MIT severs ties to company promoting fatal brain uploading
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I, for one, wouldn't trust that their preservation solution is sufficient for reconstruction of anything even approximating consciousness without a successful bidirectional demonstration. Far too high a risk that what they'd be able to deliver right now is a very smelly paperweight that used to be someone's brain.
I think they wil lose way too many analog details.
The question of doing something similar with a strata running a human brain doesn't seem impossible, just extremely technologically daunting when one considers the sheer number of connections into and out of the physical brain.
Brain plasticity can cover some wiring sins - cochlear implants are pretty awful for connecting where they should go, but it's good enough to get some degree of hearing going. Get enough and the simulated patient can help you out telling you if you've got it right or not.
For the sake of argument, I'm assuming you're talking about a physical, tangible body.
> Dualism is wrong and there is no mind/body split.
Not really seeing any argumentation to back this claim up. Particularly important for a debate that has been ongoing for some centuries now...
> The full state of the brain, simulated perfectly, would perfectly reproduce the experience of a brain in total sensory deprivation paired with total whole-body paralysis.
This segment of your post makes me wonder if you are fully comprehending the end-game proposed. I don't think it would be unfair to say that anyone dreaming of a future down this path intends for these "brains in vats" to have ways to sense/communicate.
> Even just sensory deprivation alone is enough to cause consciousness to entirely evaporate in moments. Add in whole body paralysis and no, you can never hope to have anything approaching 'consciousness.'
Here is where I find a particular loss of argumentation. What evidence do you have to support your claim that without sensing things, consciousness disappears? Don't some groups of monks utilize sensory deprivation to attain "higher states of consciousness"? I'm not arguing that they are truly achieving higher states but rather that the technique itself has a connotation of "consciousness-growing" rather than "consciousness-receding".
unlike cryogenics it will definitely result in a lot of useful and interesting data about the brain, whether it works or not.
[0] From https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/c-elegans-connect...: “Some people say we don't know anything about how C. elegans's brain works and I am like, 'Yes, we do!'" says Cornelia Bargmann of The Rockefeller University, who has studied the nematode for more than two decades and attended the Columbia debate. "A lot of what we know about C elegans's rapid behaviors we have learned through and with the connectome. Every time we do an experiment, we look at those wiring diagrams and use them as a starting point for generating hypotheses."
they have hojillions of firing patterns, some of which are cyclical and constant, other of which are transient and tiny. these stop when the brain is dead. you're not gonna capture these from a dead brain.
what if there's some essential aspect of consciousness that's depending on circles of five or six neurons holding a pattern of action potentials in perpetuity?
i doubt that this is the case, but if it is, cracking the connectome -- which is already an achievement that would require an effort greater than the human genome project -- wouldn't be very helpful at all.
oh yeah, and as far as preserving those circuits go, do you have a solution for clearing neurons from excess sodium or potassium after it accumulates there during death? depending on which ion pump fails from lack of energy first (and my bet is that it's the sodium-potassium ion pump, because it's responsible for some absurd percentage of the body's total energy usage), neurons could very easily be left logjammed with a glut of charged particles that prohibits making action potentials in any capacity even when energy becomes available. you don't wanna be assuming that all those excess ions are signal when they're noise.
finally: have you considered your philosophical disposition wrt substance dualism or materialism? you're gonna have to have a damn good case for some philosophical angle when dennett comes a knockin or he'll immolate your entire project.
Finally, dualism is juvenile bullshit. A neuroscientist who thought the mind WASN'T the brain would be absolutely useless.
What's Y Combinator's stance on the death requirement? Nectome was at demo day last month and Sam Altman is (or was) on the waiting list.
Following the example of electric-vehicle maker Tesla, it is sizing up demand by inviting prospective customers to join a waiting list for a deposit of $10,000, fully refundable if you change your mind.
So far, 25 people have done so. One of them is Sam Altman, a 32-year-old investor who is one of the creators of the Y Combinator program.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610456/a-startup-is-pitch...
Sam Altman co-created Y Combinator when he was 20?
I'm not sure whether this will just further the kneejerk anti-cryogenics sentiment or if it will seem to more normalise normal post-death cryogenics, but it does seem a rather dangerous play. I don't want cryogenics to find itself tangled up in crazy legal issues.
At an object level I'm not all that concerned with the ethics of people taking this bet, given the science is pretty sound. It does not make sense to allow people to take medical treatment that have a significant chance of serious harm for the chance of a few years longer health if it pans out, but then ban a bet as safe as cryogenics.
We're a very very long way away from being able to survive if Earth fails. It is foolish to bet on any kind of interplanetary survival strategy at this point. Getting humans to other worlds is by far the easiest part of that equation.
Suppose humanity attains indefinite life spans in the near future. Would you then advocate murder in order to save space?
Should we outlaw antibiotics because they save lives, and those lives take up resources?
I find this argument both unimaginative (improving technology changes the nature of our challenges) and repulsive (it's advocating murder through inaction).
No, and putting words in my mouth like that is extremely uncivil. We're talking about people who have already died.
"I find this argument both unimaginative (improving technology changes the nature of our challenges) and repulsive (it's advocating murder through inaction)."
And I find your tone repulsive and uncivil, as you're making extreme assumptions about my positions.
Not to mention, you're only advocating that we save the rich. I don't see you setting up a GoFundMe to preserve homeless people.
If the immortality is based on "brain uploading", maybe just an extra EC2 instance per family of four.
The general principle, to me, is that whatever the "ideal" rate of death is, for any given set of values and preferences, it would be an astonishing coincidence if it coincidentally happened to be exactly the current rate today.
If we woke up tomorrow to a world where humans didn't suffer degenerative aging and the vast majority of fatal illness (cancer) were treatable, would you start by advocating for mass executions, or would you advocate for increased birth control, renewable energy, reduced resource consumption rates, finding ways to make productive use of otherwise-uninhabited areas of earth, space travel, etc. before you started advocating for murdering billions of humans?
The very idea that this would cross your mind after reading my comment shows that you are not interested in having any kind of serious discussion about this topic.
If your comment wasn't intended to advocate for pro-death policies, I'm very confused about what you were trying to communicate here.
My reading of your comment is that you first asked the reader if they can imagine what the planet would be like if nobody died, then implied through what appears to be rhetorical questions that it would be much more crowded and much more of a strain on the earth's resources.
There's a lot of diversity in the use of English, so we may have experience with different rhetorical traditions, but my experience is that rhetorical structures like that are pretty exclusively intended to express condemnation of the subject and anyone who would support it, implying that they're ignoring the disastrous consequences of their policy.
The assumptions I inferred from your questions, stated directly, are something like the following. If you're uninterested in engaging with me after my earlier reply, I understand, but if not I'm curious which of these you disagree with.
1) If life-extension technology manages to dramatically reduce nonconsensual death, we will have a population explosion on Earth.
2) If we have a population explosion on Earth, quality of life for most humans will drop significantly.
3) If we have a population explosion on Earth, consumption of nonrenewable resources will increase dramatically, leading to resource shortages dangerous to human civilization.
4) In order to avoid a population explosion, we should stop work on life-extension technology.
5) It is better for the majority of currently-living humans to die after less than 100 years of life than for Earth civilization to undergo a population explosion.
By my best attempts at moral reasoning, withholding life-saving medical technology is morally equivalent to murder, and although I've fortunately never been in a situation to make such a decision, I hope that I can be the kind of person who would never decide for people to die through inaction that I wouldn't be theoretically willing to kill myself for the same benefits.
I hope that's given you enough perspective on my position that it doesn't seem completely hostile to serious discussion.
[edited for formatting]
The brain upload thing is a complete fantasy and science fiction, but even the traditional promise of somehow resurrecting you has never been proven with the exception of a 30-year-old tardigrade two years ago if I remember correctly.
(1) The idea that the ultra-rich may be able to survive into the future cryogenically while 90+% of the rest of the world dies is morally abhorrent.
(2) Fearing death so much is viewed as cowardly.
(3) This is a bit more abstract, but the implicit assumption in cryogenics that death is a universal bad is troubling. Thousands of years of human thinking have determined that the prospect of death is an integral part of the human experience and may be the thing that provides life meaning. I don't know about anyone else, but the idea that the coming natural death of me and probably everyone else in this thread is on par with a genocide is upsetting (and I personally choose not to believe it). From Epictetus: "Death, for instance, is not terrible, else it would have appeared so to Socrates." [0]
To me, this sounds like the naturalistic fallacy. Is there a better argument than this one?
(2) If you fear death to much, you might not fight to the death in a war. Not everything in our culture makes sense in the modern world.
(2) ? unsure about what you're saying here.
(3) Okay yeah, sure, I've read that before. I don't think he offers a (currently) practical alternative to "resignation coupled with an effort to achieve closure in practical affairs and personal relationships." The harsh reality is that we'll probably die--why would I choose to conceptualize this as a violent death from a dragon? That'd surely lead to despair in my last years.
(2) I'm saying that one of the reasons why death is viewed as cowardly is because that belief is promoted by generals in order to make their soldiers more willing to die in battle. If that's where the idea comes from, then we should reject it, because willingness to die in battle is no longer a good thing.
What do you mean?
A) Not hoping for anything is a great way to stay in shit situations, and B) Yeah, no, you can't actually control your own mind that well.
Then yes I say there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. It's their money and their body.
Schopenhauer has the very best treatise on the morality/philosophy of each persons right to suicide: https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/schopenhauer/arthur/pessimi...
Our early supporters have shown their support for Nectome’s research through fully refundable deposits, and we hope that they will live long, healthy lives, creating the very memories that they hope can one day be preserved.
For example, what if an evil scientist or organization were to buy up cryogenically preserved bodies on the cheap in 300 years?
Yeah, you could say it's unlikely, but why is it more or less likely than being unfrozen into some paradise?
From what I know from cryogenic freezing or preservation is that it is a good idea that it could be "scanned" back in but most likely the information is lost. I would like to understand how they solve this using embalming. MIT seems to say that we don't know that at all.
Is this company a part of Ycombinator Winter 2018? https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/nectome#section-fund... says it was funded in January 2018.
The startup is a snake oil scam. It is by definition "south." It is not "unclear if the upload is feasible." It is simply NOT feasible.
So I will reframe and clarify my argument -- I believe that we do not know enough about the brain and the nature on consciousness to be able to conclude that taking this kind of "snapshot" of the brain will in anyway preserve any of the necessary information needed to reproduce or even accurately simulate consciousness, and that the argument that it is or will is based on the flawed assumption that the brain is or functions like a information processor (a flawed metaphor that is very quickly reaching it's limitations).
Literally everything that humans understand is understood in a framework of information processing. It is probably not even possible to understand something without being able to model it as an information-handling process. What basis do you have to say consciousness is different? Because we haven't figured it out yet? It's 2018. There are billions of years of thinking that have yet to happen on the subject.
If you preserve the structure of the brain well enough, you can scrape it down in micrometer-thick layers and progressively photograph the visible surfaces in sufficient detail to reconstruct a map of all neural connections. Combine this with a working model of a neuron, a physics model for chemical diffusion, and knowledge of how living neurons respond to certain chemicals typically found in the brain or those that can cross the blood-brain barrier, and you can simulate a human consciousness inside a computer.
It won't be you, but it will think it was you. That's almost the same thing as what happens every time you wake up in the morning.
Also, in order to avoid frequently resetting the simulation due to insanity, you probably also need a virtual world that simulates realistic inputs through the sensory nerves.
The technology is plausible, particularly if you are a Kurzweilian or transhumanist. Some may feel more comfortable with "Ship of Theseus"-style gradual migration of an organic brain into digital computer via implantation of technology devices with neuron-computer interfaces. But since we aren't as close to that, injecting your dead brain with epoxy is the closest you can get now to not being dead and gone forevermore.
Note that the necessary knowledge for digitizing a preserved brain is likely centuries away, but that doesn't matter if you can preserve your brain to remain unchanged for centuries. To the new entity that can remember being you and likes all the same things you like, it will be like waking up in the future. And hopefully, you left some money for AI civil rights in your will, so it won't be a digitized slave toiling away on the pattern recognition plantations.
This is how frogs in shallow pond-bottoms can freeze solid during the winter and then thaw out in spring. The formation of ice crystals is what damages the organ. But glutaraldehyde is highly cytotoxic, and the brain cells are killed, along with anything else, so your brain won't ever be thawed. They will use ion beams to shave off very thin layers of your brain and use a scanning electron microscope to image it, all while still frozen.
This is the same process, in finer detail, that occurs for detail 3-d imagery of plastinated organs and entire organisms. The crosslinking and heat generated during the curing process of most epoxy resins will destroy the finer structures in the brain as it preserves the macro-structure, so no, you couldn't use the same types of plastic typically used to preserve anatomy specimens. Instead of a microtome, the top layer is ablated with ion beams. Instead of an optical microscope, an electron microscope is used.
You can't currently get a more detailed 3-d image than this. The ion beam can strip away one layer of atoms at a time, and the electron microscope can identify the positions of all the atoms in the next layer.
But imagine the size of that data set. Imaging a volume of about 1500 mL, at a detail level of 1 nm, is 1.5e24 voxels. Even at one bit per voxel, for filled/empty, that's in the yottabyte range. A trillion 1 terabyte hard drives. The gap junction of an electrical synapse is about 3.5 nm, and chemical synapses are 20-40 nm apart. so if you image at a resolution of 3.5nm, you're still talking at least a zettabyte, but at least that's just under half the maximum file size of UFS, at around 2^75 bits.
Better hope those cryo-coolers don't fail before we can store that much data and reduce it all to a neuro-map.
here is why:
imagine that we create a perfect copy of a person who is alive.
there is now person A, and person B, who are identical. but being identical does not imply shared sensations. if you pinch person A, person B won't feel it. the reverse is true. they're two separate entities, even if they behave similarly. if person A dies, person B is very similar to person A -- but they're not person A. that person is dead.
same goes for "mind uploading". the copy could, hypothetically, exist. it is extremely unlikely that this is technologically possible. but even if it was possible technologically, the original would be dead.
"you" have a chain of consciousness that is unique to your body. you destroy that body, and that chain of consciousness ends. re-assembling it elsewhere perfectly doesn't re-start that chain. it creates a new chain which from inside of its own perspective is consistent with the original chain. and it is. but the original chain has no further consciousness, as it was destroyed.
this isn't a "nobody really knows" situation so much as a "we know, but people refuse to accept what we know" situation. the semantics of what is "you" really don't matter when faced with reality.
Even if I agree with your interpretation, again, I'm not sure it matters. Perhaps my physical body dies and my brain becomes digitized and I "wake up" in a computer simulation, or perhaps in an artificial brain attached to a replacement body. Even if the new me has a new consciousness that isn't just a continuation of the old one, perhaps that's an outcome I'm ok with and welcome.
This is a matter of much debate in philosophy, neuroscience, and other fields. You accidentally touch on identity theory (bundle, substratum, etc), philosophy of mind, etc. The Ship of Theseus is an interesting problem - what if I gradually replace parts of someone's brain with artificial ones, so they are integrated with the rest?
furthermore, academic concerns aside, there's no disproving my original comment in the context of technical feasibility. it's literally bulletproof; one person does not share the sensations of another person.
postscript: i took a philosophy of mind class and a philosophy of cognition class and a systems neurobiology class in college plus a few others that are tangentially relevant. i'm not appealing to authority here, just stating that my simplistic objections are actually the result of an extensive amount of diving into the details of those disciplines. sometimes the details build a picture that's simple from afar.
The marketing thereof as something else doesn't sound quite ethical to me. It's downright ghastly if people are dying earlier because of this.
And yes, we are in YC Winter 18
That sounds a lot like the "heavier than air flight is impossible" quote from 1895.
Like, I get that these guys might be - maybe even probably are! - snake oil salesmen, but what about brain digitization is actually impossible? There are certainly a fixed number of neurotransmitter types, a fixed number of channels, a fixed structure to a particular operating brain, and so on. Anything that exists can be reverse engineered and, in principle, rebuilt.
https://www.google.ca/search?q=alcor+cryonics&oq=alcor+cryon...
"We believe medical technology will advance further in coming decades than it has in the past several centuries, enabling it to heal damage at the cellular and molecular levels and to restore full physical and mental health."
This is not a promise from them but is surely worded like resurrection is a certainty.
I don't think it is 'preying' on the fear of death. A <.1% chance at eternal life is more or less what they offer and is a more reasonable investment than how many wealthy people spend their money. I could spend that money on a marginally nicer apartment for $100/mo and no one would bat an eye even though the expected value is almost certainly lower.
It seems appealing to me to come to terms with mortality while also being able to have some small hope that you will get lucky and have another chance at life.
Resurrection is a hope, but never a claim.
Alcor has so far shown itself to be a fairly reliable cryonics provider and the sums of money are not extreme - neuropreservation being only $80,000, or a life insurance policy of ~$30-$150/month.
Of course, in the case of cryonics, there is no measurable probability of coming back, so the point is largely moot.
But you can break the question down and look for evidence about each step, it's not going to be a precise measurement but you can at least start estimating your belief certainty (as well as introducing bounds -- I don't think anyone's justified in a 90% certainty of coming back at this point, but nor do I think there's justification that it's as low as one in a billion). I've always liked http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/03/break-cryonics-down.ht... as one approach to turning the problem into multiple conditional steps.
So, insofar as this is viewed optimistically as something other than a combination of assisted suicide with weird storage of remains, I'm skeptical that it would be psychologically beneficial to the survivors.
I’m not sure if that small of a scale would ever be possible.
Electron micrographs vary quite a bit in quality (good micrographs are an art), but if you can barely see the synapses, you may be thinking of light microscopy, where it’s very difficult to see differences in the sizes of synapses. You can see for yourself what synaptic details electron microscopy allows you to see in the book, "Fine Structure of the Nervous System: Neurons and Their Supporting Cells". You might also want to see the FIB-SEM images from the Brain Preservation Foundation at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYKIePuVENY, which I find quite beautiful.
As for how sizes may relate to weights [1]: “Some axons form two or more synapses with the same dendrite, but on different dendritic spines. These synapses should be the same strength because they will have experienced the same history of neural activity…the synaptic areas and volumes of the spine heads were nearly identical. This remarkable similarity can be used to estimate the number of bits of information that a single synapse can store, since the size of dendritic spines and their synapses can be used as proxies for synaptic strength.”
I hope that these are informative. I do want to clarify that we are not arguing that electron micrographs of brain tissue are all that’s needed to reconstruct memories. We are interested in building the best brain preservation technology possible, and one of the ways we evaluate brain preservation is with electron microscopy. The connectome is the first step, the “skeleton” upon which models of the mind can be built.
[1] "Nanoconnectomic upper bound on the variability of synaptic plasticity" at https://elifesciences.org/articles/10778
At best, decades away? That's some crazy hubris. It's not even imaginable how far away it is. I find it absurd that humans think they can achieve arguably the highest level of godliness in mere decades. This is almost as crazy as saying teleportation is less than a hundred years away. We can't make predictions about things we don't understand.
Edit: I'm getting some flak for not including the rest of the quote, but I would argue that it doesn't matter. The rest of the quote was "and probably not possible at all". Their conclusion makes no sense. How can something either be impossible or potentially very possible? This statement shows how little academia actually knows about neuroscience. And no, this is not comparable to opinions about the moon landing in the 50's. By the 1950s we already had a completely sufficient theoretical framework for achieving space flight. The same cannot be said about consciousness upload as of today.
Did you deliberately ignore the rest of that sentence?
“At best” means “viewed maximally optimistically”, and, in the context of a development timeline, specifically “no sooner than”. So, it was saying “it’s probably not possible at all, and, if it somehow is possible, we’re at least several decades away from even a demonstration”.
You have badly misread, apparently inverting the sense of “at best”.
The future is bright.