). can anyone confirm? today's article doesn't seem to have many details about the architecture of the actual neural network.
I actually did see the movie, and I thought it was pretty good, but the songs were a little tedious (I don't understand Japanese). Also, I thought that at some points the characters just seemed to be preaching about the writer's perception of life, consciousness, etc... The boat scene comes to mind.
But yeah, I enjoyed it quite a bit. I give it 4 out of 5.
If you like discussions on he nature of consciousness, as is hapening in this thread, then I would suggest reading the book that I alluded to in my earlier post. "The age of spiritual machines" by Ray Kurzweil. I picked it up for $5 at a rummage sale. Right now, it's $10.47(US) on amazon.com
"Ol' Jim there, after they put that new fangled hippo-camper insude 'o him, he don't remember his name too well - but last fall he was in an' out of the corn maze in five minutes flat!"
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I just went and read through the entire freakin book on my CRT.
/. story submitters could be a bit more considerate!
GEE THANKS NOW I AM GOING TO NEED A FREAKIN HUB TO EVEN SEE!
Yeesh, figure
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
Build in some of those microsensor things we keep hearing so much about, and degrade the signal out of the artificial hippocampus when the sensors detect ${MIND_ALTERING_SUBSTANCE}
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Alternatively, some people could have even more highly evolved neural centers that are capable of decoding the neural gibberish from another mind.
I don't really believe in any of this; rather I'm suggesting it as the way a form of telepathy might be implemented, someday in the distant future when we develop the technology.
hah, pun in the title, but seriously:
From what I have read so far is that they put voltage combinations into the hippocampus (I will type HC from here on) and observes its output - much like a combinational logic circuit; which is assuming that one input is exactly correspondent to one output.
Being neurons, I'd assume that the HC portions at the "input" area would also "fire-back," as well, which makes it a little more complicated.
Worse yet, if I do a CPU analogy - load Reg A with 0 and Reg B with 1; keep clocking in commands of "A=A+B" (and output Reg A every step). Of course, while your 1000 commands looks exactly the same, the results of "A=A+B" is different. Similarly, I would expect something similar from any part of the brain - as a signal would take multiple paths to get from one end to the other, and more likely than not the order of pulse inputs are very important as well.
so two things, mainly:
1) the bidirectional-ness of the HC is apparently not duplicated
2) It is impossible to even check for a unknown CPU's full range of functions (let's say, you get a 8086 and no manuals or knowledge of internal structure (or experience in semiconductors) - but you do get to slam different combinations of "stuff" into it - how much of the testing would it take to duplicate the CPU completely? - now, try a 386; and now try a PIV with its huge cache and massive pipelines.
I dunno; I can just imagine something will be lost with the current implementation - though I hope otherwise.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
I can't believe nobody's brought this up yet.
Hey, let's mod it, and put linux on it, and teach it to hate microsoft, and slap on some cold cathode ray tubes while we're at it.
April Fool's! isn't for a while yet.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
Keeping rat brains and rat brain slices alive in vitro has been a staple of neuroscience for 10 years + now. Electrophysiological monitoring of these slices is a staple of neurological and psychological drug developments in every pharmaceutical company working on Central Nervous System agents (Lilly, Wyeth, Pfizer, J&J, Merck, etc.)
Step one... create a network of interconected brains.
Step two... Steve Case invests heavily.
Step three... constant subliminal pop-up ads!!!
So do we get to do the Borg thing then, or some kind of hive mind memory/experience sharing?
Or will the spammers just go war chalking - make that Brain Chalking - and implant unsolicited memories?
I am Pentium of Borg. You will be approximated.
Your copies will be different individuals. Your copies will just be at a higher level than normal genetic clones, but still be individuals.
They'll be seeing different parts of the Galaxy from you and each other.
Sure it's a nice feeling that your clone gets to do certain stuff, but it's different from experiencing it yourself.
Unless the silicon thing can create new neurons.1 /0409/6a.shtml
See:
http://www.princeton.edu/pr/pwb/0
Gould suspected early on that they might play a role in memory, particularly since one of the brain areas where new neurons are found, the hippocampus, is known to be important for learning and memory. To prove that hunch, Gould and Shors treated rats with a chemical that suppresses new neuron formation. The researchers then tested the rats for a type of memory formation known as trace conditioning, in which the animals learn to associate events separated in time. Rats that had been given the suppressant failed to make such associations. When the researchers stopped administering the suppressant, the rats quickly regained their ability to form memories.
To say that "no one understands how the hippocampus encodes information" is to admit to not even glancing at the research literature. Physiological work dates back to the 70's, revealing mechanisms of hippocampal place cell formation and episodic (declarative) memory formation (e.g., "cognitive map" theories, O'keefe, Nadel, Dostrovsky...). There is definitely some understanding of the Hebbian-like rules (correletional activity strengthens synaptic connections.. or "neurons that fire together wire together") which are critical to the formation of autoassociative memories. Most notably, the modeling and physiology research into "spike-timing dependent plasticity" has been enormous over the last decade at least. This is the idea that the strengthening and weakening of synapses (in cortical and parahippocampal systems) depends on the interval between the firing of the presynaptic and the postsynaptic neuron.
There is also great recent literature on the role of the theta and gamma cycles in hippocampal memory formation (for modeling, see John Lisman at Brandeis, Mike Hasselmo at Boston U.; for the physiology see e.g. Matt Wilson at MIT). The general idea here is that dentate gyrus provides heteroassociative feedback to hippocampus (CA3 region, specifically) on the gamma cycle while the recurrent architecture of CA3 itself provides the autoassociative capabilities necessary for partial-pattern completion (both of which are necessary for declarative sequence learning). Hippocampal place cells (google for more info) are a form of contextual encoding which has been extensively modeled, in general, by e.g. Levy at U.Va (at whose lab I've worked the last few years.)
One of the most important hippocampal functions, though, is its role in memory consolidation, which involves a complex dialog of sorts with neocortex during slow wave sleep. The artificial hippocampus (it's hard to tell if they're replacing the entire thing or just one of the layers) would need to correctly carry out this "teachback" process (which is not understood very well at all). Long story short, even as a relatively contained system, building a silicon replacement hippocampus is not something a budding neuroprostheticist should realistically concern him/herself with.
As kennorman said, the long- and short-term plasticity of the system (i.e., how synapses and neuronal properties change with experience) is far too complex to implement in silicon. I mean, even computational modeling of the system still has a long long way to go. Every researcher has their own model with its own plasticity rules, and as far as most neurobiologists are concerned they're all wrong. Brute-forcing all of the input-output functions of the different cell types is kind of ridiculous for several reasons: 1) most of these i/o functions have been already mapped out by cell physiologists and described by linear-nonlinear models (like double-E's use), 2) the precise architecture (connectivity, topography, etc) of the hippocampal neural networks is "part" of the computation, and 3) hippocampal behavior is dependent on many external factors such as whether or not the brain is sleeping, what hormones happen to flitting around at the moment, etc. Fixed input-output functions will only isolate the behavior of the prosthetic, when it should be a civil member of the society of the brain (otherwise who knows what could go wrong?).
At least though, we actually do know a good deal about hippocampal memory formation, but it's all still just a candle in a dark room.
It's well worth checking out Mike Hasselmo's articles, and especially the review article on hippocampal models that he did with Jay McClelland (who I got the chance to meet a few weeks ago, and is the coolest/smartest guy in the field).
This time however, I decided to randomize the timings. Rather than have a set amount of time to back up, and a set amount of turning, I randomized the interval of time for both. I turned it loose and found it god itself stuck a lot less often.
For giggles I packed it up and lugged it over my mom's place. She had gotten me the bot for my birthday and I wanted to show her some of the nifty things I was doing. Her first impression was that I had programmed some sort of intelligence into it. To her the movements were so lifelike. I didn't have the heart to tell her it was a simple algorythem with a random number generator.
Now that begs the question. Is there some random element that makes us human? Do our neurons simply channel random chance into a somewhat repeatable array of behaviors?
As a side note, ever since then rather than rack my brain over dinner choices, or what to have in my coffee, I've started picking selections at random, or flipping a coin. I generally find I like the randomized selection better.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
a Beouwolf cluster of yourself!
Plasticity is an issue. Over-simplification is an issue. Please see my earlier post on the matter.
I don't know if I'd want computer technology implanted into my brain... as much as I love computers, there's the inherent risk of literally being hacked to death. Well, once these things have WiFi, anyway.
But that's because humans don't have souls either. Duh.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Obviously you are diffrent then the person who you were a few years ago. But that's not the point, the point is that both 'copies' would diverge. One copy would be immortal and digital, and the other would not. The moral one would still occupy the physical body, and feel jipped.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Step 1: Have the Google brain implant.
:)
Step 2: Go onto lots of quiz shows and win prizes.
Step 3: Profit.
Look... no ??? for step 2.
I think it would be you. Think of it this way: if the emulation is good enough so that no observer can distinguish between the original and the emulation, then that person has been transferred.
That's a Turing test, and it won't work. Consider the following thought experiment. You have no idea who Mel Gibson is. You also have two oil paintings, one of the real William Wallace and one of Gibson's character in the movie Braveheart. Could you tell which one is which? If not, does it logically follow that Mel Gibson is actually the reincarnation of William Wallace? I would say not.
That there is a simulation of "you" running will not change the fact that once the original you dies, you're gone. Even if the simulation believes that it is you, it doesn't change the fact that the original you knows it isn't, and is going to experience dying. And even if you and the simulation coexist for a time, in 10 years, 50 years, 100 years you will be completely different people, because your experiences will be so different. How much of what you do in your life is influenced by the knowledge that time is finite? I don't mean grand philosophical questions, I mean "do you own a watch? an alarm clock? did you think that you had to graduate by a certain time, or complete activities by a certain age?" All of that simply won't apply to a simulation.
If you want immortality through technology, it's going to have to be done "in place" and it has to replace your mortal hardware while it's still running.
Sounds like neural net, but without the "learning" process of trying random things then assigning a weighting value to it based on how it worked out...
> I wonder how long it will be before we can have
> HUDs, such as in this story by Cory Doctorow?
But we already have Housing and Urban Developement.
Seriously, what is HUD?
...or a furby knockoff.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Despite giving a new (related) meaning to Wetware, brain installed software would have a problem.
What happens if there is a bug, and your microsoft activation key goes haywire, and your brain shut down to minimal mode, with no masturbation privs.
Of course, you could hack it, but everywhere you go, bluetooth enabled devices would be exploiting backholes in your head, and installing little toolbars, popups etc.
Imagine the spam now, just install this plugin, and penis growth hormones will give you an extra 11 feet.
Or "Save money on ink refills, urinate ink!"
Thought police, all thoughts transmitted by bluetooth, and saved on your google cookie.
Cookies, real double chocolate cookies from starbucks, send special flavour senses to your brain and reprogramme you to like their coffee more.
You mobile phone sim is hardwired into your brain, overwriting memories such as first loves.
Your browser cache makes you forget your own mothers birthday.
Your dreams have adverts in them.
You start dreaming of gay porn popup ads.
You go to councelling, they download your software, and apply some patches, and install an auto update feature.
Your life gets better, you meet a girl, you are about to propose, and an auto update for a new MSN kicks in, and you go unconscious.
You find another girlfriend, and the new update starts forcing you to speak all the messages as they come in, and emotify all the emoticons, you start smilling with your tongue out whilst saying, have you shagged that new bird yet, in your mates voice.
You think of a microsoft product, and a micro payment is made.
You always know when a bus is coming, but your shopping is delivered, and contains mind altering software to make you buy more each week, and special chemicals to make you loose weight.
You spend 10 hours a day plugged into a computer power matrix, running stats packages for advertising companies, whos data erases all your knowledge, and gives you nightmares.
You then get driven home by a taxi company you never remeber hiring.
You sit through non stop trashy new movies on pay per view, continously eating to try and clear your fridge until your next automated shopping delivery.
You think something is missing, you dont know what it is.
Everyone is the same.
Oh oh, hi mike are you watching the movie, yes I am, do you think it is good?
erm no, I think is sucks.
10 minutes later, the RIAA crash down the door, and remove your digital rights module of your brain (previously contained the sensitive articulation of erectile function)
the operation is messy, they reboot you, and leave you drooling in a pool of your own brain fluid, with pay per view draining your bank account until it is empty.
Microsoft automatically clear out your bank balance when your watch interfaces over WSDL to their records service, and notifys them of your death.
You paid for your funeral service a long time ago, as random brain activity in the testtube was used to preselect the company.
MicroBurials melt your body down, ad recycle it.
Your more humourous thougths and ideas are recycled into their next wave of products.
Only one man remains sentient, controlling all.
Bill.
MS Think
MS Sleep
MS Walk
MS Talk
MS Eat
New improved and graceful ways to control your body, forcefully installed when you sign up for the new service.
Everyone will sign up because it allows you to send picture messages, straight into the mind of an individual.
What you are looking at, or what you are thinking.
Every time you think of something you must do, it is automatically scheduled, and your pay per use software gets a micro payment, every thought, action and deed is payable to M$.
Bill boards are blank, your brain just superimposes the image on top of them.
Every single car, wall, floor, every concievable place is full of full colour moving adverts.
Popups ads lead to accidents.
If you are late for work, your boss immediately logs into your brain, and watches you for 5 minutes screwing you new girlfriend, before shouting at you.
Microsoft have access to everything you see and think.
Your live sexual experiences are broadcast over real networks, whose sole income is now sense-porn.
On the plus side, porn is a bit more immersive.
On the negative side, you have to wash your teeth for a day after experiencing a gay porn popup ad.
websites spring up giving instant suicide, for all your money value.
One click payment options give you access to a wide range of simulating painless or painful deaths.
The neural net came to an abrupt end 5 months after it started, when a 16 year old girl announced she would lose her virginity live on air to brad pitts clone.
Every man and woman login, and the world stopped, every mind gridlocked, and 35 years later, an alien race comes to announce that they want to adopt the whole human race, and sell us as novelty items to a race of fluffy bunnies, who just want to be hugged all day long.
Brad and the virgin were the only survivors, and live quite a few years petting bunnies.
So let that be a lesson to you all.
As a side note, ever since then rather than rack my brain over dinner choices, or what to have in my coffee, I've started picking selections at random, or flipping a coin.
you may enjoy American Perfekt
Jake, a psychiatrist on the road to Utah, is a man who seriously relies on the flip of a coin for all his decisions...
Does that mean that the patient has to be careful about walking on carpet when wearing a sweater?
can you literally "fry" your brain?
I can see taht view point. I just didn't understand from the original post that that was where you were going.
:)
Yep, I have this book somewhere, written by Harry Harrison and Marvin Minsky. The story follows a guy who, if I recall correctly, was shot in the head. The bullet wound effectively severed the links between his memory and the rest of his brain, and the implant basically sat in the hole and re-routed signals from one side to the other. It did this in a self teaching/brute force kind of way, gradually testing all combinations, somehow measuring the response.
A cool idea explored in the book was how the brain would react to the implant. In the story, as the implant learned the responses to the brain, the brain learned the responses to the implant. The guy eventually gained the ability to use the fast mathematical operations available on the processor within the implant. Which would be nice.
It's not the best book ever written, but it's got some interesting ideas and will keep you reading for a while.
HA HA HA HA HA, Good Answer.
It's not a turing test, and it's specified not to be. It's the idea that a perfect emulation is indistinguishable from the original. The system being emulated doesn't have any special powers to distinguish, so it will never know it is emulated.
This is not about a turing test, it's more about the fact that a hydrogen atom cannot be distinguished from another hydrogen atom. And furthermore, it cannot be distinguished from a perfect simulation of a hydrogen atom. The turing test is about human intelligence in particular, and says nothing about the implementation.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
This was already thought of, as I've read it before, either in one of my SF books from my collections, or in one of the pulps--Asimov's SF or Analog or somesuch.
The idea was to implant these nanomachines into the brain to effectively make it immortal. I don't recall whether they worked proactively or just waited for the normal brain tissue to die, or whether the implant happened at birth or in old age.
Anyway, it's an old idea.
This is how it begins.
Now we will finally be able to grant the wish of the Tin Man... Rejoice
No one has mentioned MEMENTO yet
Apparently, you can't hold a memory for two hours. Remember Sammy Jenkis?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Or would it just be an emulation that thinks it's you?
;)
I am an emulation that thinks I'm me. It's old biotechnology, and in need of an upgrade, but it's got an uptime of 21 years and that's hard to beat with other technologies.
When the system is getting ready to crash, I'd appreciate it if somebody moved the system image to something more modern, with better reliability than the present platform. But the emulated code will start off the same.
Plus if my latest experiment goes horribly wrong and I am destroyed in the process, the sysadmin can restore me from backup tapes
3. Lose and die when your chip explodes after looking up a question related to goats.
My scarecrow will finally have a brain... hooked up to an X10 controller and a beowulf cluster of shotguns!
> To say that "no one understands how the hippocampus encodes information" is to admit to not even glancing at the research literature.
I think you're overstating this by a few miles. Yes, there are models. Yes, there is some data that can be mapped to real information, e.g. "place". But there's a vast gulf between a few reproducible results in a few very highly stereotyped lab settings (rats in a maze), and claiming to understanding how the hippocampus encodes information.
We have a few hints about how the hippocampus works and a few very preliminary and very cautious theories about what it might be doing.
Btw, do I know you? Say hi to Mike if you see him.
My concern for getting anything done has nothing to do with death. If I knew for certain that I would die, I probably wouldn't do anything. The reason why I don't put things off is because I want things today.
The system being emulated doesn't have any special powers to distinguish, so it will never know it is emulated.
How could it not know? Would you reconstruct a perfect replica of the real world for it, like The Matrix? That makes no sense - creatures that live inside a machine would have access to the machine's capabilities - perfect memory, for example, or the ability to think at variable rates depending on the hardware. In fact, this is what really attracts geeks, even more so than the immortality. And any intelligence will eventually spot the flaws in the simulation, unless the creator of the simulation was a lot smarter than the combined intelligence of all the human minds.
The world doesn't need to be emulated, only the machine itself.
:-)
Example: I run VMWare on my laptop. The Windows ME OS that is running inside of it has no idea that it's running on a virtual machine. And it thinks that it has an AMD PCNET ethernet adapter. Little does it know that it's really a Linksys. "Do you think that's air you're breathing?", said Morpheus
I'm not necessarily talking exclusively about emulating something inside of a machine. I'm only talking about emulating the hardware itself. An artificial brain that was constructed from a real person, that functions exactly as the wetware would have would not also require an artificial world. It could live in the one we have now.
Also, I doubt that an intelligence would spot the flaws in the simulation. For example, what if it turns out that we are living in a simulator, and the quantum behavior of particles was really an artifact of the digital simulation. Those particles were meant by the creators of our simulation to be continuous functions, but in a digital computer, that's not possible. Are we fooled? Sure we are. We've got all kinds of smart people off working on quantum mechanics to explain this weird behavior we see.
I am not claiming that we live in a simulator. I am just saying that for people who would live in a simulator, any quirks in the universe wouldn't look like mistakes. They would just look like that's how the universe is supposed to work.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
I am just saying that for people who would live in a simulator, any quirks in the universe wouldn't look like mistakes. They would just look like that's how the universe is supposed to work.
You are of course correct, but only if you were born in that world. Don't forget that the copy of you would have your memories of this world. It would remember feeling hunger, for example, or uncomfortably cold, and you cannot map those directly into digital experiences. For example, should "power low" be hunger, thirst, sleepiness, a headache or what? And if it didn't have those memories, then would it be you?
you cannot map those directly into digital experiences
But you can! Every experience is a product of some state 'X' that the brain is assuming. No state is repeated twice, since state X is a snapshot of the individual states of all the neurons taken as a whole. But there are substates that can be repeated, and those can cause things like hunger, thirst, etc.
Recreating those states would recreate those feelings.
As you can tell, I'm a materialist when it comes to my attempts to explain what a brain is, what a person is, and things like that.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
> I'd like to run on silicon. fork() me a few times, plug my copies into space probes, and lob them off on random paths to star systems, and HLT me until there are enough photons bouncing off my solar panels to run my clock....
That's more or less the plot of the sci-fi novel "Diaspora" by Greg Egan. An amazing book I thought.
I seem to remember that the eye was one thought as "The Ultimate Proof of the existence of God", because of it's apparent simplicity and its marvelous engineering qualities (http://www.emergentmind.org/Discussion/_disc/0000 0024.htm)
Now,if you please would define quickly...
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker