From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Fri Jan 01 1999 - 05:31:35 MST
"Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" <sentience@pobox.com> writes:
> 1) Will these neurons keep regenerating forever, preventing senility?
I don't think so, they just seem to be given high doses of growth
factors. Neural regeneration is likely highly controlled in the brain,
and the implanted neurons will become boring, normal neurons
(hopefully) when implanted. I also wonder if just simple implantation
can cure senility, it often seems to involve widespread loss across
the entire brain, relatively hard to fix through simple implantation.
> 2) Why hasn't that occurred as a natural mutation?
Likely becuase there is no evolutionary pressure for regenerating
brains (most brain damage in the natural environment is deadly anyway)
and a fairly firm pressure against regeneration (upsets old memories,
increased cancer risk). Note that the only places where regeneration
seems to occur are the olfactory bulb (restore lost olfactory sensors)
and the hippocampus (very dynamic place, likely not storing anything
for long anyway).
> 3) Could this transform non-infants into Algernons?
Perhaps. I'm not sure if added neurons will benefit normal people
much, since all the important stuff is in connectivity. If we can set
up some new long-range connections we might see interesting new
abilities.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:02:42 MST