From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Mon Mar 06 2000 - 10:11:27 MST
Skye <skyezacharia@yahoo.com> writes:
> *thinks* I wonder... can the same memory be stored in
> different parts of the brain?
Individual memories are apparently stored as modifications in synaptic
connections in many neurons, so they are spread out across most of the
brain already. The nice thing about distributed representations is
that if you lose one part of the pattern, the whole is not lost.
> I could almost see some kind of process whereby a computer's neural
> net was interfaced with a person's... and then, somehow, you kind of
> shove... *thinks* not very coherent in this form, but I'm sort of
> thinking about whether or not a neuron has any natural capacity to
> transfer it's state to another neuron... and whether some form of
> excitation could cause them to transfer along a chain. Kind of like
> providing space for it to move through...
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.
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.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 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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