9 ms·

Can We Copy the Brain?

locopati 9y ago
even if we could, so much of our experience and perception is in the body as a whole - what would it even mean to be a brain without a body (which contains other major neural centers like the enteric nervous system) - how dissociated from your own body do you need to be to think you could replicate consciousness with just the brain?
aaimnr 9y ago
We've no idea how neurons actually work but hey, sure, let's copy the whole brain! Most articles concerning brain recently are some kind of infotainment porn.
- baron816 9y ago
  Yeah there’s still a lot of fundamental research that needs to be done here. We’re probably 3-4 Nobel prize worthy breakthroughs before we have the necessary knowledge to do such things with brains.
- quickthrower2 9y ago
  Downvoted as you probably didn't click the link and left the flippant comment. It links to a page of interesting articles related to this topic.
- PeterisP 9y ago
  We kind of have an idea of how individual neurons work, the problem is that all the interesting aspects seem to appear in tangled systems of millions (or much more) of neurons, and we don't understand that. If we want to study the collective behavior of neurons, then we do pretty much need to analyze or simulate large-ish portions of brains.
alyx 9y ago
Hard problem of conciousness https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousnes...
- Symmetry 9y ago
  And one of the linked articles was explicitly engaging with that. https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/can-we-quantify-machine-consciousness https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/can-we-quantify...
platz 9y ago
No
otakucode 9y ago
Sure... sorta. But there is a problem. You see, without continuous input from the environment in the form of highly corellated input... we know what happens to human consciousness. It rapidly dissolves and disappears. Consciousness is intimately and (thus far) inextricably bound up in its embodied existence. Facial paralysis has profound effects upon the ability of people to feel emotions 'internally', eventually resulting in both an inability to even recall ever feeling those emotions or having an ability to recognize them in others. Should a consciousness divorced from a feedback loop created with the same environment we share (or at least similar in most respects, a simulation might work OK, I don't think we know) be created, the odds that we could even recognize it as conscious are very low. Maybe a general measure of the systems tendency to reduce entropy in some region either within or near itself? We are feedback loops, and when the loop is broken, we stop being us.
- koverstreet 9y ago
  That's not entirely true. That certainly is how we evolved, but somehow we evolved a consciousness that isn't purely a function of its inputs; people who are "locked in" remain conscious. That was quite the trick...
  - otakucode 9y ago
    People who are 'locked in' are not cut off from perceptive stimulus. They're simply cut off from being able to have their nervous system output result in manipulation of the world. I imagine this does have a significant effect upon their conscious experience, but it's not something that would be easy to study. Even studying how less significant damage to the body results in 'personal' changes can be difficult. Studies of victims of spinal cord damage which results in parapelegia and how that results in depression and reduced emotional range beyond what should be expected from the pain or trauma alone strikes some people as 'insulting'. Our adamant refusal to recognize that the 'brain' is nothing more than a convenient formalism used to talk about the entire nervous system and body and that every part is necessary to give rise to what we recognize as human consciousness runs very deep. Dualism (in the sense of a body/brain split) is wrong, but apparently far too alluring for many.
excalibur 9y ago
No, it's protected under the DMCA. If you wish, you may read the complaint at ChillingEffects.org.
- FreakyT 9y ago
  You wouldn't download a brain!
- ben_w 9y ago
  Tom Scott did a video about that — “Welcome to Life: the singularity, ruined by lawyers”
10-6 9y ago
This report by IEEE is actually a very good collection of topics and research currently being done in this field. They discuss specific problems and topics like the neocortex, IIF [1], neuromorphic engineering [2], pose cells, SLAM [3], and more. For anyone interested in research being done in AI, ML, consciousness, etc., these are great articles written by actual scientists and researchers who are doing the work (as opposed to the hyperbolic articles or tweets you see online these days about AI). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory [2] https://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/design/neuromorphic-chips-are-destined-for-deep-learningor-obscurity https://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/design/neuromorphic... [3] https://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/robotics-software/why-ratbrained-robots-are-so-good-at-navigating-unfamiliar-terrain https://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/robotics-software/why-rat...
- visarga 9y ago
  I'd like to add this article (with somewhat of a cheeky title): "The impossibility of intelligence explosion" https://medium.com/@francois.chollet/the-impossibility-of-intelligence-explosion-5be4a9eda6ec https://medium.com/@francois.chollet/the-impossibility-of-in... It's written by François Chollet, creator of the Keras DL framework. In the article it is shown how the environment and intelligence are interrelated. Some of the points are expressed in the IEEE Special Report as well (sensorimotor integration). There are many correlations with the recent push towards simulation in AI - Atari, OpenAI Gym, AlphaGo, self driving cars, etc. It's a new front of development, where simulation will create playgrounds for AI. The main point is that intelligence develops in the environment, and is a function of the complexity of the environment and task at hand. There is no general intelligence, or intelligence in itself, only task-related intelligence. An intelligence explosion can't happen in the void (or in a brain in a vat, or in a supercomputer that has no interface to the world, and can't act on the world). The author concludes that AGI is impossible based on environment and task limitations. An interesting take because we're focusing too much on reverse engineering "the brain" as if it exists in itself, outside the environment. We should learn about meaning and behaviour from the environment and the structure of the problems the agent faces. Meaning is not "secreted" in the brain.
pmoriarty 9y ago
Copy at what level? Cellular? Molecular? Atomic? Subatomic?
- da_chicken 9y ago
  The subtitle appears to be "Intensive efforts to re-create human cognition will transform the way we work, learn, and play." So, functional copying, presumably.
  - rzzzt 9y ago
    One article of the series revolves around MOSFET-based analog circuitry for the building blocks: https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/we-could-build-an-artificial-brain-right-now https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/we-could-build-...
- GCU-Empiricist 9y ago
  I believe the open worm project works at the functional neural level. That's today's state of the art, who knows what level of fidelity we need to get to to get digital immortality.
unpythonic 9y ago
An excellent book which covers this topic is Permutation City by Greg Egan (1994). If we can clone all of you (physical characteristics, brain, memories, personality) into a simulation, what are all the implications? In it, a perfect replica of a person is scanned, and when it boots up, it continues it's existence from the time of the scan. Hacking on the model is possible, so you can avoid certain memories, update "physical" appearance, etc. Given how prevalent virtualization has become recently, I thought it was a fairly modern book. I was surprised to find out it came out in the nineties, and not only has it held up well, it would be considered visionary even if it had been published yesterday.
- aluhut 9y ago
  You should try the Takeshi Covacs books by Richard Morgan. There is a TV show coming out in two days (good timing here) based on the first book (Altered Carbon). It'll probably be a mess since the book has quite some violence. But the thoughts above are played out in a interesting and entertaining way. All three books play in the same universe with the "same" main character but are not a trilogy.
  - gergoerdi 9y ago
    *Kovacs.
    - aluhut 9y ago
      Well that's embarrassing...but it was late here ;)
  - fernly 9y ago
    Can you link to info on the TV show? Because all I can find is Morgan's recent blog post recounting his visit to the set: https://www.richardkmorgan.com/2018/01/fragments-of-a-jet-lagged-dream/ https://www.richardkmorgan.com/2018/01/fragments-of-a-jet-la...
    - fernly 9y ago
Bucephalus355 9y ago
The best analogy to this field and the many, many problems it might run into is biotech. This is actually quite funny because in the early days the main analogy to biotech was the computer / state-machine. For some background, biotech has undergone many booms and busts in the last half century; unlike the last tech bubble, these booms and busts have flown somewhat under the radar. In fact, Jurassic Park, written in 1990, is actually a book /about/ the late 80’s biotech bubble. There is a really fun part in the book where they are talking about making miniature dinosaurs that will only eat Ingen-brand dinosaur pet food (Ingen was the company behind Jurassic Park). Anyway, with biotech, the problem has been, again and again, the assumption that a system is radically simpler than it. Biology is so incredibly complicated that it puts the largest engineering book I have, a 1500 TCP/IP protocol book (No Starch) to shame. I mean at least we know how TCP/IP works. With biology, the manual might be closer to 900,000 pages and we only have 40% of the table of contents and maybe 800 pages (out of order) so far. BEST EXAMPLE: In the 70’s, once large portions of the genome started to be identified and linked to specific genes that were known to cause traits or diseases, it was widely assumed that creating/reading/updating/deleting genes on DNA would be relatively straightforward, particularly as more of the genome was uncovered. However, as was later discovered, many traits or diseases might be the result of 200+ genes that are also used elsewhere. Turn off just 1 gene for a disease, and 1). it won’t do anything because you didn’t turn off the other 199, and 2). oh wow that gene was actually used for something else and now you’ve lost the ability to form eyeballs / are born without anything in your eye sockets.
- knight-of-lambd 9y ago
  > Turn off just 1 gene for a disease, and 1). it won’t do anything because you didn’t turn off the other 199, and 2). oh wow that gene was actually used for something else and now you’ve lost the ability to form eyeballs / are born without anything in your eye sockets. Certainly not on the same scale, but this resonates with my experiences with legacy code. I think this similarity is more than superficial. Energetic systems evolve over time to become tangled, correlated messes, without some other force counteracting this tendency (ie. refactoring). I wonder if DNA has analogous mechanisms.
  - 9y ago
tritium 9y ago
Identical twins handily prove that copying a brain still produces different people. It’s true for siamese twins, and it’d be just as true for cloned genetic stem cells 3D printed from a snapshot of the exact cellular structure of your brain from a moment in time, transplanted into your body. If I copy your brain, you won’t be inside it, even if it’s effectively you, as far as anyone else can tell. So, I can comfort myself with a replica of each dead parent. But the parents that raised me, those people are dead. They won’t be there to see me sharing christmas with their atomic-precision duplicates. Virtual simulations aren’t people, aren’t human beings, no matter fidelity of the simulation. Maybe you can hold a conversation with a hologram, but then what? Would one expect to experience what it feels like to become and persist as a haptic-enabled hologram? Pretty sure that’s a bogus concept, turtles on down.
- meric 9y ago
  I wonder if person died, and his clone waking up can be compared to a person getting into a deep coma from an accident and waking up a year later. In both cases a consciousness disintegrated and a consciousness was integrated?
  - tritium 9y ago
    Would you commit suicide to find out? Would you believe it, if you witnessed a minutes-long, violent, extremely painful suicide, and the dead individual’s clone said they remember everything, and that despite all the screaming and begging, it was an unremarkable experience?
    - meric 9y ago
      I wouldn't get into a deep coma to find out either!
  - cgmg 9y ago
    > clone Being genetically identical is not equivalent to having same memories and experiences. Such things are not stored in DNA.
- 9y ago
bmer 9y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Mind
m3kw9 9y ago
When they do “copy” it and successfully put it in a human, it will make Pet Sematary the movie look like Driving Miss Daisy
Rapzid 9y ago
I read something along the lines of files having no meaning until we interpret them with programs. The idea is that files are almost schemaless and we bestow a schema on them by the way we consume them with programs. I believe this may have been a SQL book... In any case, what does "copying the brain" mean if we don't fully understand how it works? How can we bestow meaning on the raw data, given we can even collect it, without knowing exactly how the brain itself interprets it?
- IIAOPSW 9y ago
  What if there is no meaning. What if "meaning" is just a word we invented to describe whatever our brain does with information.
- GCU-Empiricist 9y ago
  Ideally if you are copying a brain, you are going to copy the I/O schema (spine connecting to a "body", eyes, ears, nose, mouth, ect). When you run a brain as a computer program you don't want a disembodied mind, you want a person who "really-is" in a VR environment.
  - JoeAltmaier 9y ago
    Discussed at length in the book "We are Legion; We are Bob" where a disembodied mind creates a VR environment to preserve its sanity.
- JoeAltmaier 9y ago
  I'm pretty sure we know how disembodied brains would work - consider any quadriplegic. They may as well be disembodied, yet they can continue to mentally function at a high level. Agreed 'copying the brain' would have to copy/checkpoint the software running, or you risk failing to connect meaningfully with the environment. It'd be hard for a deaf/dumb/quad brain to learn to speak or interact from scratch.
bane 9y ago
Why bother? It's a great general purpose organic computer that you can power with sugar and fit into a head...but there's no reason that some other solution to the problem might be arrived at that works along entirely different parameters. There's lots of evidence that brain design has some deep flaws, extreme limitations and severe compromises. Look at the crazy stacked, hemispherical design of mammal brains -- nonsense! Besides, if we need a brain, there's literally trillions of them already all over the planet. In fact they're so common they're already commoditized, everybody has one!
- 7Z7 9y ago
  Be able to make a brain, hopefully means being able to make a better brain - or even, to make our brains better.

even if we could, so much of our experience and perception is in the body as a whole - what would it even mean to be a brain without a body (which contains other major neural centers like the enteric nervous system) - how dissociated from your own body do you need to be to think you could replicate consciousness with just the brain?

aaimnr 9y ago

We've no idea how neurons actually work but hey, sure, let's copy the whole brain! Most articles concerning brain recently are some kind of infotainment porn.

baron816 9y ago
Yeah there’s still a lot of fundamental research that needs to be done here. We’re probably 3-4 Nobel prize worthy breakthroughs before we have the necessary knowledge to do such things with brains.
quickthrower2 9y ago
Downvoted as you probably didn't click the link and left the flippant comment. It links to a page of interesting articles related to this topic.
PeterisP 9y ago
We kind of have an idea of how individual neurons work, the problem is that all the interesting aspects seem to appear in tangled systems of millions (or much more) of neurons, and we don't understand that. If we want to study the collective behavior of neurons, then we do pretty much need to analyze or simulate large-ish portions of brains.

alyx 9y ago

Hard problem of conciousness https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousnes...

Symmetry 9y ago
And one of the linked articles was explicitly engaging with that. https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/can-we-quantify-machine-consciousness https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/can-we-quantify...

platz 9y ago

otakucode 9y ago

Sure... sorta. But there is a problem. You see, without continuous input from the environment in the form of highly corellated input... we know what happens to human consciousness. It rapidly dissolves and disappears. Consciousness is intimately and (thus far) inextricably bound up in its embodied existence. Facial paralysis has profound effects upon the ability of people to feel emotions 'internally', eventually resulting in both an inability to even recall ever feeling those emotions or having an ability to recognize them in others. Should a consciousness divorced from a feedback loop created with the same environment we share (or at least similar in most respects, a simulation might work OK, I don't think we know) be created, the odds that we could even recognize it as conscious are very low. Maybe a general measure of the systems tendency to reduce entropy in some region either within or near itself? We are feedback loops, and when the loop is broken, we stop being us.

koverstreet 9y ago
That's not entirely true. That certainly is how we evolved, but somehow we evolved a consciousness that isn't purely a function of its inputs; people who are "locked in" remain conscious. That was quite the trick...
- otakucode 9y ago
  People who are 'locked in' are not cut off from perceptive stimulus. They're simply cut off from being able to have their nervous system output result in manipulation of the world. I imagine this does have a significant effect upon their conscious experience, but it's not something that would be easy to study. Even studying how less significant damage to the body results in 'personal' changes can be difficult. Studies of victims of spinal cord damage which results in parapelegia and how that results in depression and reduced emotional range beyond what should be expected from the pain or trauma alone strikes some people as 'insulting'. Our adamant refusal to recognize that the 'brain' is nothing more than a convenient formalism used to talk about the entire nervous system and body and that every part is necessary to give rise to what we recognize as human consciousness runs very deep. Dualism (in the sense of a body/brain split) is wrong, but apparently far too alluring for many.

excalibur 9y ago

No, it's protected under the DMCA. If you wish, you may read the complaint at ChillingEffects.org.

FreakyT 9y ago
You wouldn't download a brain!
ben_w 9y ago
Tom Scott did a video about that — “Welcome to Life: the singularity, ruined by lawyers”

10-6 9y ago

This report by IEEE is actually a very good collection of topics and research currently being done in this field. They discuss specific problems and topics like the neocortex, IIF [1], neuromorphic engineering [2], pose cells, SLAM [3], and more. For anyone interested in research being done in AI, ML, consciousness, etc., these are great articles written by actual scientists and researchers who are doing the work (as opposed to the hyperbolic articles or tweets you see online these days about AI). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory [2] https://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/design/neuromorphic-chips-are-destined-for-deep-learningor-obscurity https://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/design/neuromorphic... [3] https://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/robotics-software/why-ratbrained-robots-are-so-good-at-navigating-unfamiliar-terrain https://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/robotics-software/why-rat...

visarga 9y ago
I'd like to add this article (with somewhat of a cheeky title): "The impossibility of intelligence explosion" https://medium.com/@francois.chollet/the-impossibility-of-intelligence-explosion-5be4a9eda6ec https://medium.com/@francois.chollet/the-impossibility-of-in... It's written by François Chollet, creator of the Keras DL framework. In the article it is shown how the environment and intelligence are interrelated. Some of the points are expressed in the IEEE Special Report as well (sensorimotor integration). There are many correlations with the recent push towards simulation in AI - Atari, OpenAI Gym, AlphaGo, self driving cars, etc. It's a new front of development, where simulation will create playgrounds for AI. The main point is that intelligence develops in the environment, and is a function of the complexity of the environment and task at hand. There is no general intelligence, or intelligence in itself, only task-related intelligence. An intelligence explosion can't happen in the void (or in a brain in a vat, or in a supercomputer that has no interface to the world, and can't act on the world). The author concludes that AGI is impossible based on environment and task limitations. An interesting take because we're focusing too much on reverse engineering "the brain" as if it exists in itself, outside the environment. We should learn about meaning and behaviour from the environment and the structure of the problems the agent faces. Meaning is not "secreted" in the brain.

pmoriarty 9y ago

Copy at what level? Cellular? Molecular? Atomic? Subatomic?

da_chicken 9y ago
The subtitle appears to be "Intensive efforts to re-create human cognition will transform the way we work, learn, and play." So, functional copying, presumably.
- rzzzt 9y ago
  One article of the series revolves around MOSFET-based analog circuitry for the building blocks: https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/we-could-build-an-artificial-brain-right-now https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/we-could-build-...
GCU-Empiricist 9y ago
I believe the open worm project works at the functional neural level. That's today's state of the art, who knows what level of fidelity we need to get to to get digital immortality.

unpythonic 9y ago

An excellent book which covers this topic is Permutation City by Greg Egan (1994). If we can clone all of you (physical characteristics, brain, memories, personality) into a simulation, what are all the implications? In it, a perfect replica of a person is scanned, and when it boots up, it continues it's existence from the time of the scan. Hacking on the model is possible, so you can avoid certain memories, update "physical" appearance, etc. Given how prevalent virtualization has become recently, I thought it was a fairly modern book. I was surprised to find out it came out in the nineties, and not only has it held up well, it would be considered visionary even if it had been published yesterday.

aluhut 9y ago
You should try the Takeshi Covacs books by Richard Morgan. There is a TV show coming out in two days (good timing here) based on the first book (Altered Carbon). It'll probably be a mess since the book has quite some violence. But the thoughts above are played out in a interesting and entertaining way. All three books play in the same universe with the "same" main character but are not a trilogy.
- gergoerdi 9y ago
  *Kovacs.
  - aluhut 9y ago
    Well that's embarrassing...but it was late here ;)
- fernly 9y ago
  Can you link to info on the TV show? Because all I can find is Morgan's recent blog post recounting his visit to the set: https://www.richardkmorgan.com/2018/01/fragments-of-a-jet-lagged-dream/ https://www.richardkmorgan.com/2018/01/fragments-of-a-jet-la...
  - fernly 9y ago

Bucephalus355 9y ago

The best analogy to this field and the many, many problems it might run into is biotech. This is actually quite funny because in the early days the main analogy to biotech was the computer / state-machine. For some background, biotech has undergone many booms and busts in the last half century; unlike the last tech bubble, these booms and busts have flown somewhat under the radar. In fact, Jurassic Park, written in 1990, is actually a book /about/ the late 80’s biotech bubble. There is a really fun part in the book where they are talking about making miniature dinosaurs that will only eat Ingen-brand dinosaur pet food (Ingen was the company behind Jurassic Park). Anyway, with biotech, the problem has been, again and again, the assumption that a system is radically simpler than it. Biology is so incredibly complicated that it puts the largest engineering book I have, a 1500 TCP/IP protocol book (No Starch) to shame. I mean at least we know how TCP/IP works. With biology, the manual might be closer to 900,000 pages and we only have 40% of the table of contents and maybe 800 pages (out of order) so far. BEST EXAMPLE: In the 70’s, once large portions of the genome started to be identified and linked to specific genes that were known to cause traits or diseases, it was widely assumed that creating/reading/updating/deleting genes on DNA would be relatively straightforward, particularly as more of the genome was uncovered. However, as was later discovered, many traits or diseases might be the result of 200+ genes that are also used elsewhere. Turn off just 1 gene for a disease, and 1). it won’t do anything because you didn’t turn off the other 199, and 2). oh wow that gene was actually used for something else and now you’ve lost the ability to form eyeballs / are born without anything in your eye sockets.

knight-of-lambd 9y ago
> Turn off just 1 gene for a disease, and 1). it won’t do anything because you didn’t turn off the other 199, and 2). oh wow that gene was actually used for something else and now you’ve lost the ability to form eyeballs / are born without anything in your eye sockets. Certainly not on the same scale, but this resonates with my experiences with legacy code. I think this similarity is more than superficial. Energetic systems evolve over time to become tangled, correlated messes, without some other force counteracting this tendency (ie. refactoring). I wonder if DNA has analogous mechanisms.
- 9y ago

tritium 9y ago

Identical twins handily prove that copying a brain still produces different people. It’s true for siamese twins, and it’d be just as true for cloned genetic stem cells 3D printed from a snapshot of the exact cellular structure of your brain from a moment in time, transplanted into your body. If I copy your brain, you won’t be inside it, even if it’s effectively you, as far as anyone else can tell. So, I can comfort myself with a replica of each dead parent. But the parents that raised me, those people are dead. They won’t be there to see me sharing christmas with their atomic-precision duplicates. Virtual simulations aren’t people, aren’t human beings, no matter fidelity of the simulation. Maybe you can hold a conversation with a hologram, but then what? Would one expect to experience what it feels like to become and persist as a haptic-enabled hologram? Pretty sure that’s a bogus concept, turtles on down.

meric 9y ago
I wonder if person died, and his clone waking up can be compared to a person getting into a deep coma from an accident and waking up a year later. In both cases a consciousness disintegrated and a consciousness was integrated?
- tritium 9y ago
  Would you commit suicide to find out? Would you believe it, if you witnessed a minutes-long, violent, extremely painful suicide, and the dead individual’s clone said they remember everything, and that despite all the screaming and begging, it was an unremarkable experience?
  - meric 9y ago
    I wouldn't get into a deep coma to find out either!
- cgmg 9y ago
  > clone Being genetically identical is not equivalent to having same memories and experiences. Such things are not stored in DNA.
9y ago

bmer 9y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Mind

m3kw9 9y ago

When they do “copy” it and successfully put it in a human, it will make Pet Sematary the movie look like Driving Miss Daisy

Rapzid 9y ago

I read something along the lines of files having no meaning until we interpret them with programs. The idea is that files are almost schemaless and we bestow a schema on them by the way we consume them with programs. I believe this may have been a SQL book... In any case, what does "copying the brain" mean if we don't fully understand how it works? How can we bestow meaning on the raw data, given we can even collect it, without knowing exactly how the brain itself interprets it?

IIAOPSW 9y ago
What if there is no meaning. What if "meaning" is just a word we invented to describe whatever our brain does with information.
GCU-Empiricist 9y ago
Ideally if you are copying a brain, you are going to copy the I/O schema (spine connecting to a "body", eyes, ears, nose, mouth, ect). When you run a brain as a computer program you don't want a disembodied mind, you want a person who "really-is" in a VR environment.
- JoeAltmaier 9y ago
  Discussed at length in the book "We are Legion; We are Bob" where a disembodied mind creates a VR environment to preserve its sanity.
JoeAltmaier 9y ago
I'm pretty sure we know how disembodied brains would work - consider any quadriplegic. They may as well be disembodied, yet they can continue to mentally function at a high level. Agreed 'copying the brain' would have to copy/checkpoint the software running, or you risk failing to connect meaningfully with the environment. It'd be hard for a deaf/dumb/quad brain to learn to speak or interact from scratch.

bane 9y ago

Why bother? It's a great general purpose organic computer that you can power with sugar and fit into a head...but there's no reason that some other solution to the problem might be arrived at that works along entirely different parameters. There's lots of evidence that brain design has some deep flaws, extreme limitations and severe compromises. Look at the crazy stacked, hemispherical design of mammal brains -- nonsense! Besides, if we need a brain, there's literally trillions of them already all over the planet. In fact they're so common they're already commoditized, everybody has one!

7Z7 9y ago
Be able to make a brain, hopefully means being able to make a better brain - or even, to make our brains better.