Ruzeil comments on MIT Technology Review - Michael Hendricks opinion on Cryonics - Less Wrong

4 Post author: Ruzeil 16 September 2015 08:15AM

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Comment author: AndreInfante 16 September 2015 08:43:17AM *  7 points [-]

If we could “upload” or roughly simulate any brain, it should be that of C. elegans. Yet even with the full connectome in hand, a static model of this network of connections lacks most of the information necessary to simulate the mind of the worm. In short, brain activity cannot be inferred from synaptic neuroanatomy.

Straw man. Connectonomics is relevant to trying to explain the concept of uploading to the lay-man. Few cryonics proponents actually believe it's all you need to know to reconstruct the brain.

The features of your neurons (and other cells) and synapses that make you “you” are not generic. The vast array of subtle chemical modifications, states of gene regulation, and subcellular distributions of molecular complexes are all part of the dynamic flux of a living brain. These things are not details that average out in a large nervous system; rather, they are the very things that engrams (the physical constituents of memories) are made of.

The fact that someone can be dead for several hours and then be resuscitated, or have their brain substantially heated or cooled without dying, puts a theoretical limit on how sensitive your long-term brain state can possibly be to these sorts of transient details of brain structure. It seem very likely that long-term identity-related brain state is stored almost entirely in relatively stable neurological structures. I don't think this is particularly controversial, neurobiologically.

While it might be theoretically possible to preserve these features in dead tissue, that certainly is not happening now. The technology to do so, let alone the ability to read this information back out of such a specimen, does not yet exist even in principle. It is this purposeful conflation of what is theoretically conceivable with what is ever practically possible that exploits people’s vulnerability.

This is not, to the best of my knowledge, true, and he offers no evidence for this claim. Cryonics does a very good job of preserving a lot of features of brain tissue. There is some damage done by the cryoprotectants and thermal shearing, but it's specific and well-characterized damage, not total structural disruption. Although I will say that ice crystal formation in the deep brain caused by the no-reflow problem is a serious concern. Whether that's a showstopper depends on how important you think the fine-grained structure of white matter is.

But what is this replica? Is it subjectively “you” or is it a new, separate being? The idea that you can be conscious in two places at the same time defies our intuition. Parsimony suggests that replication will result in two different conscious entities. Simulation, if it were to occur, would result in a new person who is like you but whose conscious experience you don’t have access to.

Bad philosophy on top of bad neuroscience!

Comment author: Ruzeil 16 September 2015 09:11:44AM 1 point [-]

Since I don't have much academic knowledge on this subject, I appreciate Your feedback a lot. Can I just ask what is Your level of competence in this field?

BR

Comment author: AndreInfante 16 September 2015 09:37:37AM 1 point [-]

Just an enthusiastic amateur who's done a lot of reading. If you're interested in hearing a more informed version of the pro-cryonics argument (and seeing some of the data) I recommend the following links:

On ischemic damage and the no-reflow phenomenon: http://www.benbest.com/cryonics/ischemia.html

Alcor's research on how much data is preserved by their methods: http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/braincryopreservation1.html http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/newtechnology.html http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/CryopreservationAndFracturing.html

Yudkowsky's counter-argument to the philosophical issue of copies vs. "really you": http://lesswrong.com/lw/r9/quantum_mechanics_and_personal_identity/

Comment author: anon85 17 September 2015 05:20:06AM 6 points [-]

You might be interested in Aaronson's proposed theory for why it might be physically impossible to copy a human brain. He outlined it in "The Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine": http://arxiv.org/abs/1306.0159

In that essay he discusses a falsifiable theory of the brain that, if true, would mean brain states are un-copyable. So Yudkowsky's counter-argument may be a little too strong: it is indeed consistent with modern physics for brain simulation to be impossible.

Comment author: V_V 17 September 2015 03:24:34PM 1 point [-]

Yudkowsky's counter-argument to the philosophical issue of copies vs. "really you": http://lesswrong.com/lw/r9/quantum_mechanics_and_personal_identity/

Yudkowsky's counter-argument is a counter-argument to a straw man, since I don't think anybody ever argued in modern times that personal identity is linked to a specific set of individual atoms. Everybody knows that atoms in the brain are constantly replaced.

Comment author: Ruzeil 18 September 2015 08:07:45AM 0 points [-]

Everybody knows that atoms in the brain are constantly replaced.

I don't know if this is true.

http://askanaturalist.com/do-we-replace-our-cells-every-7-or-10-years/ http://rebrn.com/re/theseus-body-is-there-any-part-of-a-human-that-is-cellularly-or-873979/ http://www.theguardian.com/science/neurophilosophy/2012/feb/23/brain-new-cells-adult-neurogenesis All 3 links suggest the opposite.

Can You provide a source for this claim?

BR

Comment author: V_V 18 September 2015 01:04:21PM 1 point [-]

If I understand correctly, long lived and highly metabolically active cells like neurons still replace most, if not all, of their atoms during their lifetime, since metabolism and environmental radiation cause chemical damage which needs to be repaired in order to keep the cell functional.

Comment author: CellBioGuy 20 September 2015 03:37:24AM *  2 points [-]

There's actually been some cool studies on DNA extracted from brain tissue from people born before the first nuclear tests...

DNA is turned over for the most part during DNA replication. Neurons are terminally differentiated and do not divide, and thus their DNA is more or less frozen in place even as other molecules turn over (barring small repair events). People born before the first nuclear tests have neurons bearing a different carbon isotope ratio in their DNA than people born afterwards, and this was used in a study to determine the rate over a human lifetime of new neurogenesis versus nerve cells that stick with you for your whole life. Turns out most neurons stick around but in particular regions like your hippocampus there is a good deal of turnover of cells, with only about two thirds of the DNA there with you from birth:

http://www.physicscentral.com/explore/action/images/Neuron-by-age.jpg

The turnover of DNA molecules doesn't really make any difference, just something fun that lets you track cells incidentally.

Comment author: V_V 20 September 2015 08:41:17AM -1 points [-]

Nice information!

Comment author: gjm 18 September 2015 11:29:46AM *  1 point [-]

The claim isn't that the cells are constantly replaced, but that the atoms are; see e.g. this blog post as an example of the claim being made. [EDITED to add:] More specifically, an example where the claim is made and "new cells" and "new atoms" are explicitly distinguished.

Comment author: Ruzeil 18 September 2015 12:16:19PM *  1 point [-]

I have found this reddit discussion:

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1q16hw/im_32_is_there_a_single_cell_or_even_molecule/

and there are some pro and contra comments in there about atoms and molecules of the nerve cells. Probably I need a lot more reading on this subject , txs for the guidance.

BR