From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Wed Mar 08 2000 - 11:21:05 MST
Skye <skyezacharia@yahoo.com> writes:
> > To my knowledge not. I'm working on memory transfer
> > between the
> > hippocampus and cortex, and there is no real
> > evidence this can occur -
> > which makes life much harder for me :-) What seems
> > to happen in my
> > reasearch is that one part of the brain can train
> > another part to do
> > the same function, but this a rather special case
> > and likely not
> > workable everywhere else.
> oh well.... hmm. If one part can train another part
> to do the same function... can this part be forced to
> do the training? If you suppresed one section of the
> brain and had the hardware equivalent for it to work
> with... and if you did this with each section....
Not really, the hippocampus seems to be good at storing information
quickly, and then train other parts of the brain. The first ability is
due to some special properties of the cells and network but could in
principle be imitated by giving the cortex high doses of plasticity
enhancing stuff like acetylcholine. The second part is the problem -
the hippocampus is connected to nearly every part of the cortex, but
the cortex doesn't have the same internal connectivity. Also, the
replay ability likely hinges on some special properties of the local
network, although this is more guesswork. So it doesn't seem you can
train another piece of cortex to become a new hippocampus (although
some children born with no hippocampus seem to do almost as well using
a related part of the cortex, the enthorhinal cortex, but that is
likely a special case).
> > As for uploading, I guess that if you integrate a
> > computer with a
> > neural network to your mind, and learn how to
> > integrate the network
> > with your thinking, gradually more and more of your
> > thought processes
> > would exist within the computing matrix. The problem
> > is that "you"
> > would be growing - it would not be that your
> > memories and everything
> > *moved* to the computer, but rather that new parts
> > developed inside it
> > enhancing your abilities. So the old brain would
> > still be needed until
> > enough interconnections had emerged to make it
> > irrelevant - but that
> > might not happen for some functions.
> Maybe at that point "you" would be more inside the
> computer than out... at which point, copying that one
> little original bit might be nothing more than
> minor... since your authentic self was now more inside
> than outside the computer, so to speak.
Exactly. That's the way I would like to do the transition, even if I'm
not averse to the "scan and simulate" model either.
> So I guess it wouldn't be "you" so much as "mostly you"... the
> question, I guess, would be how much is enough?
How can we tell?
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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