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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?"
So lets say they get this working. Would it then be possible to record every moment of your life and store it away?
"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?
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?
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.
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)
Hippo in Greek means Horse. Hence Hippopotomus means "River-Horse" and Mesopotamia means "Middle of rivers" actually according to This site Hippocampus originally meant "Sea horse" (ship?) I wonder how this came to be known as the horse of the sea....
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
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
Perhaps, but that doesn't solve the problem. What attourney is going to decide that a (experimental) partial brain replacement is in the best interests of their charge. Especially if the person is living well otherwise.
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.
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!
That's not true. It was thought to be the case until recently. Here's one of the first links I found: check it out.
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.