I found this article on the Brain Preservation Foundation's blog that covers a lot of common theories of consciousness and shows how they kinna miss the point when it comes to determining if certain folks should or should not upload our brains if given the opportunity.

Hence I see no reason to agree with Kuhn’s pessimistic conclusions about uploading even assuming his eccentric taxonomy of theories of consciousness is correct.  What I want to focus on in the reminder of this blog is challenging the assumption that the best approach to consciousness is tabulating lists of possible theories of consciousness and assuming they each deserve equal consideration (much like the recent trend in covering politics to give equal time to each position regardless of any empirical relevant considerations). Many of the theories of consciousness on Kuhn’s list, while reasonable in the past, are now known to be false based on our best current understanding of neuroscience and physics (specifically, I am referring to theories that require mental causation or mental substances). Among the remaining theories, some of them are much more plausible than others.

http://www.brainpreservation.org/not-all-theories-of-consciousness-are-created-equal-a-reply-to-robert-lawrence-kuhns-recent-article-in-skeptic-magazine/

"The evidence of harm would be the evidence that you can hurt some cognitive functions with the same stimulation protocols that help another cognitive function. But they're completely correct that we don't have any evidence saying you're definitely hurting yourself. We do have evidence that you're definitely changing your brain."

interview:

http://www.wbur.org/commonhealth/2016/07/11/caution-brain-hacking

Paper:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ana.24689/references

I was aware of the variability of responses to stim, but not the paper that leveraging one brain function could impair another. This was also written to give the docs some info to help inform their patients.

edit

I'll also tuck this in here, as i posted it to open thread.

Texting changes brain waves to new, previously unknown, pattern.

http://sciencebulletin.org/archives/2623.html

Makes me wonder if they were using spell check, or the new, shortend speak. By using constructed kernels, or images of words and concepts, it looks like machine learning retrieval or construction is already  being practiced here ?

Dear members of Less Wrong, this is my very first contribution to your society and I hope that you might help me to get out of my confusion.

Back a few months ago, I tested for the first time a video game created by Croteam Studio which is called 'The Talos Principle'.

At the time, i was astonished by all the philosophical questions that the game was rising. It has kinda changed the way I see the world now, also the way I see myself.

I wanted to share my thoughts with you on the subject of 'What does being a Human mean ?'

First, I'd like to introduce you to this principle.

In Greek mythology, Talos was a giant automaton made of bronze which protected Europa in Crete from pirates and invaders.

He was known to be a gift given to Europa by Zeus himself.

He was so strong that he could crush a man's skull using only one hand, and so tall that he could circle the island's shores three times daily.

He was able to talk, think and act like he wanted to. (Except he had to obey Europa's will)

Even though his body was not organic, he was composed of a liquid-metal flowing through his veins who behaved like blood.

And here is how the principle begins. What is the fundamental difference between Talos and us, Human ?

Considering the fact that like us, he's able to think by himself, move thanks to his will and communicate like everybody does. Is he really different from us ? Sharing our own culture, history and language don't make him Human as well ?

I'm pretty sure that your first thought might be 'No way ! We are part of a biological specie. We have nothing in common with a synthetic being'.

But does our body really defines us as a Human Being ?

From a strict biological point of view, Sir Darwin would say yes, of course. And we won't be able to argue with that.

But if you take a Human being, for instance Platon, and you just cut his leg off and replace it with a synthetic prosthesis.

Would this person still be Platon ?

It appears that the answer to this question is yes, according to all the people who suffered from any kind of accidents which led them to give up a part of their body.

They were still the same. Of course they suffered from phantom pains and others psychological damages, but in the end, they remain the same as before.

Let's get back to our example. Now imagine that this synthetic-leg-equipped-Platon just had an accident that has made him lose his right arm. Profused with empathy, you accept to give him a prosthethic one.

Now, would this person still be Platon ?

Again, the answer is yes. Indeed, these accidents would not leave a man without leaving any kind of trauma, but he is still able to think and act like a normal Human. Thus we are assuming that he's still one of us, and that he's still himself.

So, how many times do we have to repeat the process in order to touch something that we can't exchange with anything synthesis in order to preserve Platon's Humanity (and sanity).

The answer appears to be the brain.

Deleting Brain remains the same as deleting our being. We can live with artificial heart, lungs, stomach, etc. but we can't live without our natural brain.

The brain is one of the biggest unknowns in the Human body. Doctors are claiming that we only know less of the half of how does the brain work, mystify it by the same time.

But still, we can resume the brain to its physical material. Estimated to contain 15-33 billion neurons each connected by synapses to several thousand other neurons which communicate with one another by means of long protoplasmic fibers called axons carrying trains of signal pulses called action potentials to distant parts of the brain or body targeting specific recipient cells.

Indeed, even if we do not really know for sure how every cell interacts with others we know that everything is bounded by chemistry. Every kind of information transfer can be reduced to a chemical reaction, something physical.

Every thought of our being started and ended with a chemical reaction. And we know how to replace a chemical reaction by another. We know how to simulate a potential transfer and thus we are today able to simulate a very simple brain on a computer.

( You may want to check the Blue Brain Project which illustrates everything that i'm writing. This simulation does not consist simply of an artificial neural network but involves a biologically realistic model of neurons )

So if in a close future we are able to simulate correctly a Human's brain, and therefore a whole Human body as well, can we considerate it as a Human being ?

Being aware of the material reality of the brain might make you think twice about yourself and your specie in general.

How do you describe a human being now ? Would you describe Talos as a human being as well ? Or just call it a being, refusing to give him the title of 'Human' because of the biological difference between you and it ? Therefore, can a man entirely simulated in a computer still be called human ?

Also, do not forget how the body influences the brain. Just look back on what happened to you during puberty, when sex desire overwhelmed you, making you impossible to remain calm. This happened thanks to chemicals, but it's still very interesting to see how a single chemical can have a huge influence on your consciousness.

I'm for now in a haze, so instead of lying on my bed thinking, i'd rather ask for your point of view. I'm very curious, would you kindly give it to me ?

Thanks for reading it all, I'll see your reactions in the comment section below.

[By the way, i'm a 19 years old french engineering student, i beg for your pardon concerning my english expression]

AMA is here : http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1r6exr/i_am_kenneth_hayworth_a_phd_neuroscientist_and/

The Brain Preservation Foundation's founder Ken Hayworth is going to be available on Reddit (http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA) this Thursday at 7:00PM EST to answer your questions. We hope to have a very interesting discussion ranging from the technical aspects of plastination and cryopreservation to the social consequences of widespread adoption of brain preservation.

Hayworth is a Senior Scientist at the Janelia Farm Research Campus and is an expert in state of the art brain preservation and imaging.

From the Brain Preservation Site:

Kenneth Hayworth, President and Co-Founder of the Brain Preservation Foundation, is currently a Senior Scientist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Farm Research Campus (JFRC) in Ashburn, Virginia. JFRC is perhaps the leading research institution in the field of connectomics in the United States. At JFRC, Hayworth is currently researching ways to extend Focused Ion Beam Scanning Electron Microscopy (FIBSEM) imaging of brain tissue to encompass much larger volumes than are currently possible. For an overview of this work see his recent review paper and online presentation. Prior to moving to JFRC, Hayworth was a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University. Hayworth is co-inventor of the Tape-to-SEM process for high-throughput volume imaging of neural circuits at the nanometer scale and he designed and built several automated machines to implement this process. Hayworth received a PhD in Neuroscience from the University of Southern California for research into how the human visual system encodes spatial relations among objects. Hayworth is a vocal advocate for brain preservation and mind uploading and a co-founder of the Brain Preservation Foundation which calls for the implementation of an emergency glutaraldehyde perfusion procedure in hospitals, and for the development of a whole brain embedding procedure which can demonstrate perfect ultrastructure preservation across an entire human brain.

Links:

- http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA
  Ask me anything page where the discussion will be held

- http://chronicle.com/article/article-content/132819/     
  Overview article explaining plastination and the Brain Preservation foundation

- http://hplusmagazine.com/2013/05/28/neuroscience-and-the-future-of-humanity-interview-with-ken-hayworth/
  Extensive interview with Hayworth.

- http://www.brainpreservation.org/
- http://www.janelia.org/people/scientist/kenneth-hayworth
- http://www.brainpreservation.org/content/contact

http://www.lunduniversity.lu.se/o.o.i.s?news_item=5928&id=24890

According to Johan Mårtensson from Lund University, if you are learning new language quickly, it helps your brain to become bigger and increase its activity:

This finding came from scientists at Lund University, after examining young recruits with a talent for acquiring languages who were able to speak in Arabic, Russian, or Dari fluently after just 13 months of learning, before which they had no knowledge of the languages.

After analyzing the results, the scientists saw no difference in the brain structure of the control group. However, in the language group, certain parts of the brain had grown, including the hippocampus, responsible for learning new information, and three areas in the cerebral cortex.

And there is more:

One particular study from 2011 provided evidence that Alzheimer's was delayed 5 years for bilingual patients, compared to monolingual patients.

http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=122523&org=NSF&from=news
From the article:

New research published today in the journal Science suggests it may be possible to use brain technology to learn to play a piano, reduce mental stress or hit a curve ball with little or no conscious effort. It's the kind of thing seen in Hollywood's "Matrix" franchise.

Think of a person watching a computer screen and having his or her brain patterns modified to match those of a high-performing athlete or modified to recuperate from an accident or disease. Though preliminary, researchers say such possibilities may exist in the future.

Experiments conducted at Boston University (BU) and ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, recently demonstrated that through a person's visual cortex, researchers could use decoded functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to induce brain activity patterns to match a previously known target state and thereby improve performance on visual tasks.

EDIT: To clarify, this is almost certainly over-hyped. However, it appears to at least be an instance of very interesting biofeedback.

Article at io9. The paper is available here.

The researchers showed monkeys specific images and then trained them to select those images out of a larger set after a time delay. They recorded the monkeys' brain function to determine which signals were important. The experiment tests the monkey's performance on this task in different cases, as described by io9:

Once they were satisfied that the correct mapping had been done, they administered cocaine to the monkeys to impair their performance on the match-to-sample task (seems like a rather severe drug to administer, but there you have it). Immediately, the monkeys' performance fell by a factor of 20%.

It was at this point that the researchers engaged the neural device. Specifically, they deployed a "multi-input multi-output nonlinear" (MIMO) model to stimulate the neurons that the monkeys needed to complete the task. The inputs of this device monitored such things as blood flow, temperature, and the electrical activity of other neurons, while the outputs triggered the individual neurons required for decision making. Taken together, the i/o model was able to predict the output of the cortical neurons — and in turn deliver electrical stimulation to the right neurons at the right time.

And incredibly, it worked. The researchers successfully restored the monkeys' decision-making skills even though they were still dealing with the effects of the cocaine. Moreover, when duplicating the experiment under normal conditions, the monkeys' performance improved beyond the 75% proficiency level shown earlier. In other words, a kind of cognitive enhancement had happened.

This research is a remarkable followup to research that was done in rodents last year.

**** DEAL OVER: As of 20120611.

Another free kindle I thought some might have interest in. I haven't read it, but the first review was glowing and looked relevant.

First Amazon Review:

> Five Star Final; Excellent; A "must read" for any "student" of brain-behavior relationships

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005DKQQG4/

UPDATE: Still free at the US amazon at 2pm eastern time. Reports that it is not free at the UK site, which I verified. Since I can log in to the UK site from the US and see the price, I assume people in the UK could sign into the US site and buy it. If anyone gives that a try, let me know and I'll further update the top level.

UPDATE:  Free at amazon.fr. Can buy at the US site from the Netherlands. Can't buy from FR or US sites from UK.

A recent article in PloS Computational Biology suggests that memory is encoded in the microtubules. "Signaling and encoding in MTs and other cytoskeletal structures offer rapid, robust solid-state information processing which may reflect a general code for MT-based memory and information processing within neurons and other eukaryotic cells."

They argue that synaptic connections are transient compared with the lifetime of memories, and therefore memories cannot be stored in them, but in some more persistent structure. The structure they suggest is the phosphorylation state of sites on microtubule lattices within neurons. And that's about as much of the technical detail as I feel able to summarise. It's not all speculation, they report technical work on the structures of these cellular components. Total memory capacity would be somewhere upwards of 10^20 bits (or in more everyday units, 10 million terabytes), depending on the encoding, of which they suggest several schemes.

Journalistic writeup here.

Note that Stuart Hameroff, one of the authors, is known for his proposals for microtubules as the mechanism of consciousness through quantum effects (and with Penrose, quantum gravitational effects). The present paper, however, is solely about memory and does not touch on quantum coherence or consciousness.

Introduction

When people on LW want to explain a bias, they often turn to Evolutionary psychology. For example, Lukeprog writes

Human reasoning is subject to a long list of biases. Why did we evolve such faulty thinking processes? Aren't false beliefs bad for survival and reproduction?

I think that ''evolved faulty thinking processes'' is the wrong way to look at it and I will argue that some biases are the consequence of structural properties of the brain, which 'cannot' be affected by evolution.

Brain structure and the halo effect

I want to introduce a simple model, which relates the halo effect to a structural property of the brain. My hope is that this approach will be useful to understand the halo effect more systematically and shows that thinking in evolutionary terms is not always the best way to think about certain biases.

One crucial property of the brain is that it has to map a (essentially infinite) high-dimensional reality onto a finite low-dimensional internal representation. (If you know some Linear Algebra, you can think of this as a projection from a high-dimensional space into a low-dimensional space.) This is done more or less automatically by the limitation of our senses and brain's structure as a neural network.

An immediate consequence of this observation is that there will be many states of the world, which are mapped to an almost identical inner representation. In terms of computational efficiency it makes sense to use overlapping set of neurons with similar activation level to represent similar concepts. (This is also a consequence of how the brain actually builds representations from sense inputs.)

Now compare this to the following passage from here.

The halo effect is that perceptions of all positive traits are correlated. Profiles rated higher on scales of attractiveness, are also rated higher on scales of talent, kindness, honesty, and intelligence.

This shouldn't be a surprise, since 'positive' ('feels good') seems to be one of the evolutionary hard-wired concepts. Other concepts that we acquire during our life and associate with positive emotions, like kindness and honesty are mapped to 'nearby' neural structures. When one of those mental structures is activated, the 'closed ones' will be activated to a certain degree as well.

Since we differentiate concepts more when we are learning about a subject, the above reasoning should imply that children and people with less education in a certain area should be more influenced by this (generalized) halo effect in that area.

Conclusion

Since evolution can only modify the existing brain structure but cannot get away from the neural network 'design', the halo effect is a necessary by-product of human thinking. But the degree of 'throwing things in one pot' will depend on how much we learn about those things and increase our representation dimensionality.

My hope is that we can relief evolution from the burden of having to explain so many things and focus more on structural explanations, which provide a working model for possible applications and a better understanding.

PS: I am always grateful for feedback!

Article here;

http://www.ox.ac.uk/media/science_blog/brainboosting.html

Recent research in Oxford and elsewhere has shown that one type of brain stimulation in particular, called transcranial direct current stimulation or TDCS, can be used to improve language and maths abilities, memory, problem solving, attention, even movement.

Critically, this is not just helping to restore function in those with impaired abilities. TDCS can be used to enhance healthy people’s mental capacities. Indeed, most of the research so far has been carried out in healthy adults.

The article goes on to discuss the ethics of the technique.

A pair of conjoined twins, sharing a direct neural connection. There is evidence that the girls can sense what the other twin is sensing:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/29/magazine/could-conjoined-twins-share-a-mind.html?pagewanted=all

This suggests two things:

* High bandwidth Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI) ought to be possible (no surprise, but it's good to have strong evidence)

* The brain is a general purpose machine. It doesn't have specific modules for 'Left Hand', 'Right Hand', etc. Rather, it takes in information and makes sense out of it. It does this even when the setup is haphazard (as the connection between the twins' brains must be). On the other hand, we know the brain *does* have specific modules (such as the visual cortex among many others), which makes an interesting dichotomy.

I predict that the main hindrance to high functioning BCI is getting sufficient bandwidth, not figuring out how to decode/encode signals properly.

Underground Q&A session with Nick Bostrom (http://www.nickbostrom.com) on existential risks and artificial intelligence with the Oxford Transhumanists (recorded 10 October 2011).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQeijCRJSog

Two talks from the Future of Humanity Institute are now online (this is the first time we've done this, so please excuse the lack of polish). The first is Anders Sandberg talking about brain emulations (technical overview), the second is myself talking of the risks of Oracle AIs (informal presentation). They can be found here:

Fesability of whole-brain emulation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nIzPpF635c&feature=related, initial paper at http://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0019/3853/brain-emulation-roadmap-report.pdf, new paper still to come.

Thinking inside the box: Using and controlling an Oracle AI:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gz9zYQsT-QQ&feature=related, paper at http://www.aleph.se/papers/oracleAI.pdf

http://sites.google.com/site/gallantlabucb/publications/nishimoto-et-al-2011

Restoring Memory, Repairing Damaged Brains (article @ PR Newswire)

Using an electronic system that duplicates the neural signals associated with memory, they managed to replicate the brain function in rats associated with long-term learned behavior, even when the rats had been drugged to forget.

This series of experiments, as described, sounds very well-constructed and thorough. The scientists first recorded specific activity in the hippocampus, where short-term memory becomes long-term memory. They then used drugs to inhibit that activity, preventing the formation of and access to long-term memory. Using the information they had gathered about the hippocampus activity, they constructed an artificial replacement and implanted it into the rats' brains. This successfully restored the rats' ability to store and use long-term memory. Further, they implanted the device into rats without suppressed hippocampal activity, and demonstrated increased memory abilities in those subjects.

"These integrated experimental modeling studies show for the first time that with sufficient information about the neural coding of memories, a neural prosthesis capable of real-time identification and manipulation of the encoding process can restore and even enhance cognitive mnemonic processes," says the paper.

It's a truly impressive result.

I have recently been thinking about this question, "what is it exactly that helps install religious software so deeply and dogmatically into the brain?" Often those who are strongly religious fall into a few categories: (1) They were trained to believe in specific aspects of religion as children; (2) They entered into a very destitute part of their lives (i.e. severe depression, midlife crisis, loss of a job, death in the family, cancer, alcoholism, or other existential problems).

What strikes me about these situations is that emotion generally dominates the decision-making process. I remember when I was a child and attended church camp at the encouragement of my family I was heavily pressured by the camp counselors to "accept Christ" and I saw that there was a positive correlation between my willingness to accept Christ, memorize Bible verses, and say certain statements about behavior in the context of Christian morals and the way that the camp counselors, my extended family, and other adults would treat me. As a result, it was not until many years later that my preference for rationalism and science was able to fully crack that emotionally-founded religious belief installed in me as a child. I know many people for whom a similar narrative is true regarding experiences with alcohol, etc., though it seems to be rare for someone to completely dismiss deeply and emotionally held beliefs from their youth.

Emotion is something we have evolved to utilize. Generally speaking, we need emotion because we have to make split-second decisions sometimes in life and we don't have the opportunity to integrate our decision process on data. If someone attacks me I will become angry because anger will raise my adrenaline levels, temporarily reduce other biological needs like hunger or waste removal, and enable me to fight for survival. Essentially emotion is just a recorded previous decision that works on stereotypical data, or in probabilistic terms it is like basing a quick decision on solely the first moment of a bunch of previously experienced data. The first moment might not be the best descriptor of the data... but if you're in a computational bind you might not be able to do a whole lot better and you'll be biologically penalized for spending your CPU time trying to compute better descriptors of the data. But it is undeniable that decisions we all make based upon emotion are often some of the most powerful and deepest-seated beliefs that we have.

With religion this is especially true. Very religious people, in my view, have this software installed emotionally and then spend years practicing the art of pushing the installed software ever closer to the very act of perception itself, until at some point it is almost the case that sensory data is literally passed through a religious filter before it is even processed and presented for perception. A sunset becomes a symbol of God's love so much so that there is (almost) no physical distinction between the literal viewing of photons depicting the sunset scene and the thinking of the thought "This shows that God loves me." Emotionally installed software presents a very difficult problem. Depending on how close to the act of perception that it has been pushed, it implies there is a remarkably tiny window of opportunity for the presentation of data that could convincingly demonstrate that rational alternatives are better in a number of important senses.  

I'm sure many of you have had debates where you've run into circular logic and unavoidable walls that stifle all useful discussion. Can we as a community come up with a good theory on how sensory data can help to uninstall deep emotionally installed software in someone's brain? I really feel that this is an area that deserves some philosophical attention. Is it the case that if software is installed in someone's brain in conjunction with emotion (and by this I literally mean that the cyclic AMP cycles and other biological processes used for memory formation are made stronger and synaptic connections related to the library of belief concepts (e.g. religious) are reinforced by chemicals released in conjunction with the emotive force of the experience in which they are formed) can only be uninstalled by a similarly impactful emotional experience? It appears that slow-moving rationality and logical discussion are almost physically powerless to succeed as convincing mechanisms. And if this is the case, what should rationalists do to promote their ideas (aside from the obvious social pressure to stop installing religious software in the minds of children, etc.)

Note that in the discussion above I use 'religion' as a specific example, but any irrationally held belief that derives from an emotionally impactful experience would serve the same purpose. And also, here we can assume 'religious' refers to ontological claims unsupported by any evidence and then purported to have day-to-day impacts on life and decision-making. I would be very grateful for any thoughts the community has and hopefully we can generate some useful techniques for understanding how to appropriately uninstall emotional software (in the instances when it's useful to do so)... even the kinds of emotional software that we ourselves (rationalists) often fall victim to in our own imperfect understanding of the world.

Functioning Synapse Created Using Carbon Nanotubes: Devices Might Be Used in Brain Prostheses or Synthetic Brains (article @ ScienceDaily)

Engineering researchers the University of Southern California have made a significant breakthrough in the use of nanotechnologies for the construction of a synthetic brain. They have built a carbon nanotube synapse circuit whose behavior in tests reproduces the function of a neuron, the building block of the brain.

A very promising development for both human and artificial intelligence research.

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2186

Convincing argument, or faulty metaphor?

I would go with the latter, but I don't trust my brain's abilities at 5:30 in the morning.

There's a good song by Eminem - If I had a million dollars.  So, if I had a hypothetical task to give away $30 million to different foundations without having a right to influence the projects, I would distribute them as follows, $3 million for each organization:

1. Nanofactory collaboration, Robert Freitas, Ralph Merkle – developers of molecular nanotechnology and nanomedicine. Robert Freitas is the author of the monography Nanomedicine.
2. Singularity institute, Michael Vassar, Eliezer Yudkowsky – developers and ideologists of the friendly Artificial Intelligence
3. SENS Foundation, Aubrey de Grey – the most active engineering project in life extension, focused on the most promising underfunded areas
4. Cryonics Institute – one of the biggest cryonics firms in the US, they are able to use the additional funding more effectively as compared to Alcor
5. Advanced Neural Biosciences, Aschwin de Wolf – an independent cryonics research center created by ex-researchers from Suspended Animation
6. Brain observatory – brain scanning
7. University Hospital Careggi in Florence, Paolo Macchiarini – growing organs (not an American medical school, because this amount of money won’t make any difference to the leading American centers)
8. Immortality institute – advocating for immortalism, selected experiments
9. IEET – institute of ethics and emerging technologies – promotion of transhumanist ideas
10. Small research grants of $50-300 thousand

Now, if the task is to most effectively invest $30 million dollars, what projects would be chosen? (By effectiveness here I mean increasing the chances of radical life extension)

Well, off the top of my head:

1. The project: “Creation of technologies to grow a human liver” – $7 million. The project itself costs approximately $30-50 million, but $7 million is enough to achieve some significant intermediate results and will definitely attract more funds from potential investors.
2. Break the world record in sustaining viability of a mammalian head separate from the body - $0.7 million
3. Creation of an information system, which characterizes data on changes during aging in humans, integrates biomarkers of aging, and evaluates the role of pharmacological and other interventions in aging processes – $3 million
4. Research in increasing cryoprotectors efficacy - $3 million
5. Creation and realization of a program “Regulation of epigenome” - $5 million
6. Creation, promotion and lobbying of the program on research and fighting aging - $2 million
7. Educational programs in the fields of biogerontology, neuromodelling, regenerative medicine, engineered organs - $1.5 million
8. “Artificial blood” project - $2 million
9. Grants for authors, script writers, and art representatives for creation of pieces promoting transhumanism - $0.5 million
10. SENS Foundation project of removing senescent cells - $2 million
11. Creation of a US-based non-profit, which would protect and lobby the right to live and scientific research in life extension - $2 million
11. Participation of  “H+ managers” in conferences, forums  and social events - $1 million
12. Advocacy and creating content in social media - $0.3 million

A writer's memoir of a brain tumor slowly destroying his ability to use language

When I came to read this passage "…floating and flailing weightlessly.…" I said the word "weightlessly" as "walterkly". It took quite a bit of effort to be fully sure that this was a mistake; and more effort and repeating to grasp what exactly this nonsense word was, to establish its sound – I had to construct it phoneme by phoneme – clearly enough to write it down. And it seems that the reading eye, darting backwards and forwards, was plucking letters from the whole vicinity, and mixing them up, having lost its usual ability to sort them.What the whole thing emphasises, of course, is how what we call self-command is really a matter of having reliable automatic mechanisms, unthinking habits or instincts.

I came to the idea after a previous lesswrong topic discussing nihilism, and its several comments on depression and suicide. My argument is that wire heading in its extreme or complete/full form can be easily modeled as suicide, or less strongly as volitional intelligence reduction, at least given current human brain structure and the technology being underdeveloped and hence understood and more likely to lead to such end states.

I define Full Wire Heading as that which a person would not want to reverse after it 'activates' and which deletes their previous utility function or most of it. a weak definition yes, but it should be enough for the preliminary purposes of this post. A full wire head is extremely constrained, much like an infant for e.g. and although the new utility function could involve a wide range of actions, the activation of a few brain regions would be the main goal, and so they are extremely limited.

If one takes this position seriously, it follows that only one's moral standpoint on suicide or say lobotomy should govern judgments about full wire heading. This is trivially obvious of course, but to take this position as true we need to understand more about wire heading, as data is extremely lacking especially in regards to human like brains. My other question then is to what extent could such an experiment help in answering the first question?