Hacker News Reader

Comment by songgao | Hacker News Reader

The about page [1] is very interesting. "3. Providing a foundation for uploading research .... If it can be done for a worm, the next steps are to attempt a zebrafish, then a fruit fly, then a honeybee, then a mouse, then a dog, then a macaque monkey, then a chimpanzee, and, ultimately, a human. " -- that really fascinate me.

Isn't that awesome? But ... "the philosophical assumptions fail, and human immortality through uploading is fundamentally impossible".

Could anybody explain this a little bit?

[1] http://nemaload.davidad.org/about

View on HN

Do be careful when you get to lobsters.

Charles Stross' book Accelerando includes a short story about uploaded lobster brain-scans defecting from the KGB. And they don't like humans. :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerando_%28novel%29

The jump from honeybee to mouse is enormous - much larger than any of the other jumps except chimpanzee to human.

Maybe try lizard in between them.

The rest are a bit out of order too... you'd probably want to try Drosophilia before Zebrafish. But yeah, the leap to mouse is pretty huge. You could potentially try to do Xenopus tropicalis (frog) before mouse, but I'm not sure how well that is mapped as a neural model.

I'm tempted to point out that reptiles are so distinct from either mammals or insects that they wouldn't be a natural stepping stone. But some of my esteemed colleagues advocate jumping from zebrafish to mouse, and I just realized they're probably thinking along similar lines: why try to figure out insects along the way from fish to mammals?

Personally, though, I'm limiting my scope to the worm (at least for now!). The particular path which is best to take beyond that is much less clear.

> Isn't that awesome? But ... "the philosophical assumptions fail, and human immortality through uploading is fundamentally impossible".

To boil it down: They assume roughly that simulating the state and functionality of the neurons is sufficient to reproduce consciousness.

If there's something more to consciousness - say for example that consciousness requires the specific organisation of matter of the human brain - then uploading, at least into software, will fail.

Unless the software models those bits too and models them well enough.

The link in the sidebar offers a reasonable elaboration: http://nemaload.davidad.org/about/philosophy

I'm curious, is the goal to prove one or few models wrong? I think while it is extremely sexy, his explanation kind of answers the question for him in a cheesy way - "depends on which lens you look at the problem with".

Doing a nematode-version Turing test is one thing. You could even do it as a nematode in a Chinese box. But isn't there a flaw in comparing how a real nematode's brain reacts to light vs. a nemaload function to a specific computed wavelength of light energy? I think I'm not understanding something.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com