Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/03/16/this-startup-promises-to-prese.html
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The irony is that they don’t know enough about how the brain works to know what information to capture, much less actually be able to capture that information, so they’re just killing you.
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Wake me up when THEY WAKE SOMEBODY UP. Until then, you might as well put your money in a big pile and burn it.
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I’m pretty sure this is how SOMA starts.
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I have this rat that has been conditioned to fear “jazz music.”
Demonstrate the backup process and restore the brain to a different rat.
Let’s see if the restored rat has the same condition as the original.
(Ducks.)
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“If the brain is dead, it’s like your computer is off, but that doesn’t mean the information isn’t there,” says Hayworth.
Oh brother, I’m going with a big NO on this.
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Given that it’s coming up on Friday evening - I’ll stick to the traditional method of preserving my brain.
Cheers!
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Also a major feature of Alastair Reynolds’ Revelation Space books
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An area of personal expertise here (20 years of neuroscience work). Hopefully this is obvious, but this is an absurd fantasy. Even if they could perserve your brain perfectly, there is nothing that can be done with it afterwards. Not today, not tomorrow, not next year, not next century.
“A connectome map could be the basis for re-creating a particular person’s consciousness” - NO it could not.
“If the brain is dead, it’s like your computer is off, but that doesn’t mean the information isn’t there” - YES IT DOES.
A surprisingly large percentage of neuroscientists have no biological training and come strictly from a computer science or math background. Unfortunately this has resulted in a lot of “neuroscience” that lacks any basic understanding of how biological nervous systems actually work.
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What if the brain is more like RAM? They have to wait for the patient to say ”It is now safe to turn off my brain” before proceeding.
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Can I get blockchain with this?
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Bedder a boddle in frona me than a fronal lobobomy.
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I mean, it’s not… 100% wrong? Structurally speaking, whatever connections between the neurons that were originally present are still there, it’s just… none of the neurons actually work, so you can’t turn the brain back on again. You’d have to copy that information somewhere else. Assuming you were able to get that level of detail, understood what the connections between those cells meant, and how the network operated when it was alive, understand the entire structure well enough to know what bits are vital for memory and consciousness, and what bits are just going to freak out about not having a body and…
Anyway to go back to the computer metaphor, a dead brain is much less like a computer that’s off and more like…
uh…
hmmm…
Turns out brains aren’t very much like computers.
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Um… if you can’t ever boot up your computer again, then it doesn’t matter if “the info is still there” - without access to it, it’s essentially dead.
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But I’ve already given all my money to a guru who has promised me I will go to paradise when I die.
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A connectome map could be the basis for re-creating a particular person’s consciousness, believes Ken Hayworth, a neuroscientist who is president of the Brain Preservation Foundation—the organization that, on March 13, recognized McIntyre and Fahy’s work with the prize for preserving the pig brain.
100 years from now researchers will be understandably confused when a pig brain (mistakenly thought to be a human brain) will have information retrieved from it and give everyone the impression that it’s Trump’s brain. The end.
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