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Comment by otakucode | Hacker News Reader

I don't believe we could ever see any kind of system 'approximating consciousness' without a body. Full stop. Dualism is wrong and there is no mind/body split. 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. 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.'

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It's important to understand first of all that Nectome is not currently preserving brains in a clinical setting. We are still very firmly in the research phase of building a brain banking technique sufficiently powerful to preserve memories. (see https://nectome.com for more details). However, I envision that a validated preservation technique would preserve the entire body, including the peripheral nervous system.

> I don't believe we could ever see any kind of system 'approximating consciousness' without a body.

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".

If you have the technology to simulate a brain, it seems pretty trivial to simulate a body, environment, and associated sensory inputs as well.

I'm reminded of the 'hybrot' experiments where rat brain cells in a nutrient solution are allowed to wire up their own neural network on top of electrodes that send and receive data wirelessly from a robot body [https://www.technologyreview.com/s/401756/rat-brained-robot/]

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.

The number of connections is high, but the bandwidth is surprisingly low. Modern edge routers could do it a couple times over.

Even if the technology to emulate a particular brain based on a preserved copy could exist, it seems to be asking a lot for the engineers to also emulate the specific nervous system that brain has grown to work with without a copy of it...

Eh, you can guess for a lot of it, and you at least have a map of where all the inputs actually GO. If it synapses in the olfactory bulb, probably don't hook up your simulated eyeball and all that.

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.

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