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A computer monitor is a cybernetic connection
No it isn't. It is a form of human-computer interface. And a spade is a spade.
In terms of passing information to the brain, yes, it is. It excites neurons in a specific pattern in such a way as to form certain connections in the brain. It does this through cells in the retina, and the information does pass through a specific set of filters before it reaches the cortex, but I don't think that is an important distinction. To give an example, one of the things a friend of mine is working in the lab next door is inserting a channelrhodopsin gene into the visual cortex of monkeys. Channelrhodopsin is the protein in retinal cells that cause them to fire in response to light. By inserting it in other neural tissue, we can cause specific cells to fire by shining light of specific frequencies onto the cell. It's cool stuff, and I would put money on it becoming a dominant form of BCI in the mid term, at least for getting information into the brain.
The reason I bring this up is that it is using exactly the same mechanism that the retina uses, it just bypasses a few of the neural filtering mechanisms. Filters are incredibly useful, and while, in the future, we may want some of our connections to be directly into the cortex, we also might want to take advantage of some of those systems. To call one a cybernetic interface, and not the other, seems to be arbitrary.
Yes, this does mean that every human-computer interface is, in the end, a brain-computer interface with just an extra informational filter in between. It also means that every human interaction is brain-to-brain, again with just extra filters in place. I'm OK with that. I also find the idea very aesthetically pleasing, but that has no weight on whether it is true. When we talk about communication, cybernetics, and interfaces, it may be useful to distinguish between what filters are in place and how those effect the signal, but everything is eventually (interface/brain)-to-brain.
[edited for typo]
In response to
Meetup : Houston Hackerspace Meetup
Serendipitously enough, my family was planning on going down to Houston that day to celebrate a relative's birthday at 11:30 am, so it should easily work out for me to head over to the meetup afterward. Looks like you get another Silas visit, and so soon after the previous! :-)
Cool. We'll seeya then. Any preference on games?
The reason I haven’t posted here before is that I’ve had no burning reason to, and I’m busy.
While there are many discrete reasons why cryonics hasn’t been (more) successful, the single biggest reason is the most obvious one; it has not been demonstrably shown to work. If suspended animation were a demonstrated reality tomorrow, and it was affordable (i.e., not like spaceflight, which is demonstrably workable, but not yet affordable) then the tide would be turned. Even then, it is unlikely there would be any kind of flash-stampede to the freezers.
A schoolmate and friend of mine just died a few weeks ago of pulmonary fibrosis. He was an ideal candidate for a lung transplant. But, he couldn’t afford it, so he just laid there and died. Thousands of people who need transplants die each year, even though it is a proven modality of treatment that is yielding a significant number of quality years of life. But, it is costly, there aren’t enough donors, and here’s the really remarkable thing, the vast majority of people who could benefit from a transplant are never even candidates.
Consider Richard DeVos, the co-founder of Amway: http://www.rickross.com/reference/amway/amway24.html. In 1983 DeVos, suffering from coronary artery disease, had bypass surgery. In 1992 DeVos had another bypass surgery, and by 1995 it was clear he had end stage congestive heart failure (CHF). How many people have you known or heard about who fit that description, and subsequently go on to die a perfectly pedestrian death; at home or in the ICU? Such deaths are so routine no one gives them a second thought.
And it’s for damn sure that no one gives them a second thought when the patient is a 71 year old man! However, if you are absolutely fixated on staying alive, and your net worth is well in excess of 2 billion 1997 dollars, well, the rules of the game are different for you. DeVos got his heart in London, and the Amway corporate jet flew him there from Grand Rapids, MI. That was in 1997, and as far as I know, DeVos is still alive. There are countless ~71 year old men in the US, and elsewhere in the Developed World, dying of CHF right now. In those cases, the word "transplant" is neither uttered nor heard – even though it is very much a reality that if you have the money, the persistence and the luck – a heart transplant offers the prospect of another 5 years of reasonably good quality life, on average.
I worked in hospital, mostly in critical care medicine, for 7 years. The overwhelming majority of patients are passive – they do what their physicians advise and if they do have alternative ideas, they are usually easily dissuaded from pursuing them. And, truth to tell, most of the “alternative ideas” patients have are bad ones, including Steve Jobs. But, if you are smart, lucky and rich – and you come to your senses, as Jobs did, it can be whole other ball game. Jobs suffered recurrent pancreatic cancer (islet cell neuroendocrine tumor) after a Whipple procedure in 2004. That is just about as close as you can get to a death sentence, since the usual location of the met(s) is the liver. It is current medical consensus that liver transplantation in patients with recurrent pancreatic cancer that has metastasized to the liver is contraindicated. In fact, I know a couple of transplant surgeons who call such a procedure a murderous waste of a liver, and a life! However, Jobs got a liver transplant in 2009. I strongly suspect that he has very recently received additional cutting edge treatment not widely available.
Cryopreservation/cryonics is likely to creep in on little cat’s feet – with a big jump or two along the way. Cryobanking of parenchymatous organs will probably be one jump, reversible cryopreservation of the brain another, and finally, whole body suspended animation. But it behooves us to beware that lots and lots of people are “calmly” accepting their fates today, who could in fact be ‘rescued’ by already extant medical technology - but for the knowledge, the money and the will. And THAT is what is NOT likely to change. To a surprising degree, people stay alive because it has been made very easy for them to do so. Make it difficult, and you start to see people dropping away.
Cryonics demands a very high passion for and commitment to staying alive, not just because it is currently such a lousy product, but because, to be really credible, it DEMANDS ACTION to improve the odds of its success. Most people are not activists, and what's more, most people will refuse a chance at more life when you take away the superficial things that they mistake for their person-hood, or identity. And cryonics proposes to do exactly that. There is historical precedent for this. In his incredibly insightful book, MAN'S SEARCH FOR MEANING, Viktor Frankl noted that the people in the Nazi concentration camps fell into two groups. The first group consisted of the majority of those interned there, and they were people who defined themselves in terms of their social milieu: if you asked them who they were, they would say, "I am a doctor, a lawyer, a mother..." The second group consisted of a small minority of people who thought of themselves as existing completely independent of any label, any role, or any relationship they had with others, or with society.
When you entered a concentration camp, they took away you clothes, your profession, your family and even your name. For most people, that was the equivalent of taking away their very identity, and thus their will to live. As Frankel observed, it was mostly only the people in second, much smaller group, that survived.
It is from that tiny minority in the population as a whole, that cryonics draws it adherents. They are people who want to live, regardless, and who do not define their sense of self on the basis of their jobs, their social interactions, or really, on anything other than a raw, visceral passion to survive. Some find that absolutely terrifying.
Could you clarify this notion of a group of people who exist independently of labels? Perhaps a name that Frankl used to classify them? I have found nothing online about it.
This jives relatively well with one way I classify people. I imagine what would happen if I were to suddenly take them out of their life and drop them in a city across the country without friends or family and less than a grand on their person. I think most people I know would find it incredibly taxing. A relative minority would simply take in their surroundings and start building again.
In response to
Meetup : Houston Hackerspace Meetup
I'll try to make this one.
Good to hear. We look forward to having you.
In response to
Meetup : Houston, TX
It appears that Brasil's will be our venue for Sunday. Parking is nearby on the street. It shouldn't be difficult to find a place within a block or two. PM me for my cell number if you think you might need help getting there.
In response to
Meetup : Houston, TX
It appears that Brasil's will be our venue for Sunday. Parking is nearby on the street. It shouldn't be difficult to find a place within a block or two. PM me for my cell number if you think you might need help getting there.
In response to
Meetup : Houston, TX
It appears that Brasil's will be our venue for Sunday. Parking is nearby on the street. It shouldn't be difficult to find a place within a block or two. PM me for my cell number if you think you might need help getting there.
If you can come, we'll be happy to have you.
As for what our group does, if you mean the Hackerspace, the website is at :
If you mean the Less Wrong group, then we do not have a specific goal as of yet. I was hoping to meet people and get a feel for what lesswrongians might want to do. I would like to do a reading group, possibly with Jaynes' "Probability Theory: The Logic of Science", or Pearle's "Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent systems". I'd also like to do a basic self help thing akin to the New York group. Davorak and I have tossed around other ideas:
Paranoid debating MIT course in street fighting mathematics Stanford course on the biological basis of behavior Board games
Your bitcoin rig would definitely be interesting. We have a 96 Blade computational cluster (mostly working), and have been looking for something to stress it - BitCoin has been tossed around a lot. It certainly would be interesting. We're not sure if we could operate it profitably, but someone who has had experience with it would definitely have people listening.
Revised: 96 Blades in the hackerspace right now, another 500ish in storage.
In response to
Houston Hackerspace Meetup: Sunday May 29, 5:00PM
Might be able to make this one since I'll have Monday off. Logistic issues because I'll be brining my cats to my parents in Austin which might keep me from making a direct Houston-Austin return trip.
Btw, is there a link that explains what this group does? Would my Bitcoin rig be relevant to show off?
If you can come, we'll be happy to have you.
As for what our group does, if you mean the Hackerspace, the website is at :
If you mean the Less Wrong group, then we do not have a specific goal as of yet. I was hoping to meet people and get a feel for what lesswrongians might want to do. I would like to do a reading group, possibly with Jaynes' "Probability Theory: The Logic of Science", or Pearle's "Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent systems". I'd also like to do a basic self help thing akin to the New York group. Davorak and I have tossed around other ideas:
Paranoid debating MIT course in street fighting mathematics Stanford course on the biological basis of behavior Board games
Your bitcoin rig would definitely be interesting. We have a 96 Blade computational cluster (mostly working), and have been looking for something to stress it - BitCoin has been tossed around a lot. It certainly would be interesting. We're not sure if we could operate it profitably, but someone who has had experience with it would definitely have people listening.
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No, it isn't.
We all know how computer monitors work. We roughly speaking know that the information from the computer ends up processed in the brain in the visual cortex. But we can still tell the difference between a computer monitor and matrix headjack.
Could you give a definition of cybernetics that does not include both? Cybernetics, as a word, has two different meanings. First is the study of the structure of regulartory systems. This, in regards to electronics, is where I believe it got its second meaning, which is much fuzzier. Most of us have an image of a Neuromancer style biomechanical ninja when we hear it, but have nothing in the way of a set definition. In fact, it appears normative, referring to something that is futuristic. This, of course, changes. Well designed mechanical legs that let you run faster than an Olympic sprinter would easily have been called cybernetics in the 60s. Now, because that's here, my impression is that people are more hesitant to call it that.
Do we draw the cybernetic/non-cybernetic line at something that physically touches neural tissue? Or projects light on it? Or induces changes in it with magnetic stimulation? Does it have to interface with neurons, or do glia count too? Muscle cells? Rods and cones? If we have a device that controls hormones in the blood, is that cybernetic? I understand your point about not overgeneralizing, and I tried to include that in response. Cybernetics, if it is to mean anything and not be an ambiguous rube/blegg as we discover more, has to be thought of as being heavily related to information processing in the brain. Filters are incredibly important. In an information processing system, they are almost everything. But in terms of getting information into the brain, the difference between a cortical brainjack and a monitor is what type of filters are in their way. Those filters can be broken down into incredibly complex systems that we can and should distinguish, but that's the proper conceptual framework with which to look at the problem.