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Comment by TaupeRanger | Hacker News Reader

The hard problem is when electrical activity stops in the brain, which can continue for a time even without blood flow.

Why is this a problem (or am I dumb)?

Our current understanding seems to be that the electrical activity of the brain is what maintains the mind-consciousness system. (From a physical/materialist pov)

I assume OP wants to know why we can't provide electrical activity manually.

This seems to be one of the ancillary benefits of Neuralink, although I could be wrong, I'm not super familiar with their entire road-map.

So in other words it's like RAM, just the power off and all is lost.

Life must be sustained, once it is lost, it seems that there is a bell that cannot be un-rung.

However, our understanding of how much energy it takes to sustain life at a minimum seems to keep decreasing, like higher efficiency RAM in low-power mode.

Nah, there have been cases with short temporary flat EEG that came back to life, which is why the guidelines specify the duration for declaring someone dead in this way. Those people suffered no memory or identity loss, so electric activity is not related. Connectome structure and tuned bioelectrical responses based on cell cytoplasm gradients, receptor structure and number tuned by a bunch of either RNA or proteins the most likely candidate. So the better analogy is it's like flash memory, left unpowered but running for too long the neurons will change.

Restarting the brain from that flatlined state is therefore possible, we just don't know how to do that properly. Most importantly, it won't do any good if the brain is damaged and is rarely useful.

At that point your brain is “off”. Having a non functioning heart doesn’t seem that noteworthy in this context given that we do straight up heart transplants.

My guess at a computer analogy: Start program -> Delete program -> Crash process -> Resurrection of process impossible.

The program being the bootstrapping mechanism that is present in a baby's brain. The process being consciousness.

Even if the bootstrapping mechanism was still present in the brain, we might not know how to call it and even if we did we would lose everything that was in memory at the time of the crash.

Reverse core dumps are possible, so I'm not sure this analogy is perfectly appropriate.

Analogies aren’t meant to be 100% perfect. They are meant to provide a framework to understand a problem.

I always say: Analogies are like raccoons.

a core dump of the brain is pretty damn big... so that’s not really saying much; just that maybe we don’t have a man data to restore from

It makes you wonder if our brains work as RAM or as a more long-term storage when "rebooted".

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