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Comment by TedDoesntTalk | Hacker News Reader

What if we find that the gut, which has 100 million nerve cells, also plays a part in the emergent property of mind?

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/09/your-gut-directly-co...

"In a petri dish, enteroendocrine cells reached out to vagal neurons and formed synaptic connections with each other. The cells even gushed out glutamate, a neurotransmitter involved in smell and taste, which the vagal neurons picked up on within 100 milliseconds—faster than an eyeblink."

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That is one reason why I was very careful to name this the Mind Emulation Foundation and not the Brain Emulation Foundation. I also use the word 'body' instead of 'brain' throughout and define a connectome as: the comprehensive network of neural connections in your brain and nervous system.

If that were true, then quadriplegics would have cognitive issues, as would those who have their vagus nerve severed. Those people don't suffer from impaired cognition or drastic personality changes, so we can be sure that the nerves in the gut are not important for brain emulation.

Also human brains have an average of 86 billion neurons, so emulating an extra 100 million cells (0.1%) would be trivial in comparison.

It’s nice to see someone has consciousness all figured out.

But seriously, do you know of any studies that show no changes to mental state or capacity or personality or memory or any of the other things that compose “the mind” in such people?

I can’t believe anyone has done such studies yet. And just because you don’t see changes in such people, does not mean there haven’t been minuscule but measurable changes.

I feel like it just isn't that interesting if there are "miniscule but measureable changes" beyond a platonic ideal of self. Removing my minor back pain, or if I stopped drinking coffee, or a hundred other things would have larger-than-minuscule change on my personality but it's still "me".

Good point :)

86 billion neurons and ~1 trillion other cells, which interact with those neurons in non-trivial ways.

Quadriplegics do have altered cognitive function.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2633768/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6387693/

People who have large parts of their gut removed surgically don't lose their mind.

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