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Arran_Stirton comments on Neuroimaging as alternative/supplement to cryonics? - Less Wrong Discussion
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While the brain of a new-born baby can be generated by 10^9 bits of genetic information, it’s not true that this is enough to suitably specify a particular new-born’s brain. This is because of the large impact that conditions in the womb have on brain development (e.g. drugs&alcohol) and the limited extent to which brain structure is inherited.
However it’s quite likely that specific sections of the genome contribute to brain development, meaning that your lower bound for how much information it takes to generate a new-born’s brain is (*probably!) much lower than 10^9 bits. Though this still won’t be enough information to specify a particular new-born’s brain, just enough to considerably narrow-down the region of brain-structure-space that the new-born’s brain can occupy.
*Don't take my word for this – I don't know nearly enough to substantiate that claim.
Also, on a tentative note, it might be worth comparing scans of a brain before and after it's been cryogenically preserved in order to see if it's possible to tell the difference (and subsequently if the data from the pre-freezing brain can be approximated from the post freezing brain data).
The amount of information from a womb to the brain is about zero.
So are you saying that the conditions in the womb doesn't have any effect on brain structure?
By the way, try to aim higher than DH3 because it's hard for me to understand what exactly you're disagreeing with if you don't provide me with a counterargument. Sorry for the bother.
You are welcome to "bother" anytime.
I eat a lot. A half to a kilogram per day. What is the amount of information I've got this way? Very little, if any. Even drinking of a lot of alcohol - what I don't - and which would destroy my livers, would mean a very miniscule data transfer.
Some brain stimulating drugs one might take, and what brings him a significantly higher intelligence, is not a big data flow.
Just isn't. Biologists should respect what "information" and "data stream" and so on - mean.
I agree, yet none of that changes the fact that conditions in the womb have a large impact on brain development. Hence information about the conditions in the womb is required to generate a specific new-born’s brain. Sure when an adult takes a stimulating drug there's not a large data flow, but when the brain is actually forming drugs can fundamentally alter its final structure.
This seems to be false. See for example here.
Those biologists are enthusiastic about it, I know. But they simply don't understand what information means, IMHO.
A few years ago, some of them frequently claimed, that there is a ridiculously big number of bytes stored in human memory. Something much greater than goes inside the Beckenstein's bound for the planet, let alone the head.
In my humble opinion, and with all the respect, they don't know what they are talking about.
I'm confused. Are you saying that they are wrong when they say that womb environment impacts intelligence and sexual preference? Is it possible that there's an issue of definitions going on here about what is meant by "about zero"?
Do you have a citation for this? I'd be curious to see that.
There's one estimate in the While Brain Emulation roadmap from (Wang, Liu et al., 2003) estimating that the brain has a computational capacity with 10^8432^ bits of memory.
Sandberg & Bostrom sardonicly note in a footnote that 'This information density is far larger than the Bekenstein black hole entropy bound on the information content in material systems (Bekenstein, 1981).'
I'm not surprised that such estimates exist. What I'm more doubtful is the claim that such bounds were "frequently claimed".
Can't find it now, I am sorry. But I remember the number 2^8000 or there about bytes, mentioned a few years ago as an estimation by some scientist. Neurologist. Now it is impossible to find it, since Google can't search "2^8* ... bytes ... brains" type of a string. Or some regular expressions or something.
I am saying, that there is at the most a very tiny amount of the information flow, even if the womb can make you smarter or dumber. If a lightning strikes and makes somebody a 10 IQ points smarter - what I can see as a possibility - the amount of information by the thunder is about zero.