A major milestone has been reached in our Brain Preservation Prize

http://blog.brainpreservation.org/2015/05/26/may-2015-bpf-prize-update/

by porejide • 11 years ago

64 57 11 years ago

blog.brainpreservation.org

I am glad progress is being made here, but until we can avoid the destruction that occurs in the last 24 hours of expected death (eg cancer), or the damage that occurs with unexpected death (eg heart attack or trauma) from sitting at room temperature for hours after death, then all we are going to be preserving is grey mush.

ianpurton• 11 years ago

If people learn to take regular backups this wouldn't be a problem.

danieltillett4• 11 years ago

If only this were possible :(

imaginenore• 11 years ago

You're assuming this "grey mush" can't be recovered. We don't actually know that. A sufficiently advanced AI should be able to recover a person from way less.

danieltillett4• 11 years ago

The problem is the information is encoded in the arrangements of the neural connections. Once your brain has reached the grey mush stage all those connection are lost.

davidgerard4• 11 years ago

You're assuming the phrase "a sufficiently advanced AI" answers anything at all.

Presumably you're assuming if the information is there at all - if the necessary data hasn't been scrambled beyond the noise floor of the scrambling process - then there's something for magic (because you're really talking about magic here) to work with.

So, please (a) set out your claim with precision (b) back up your claim.

* What is the information you need to recover?

* To what degree is it scrambled?

* What of it is scrambled below the noise floor of the process?

* How do you know all this? (wrong answer: "here's a LessWrong/Alcor page." right answer: "here's something from a relevant neuroscientist.")

For comparison: even a nigh-magical superintelligent AI can't recover an ice sculpture from the bucket of water it's melted into. It is in fact possible to just lose information. So, since you're making this claim, I'd like you to quantify just what you think the damage actually is.

M83• 11 years ago

Such AI will only be able to recover a gradient set of possible personalities depending on the percentage of missing data. Something like 1000000 of slightly different permutations of you.

Udo2• 11 years ago

There has to be enough information left over to reconstruct a person in "high enough fidelity" (whatever we may decide that means in the future).

A brain just sitting there for hours after death at room temperature isn't idea - however, there is some good news in the area. It turns out that the most destruction happening to a brain after an ischemic episode is actually due to a cascade triggered by eventual re-perfusion. Since the dead brain is never re-perfused, this cascade is never triggered. Cellular decay after death makes a biological re-animation infeasible, but speaking as someone who did prepare a lot of neuro slides at uni, it takes more than a few hours for the structure itself to decay heavily, so we should be good for a scan/upload scenario.

Pertaining to the article, the first hours after death are nowhere near as problematic to the brain's information content as the plastination procedure they're using!

Brain trauma before death is another matter. Since we don't have the capability to create backups or checkpoints of our neuronal structure, what's physically destroyed is simply lost beyond recovery. However, for example in aggressive brain cancers, a functional copy of the person might still be recovered in principle even if their neocortex was severely compromised, as long as the actual data is still there.

jimrandomh• 11 years ago

I agree. But I also think this work (and future work like it) will help with that; having convincing proof that a preservation process works will make it easier to get obstacles to prompt preservation out of the way.

maaku8• 11 years ago

Note that this approach should be compared with cryonics, which attempts to vitrify the brain and preserve it in a glass-like state at liquid nitrogen temperatures:

http://www.alcor.org/

Personally I have some reservations about the plastination approach to personal longevity. Depending on your philosophical views on the nature of consciousness, it may be that under this procedure you would die and cease to exist, while some future emulation of your brain thinks it is you -- i.e. biological-you and future-emulated-you are two separate people that just share memories.

It is however interesting science and may be a short-cut path to getting necessary scanning resolution for whole brain emulation.

danieltillett4• 11 years ago

Isn't this the same as saying you are a different person every morning and that the person that went to sleep and the person that woke up are separate people?

sanoli2• 11 years ago

No, its very probably not the same. The brain doesn't shut off when you go to sleep. It keeps going, it keeps doing it's stuff, messing with memories, thoughts, all the bodily functions and a whole extra stuff that we don't know too well, but which probably still makes you you. Killing that brain and then simulating it somewhere else is not the same.

M83• 11 years ago

I personaly subscribe to that opinion. Even if the change is negligible. This is why I would like to be sober and conscious in case of any uploading.

hvs• 11 years ago

Buddhism has some interesting views on the nature of consciousness and "selfness". I think this is an interesting opportunity to think about what being "you" really means.

Shorel• 11 years ago

What about the Ship of Theseus paradox applied to brains?

If you don't 'feel' your death but all parts in your brain are eventually replaced by 'equivalent' ones, are you still yourself?

eli_gottlieb4• 11 years ago

To recap for everyone joining the conversation afresh: our intuitions about selfhood, continual consciousness, and personal identity probably don't make any sense at all if applied to this kind of question. The right thing to do isn't trying to repair the intuitions, but instead trying to figure out which of the unintuitive possibilities we happen to like.

iLoch• 11 years ago

One step closer to me being able to spin up multiple instances of my brain to work on my side project and play video games with.

sanoli2• 11 years ago

Or spin up an instance with the 'lazyness' region deactivated.

ttty• 11 years ago

Please add a load balancer too. I hope we can have an interface like amazon ec2, but for brains

vidarh2• 11 years ago

That would have been a somewhat less ridiculous explanation for The Matrix. "Oh, those vats full of humans? They're our neural network cloud".

toomuchtodo• 11 years ago

That postulates that everyone's brain is worth simulating.

In the beginning, only the most "valuable" neural mappings will be worth the computing time required to simulate them. And rights! Does a simulated neural network of a human being have the same rights as a human being? One couldn't argue that simply because the underlying processor is silicon-based instead of carbon-based rights are lost.

Many philosophical questions to answer.

Udo2• 11 years ago

We just has a plastination vs. cryonics debate (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9595853) which might be of interest here.

A major milestone has been reached in our Brain Preservation Prize

Related Stories