X-Message-Number: 33417
References: <>
From: Gerald Monroe <>
Date: Thu, 3 Mar 2011 10:40:37 -0600
Subject: Re: CryoNet #33410 - #33415

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 What is Mark PLUS's agenda?
I don't understand "Mark PLUS" claiming that cryonics is going to be
destroyed and his claim that it's all because individuals "abused their
position".  Does Mark want cryonics to be destroyed and made illegal?  His
post seems to imply that he does...that he would rather he died and
experience oblivion for eternity in order to see individuals he doesn't like
fall from grace.

Robert : think of it less like a map of a thing and more like a duplicate
copy of the same thing that has been simplified to only contain the key
elements.  If the brain is a mountain and the important part of the mountain
is the surface rocks, then think of an electronic analogue as a duplicate
copy of the mountain with the surface rocks faithfully mirrored.  (but a
little pixelated in spots).  The difference is that the electronic analogue
of the mountain has an interior made of something else.

I was just working out a way to do this, today, by studying a neuroscience
book and trying to simply the complexity to the key elements.  Each synapse
would be a capacitor, and each target a larger capacitor.  The amount of
charge in each capacitor would be varied by charge control circuitry that
would have an internal set-point representing the thresholds for that
synapse.  Some logic would give some synapses more plasticity than others.

The truth is, most experiments show the brain is so horrendously noisy that
this simple analogue could very well be more than adequate.  More subtle
effects are probably drowned out by thermal noise, electrical noise, noisy
switches and leaks and so on.  The brain self-tunes and uses massive arrays
of neurons in parallel to overcome this noise..assuming these electronic
analogues have all of the same self adjustment properties your consciousness
would quickly adapt to your new high speed brain.  If the brain really does
exploit subtle quantum effects, then perhaps we'll have to add a few
electron entanglement traps to our circuit diagram.

Yes, I'm aware that efforts to build brain analogues this way have not yet
resulted in sentient entities. (I have only read of one such attempt,
actually).  However, the collections of hardware analog neurons do have
surface signalling patterns that mimic what we see on EEG.  And we still
have to copy the software - we will need a detailed scan of a cryogenically
frozen brain to get the software.  Perhaps it wouldn't need to be atom by
atom - even a lower resolution scan that took detailed mappings to get the
exact pattern at samples in spots - might be enough to build a sentient
entity.  There is a limit to how much complexity could be specified in the
brain by our DNA and the resulting hardware created by that DNA.  There have
to be shortcuts that nature uses to decide where to make the 7*10^14
connections.

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