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Mind Emulation Foundation
- ivan_ah 6y agoFocussing on synaptic connections seems rather simplistic. For full "emulation" they would probably need to emulate the electric fields and neurotransmitter concentrations, otherwise just-the-spikes simulation will probably capture only a small percentage of brain dynamics.
- ravi-delia 6y agoYou're probably right, at least in terms of neurotransmitter concentration, but I doubt that synaptic connections are only a 'small percentage' of brain dynamics.
- lamename 6y agoI'm not as critical of these goals as some, but to not even mention another dimension of complexity beyond connections: electrophysiological firing pattern, is quite an oversimplification.
- dsiroker 6y agoWith a sufficiently robust representation of the connectome including its spatial orientation one can also emulate the electrophysiology.
- new_realist 6y agoLooks like a bunch of kids have watched too much Westworld.
- VikingCoder 6y agoMy favorite books about mind emulation: * "Fall, Or Dodge in Hell" by Neil Stephenson [1] * "Permutation City" by Greg Egan [2] [1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07PXM4VMD/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07PXM4VMD/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?... [2] https://www.amazon.com/Permutation-City-Greg-Egan-ebook/dp/B00FDWCPV2 https://www.amazon.com/Permutation-City-Greg-Egan-ebook/dp/B...
- greatquux 6y agoYes, "Fall" was really great! It was after reading it that I decided I didn't want to emulate my mind anymore. :)
- abecedarius 6y agoWhole Brain Emulation Roadmap http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/Reports/2008-3.pdf http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/Reports/2008-3.pdf The Age of Em https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0198754620/ https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0198754620/
- sriku 6y agoThumbs up for "The Age of Em". A nice example of how to assume a technology and work out economic consequences. Hanson goes into some good detail and includes physical constraints, emergent properties like relative time elapsed for simulated minds when transferring between locations and such.
- NickM 6y agoI really loved Permutation City, and loved the beginning of Fall, but man it felt like Fall just turned into a really hard slog after a certain point. I have definitely enjoyed some of Neal Stephenson's other novels too, even slower-paced ones like Anathem, but for some reason Fall just didn't do it for me.
- microtherion 6y agoI agree that the middle of the novel was dragging, but after a while, the story was picking up speed again for me. Stephenson's early novels suffered from weak endings, IMHO. His newer ones (Fall, Seveneves) suffer from bloated midsections).
- Trasmatta 6y agoAnd for games, SOMA is probably the best example.
- darepublic 6y agoOnce you become immortal, someone can put you in hell
- WealthVsSurvive 6y agoI think there is a fundamental paradox at the root of consciousness and thought: once we succeed in alleviating suffering by discarding the body, we are already in hell. What is the purpose of a mind without a body? To witness? To what ends? There's a reason that the lower brain is at the seat of the throne. Maybe we should focus more on cooperating and less on becoming a purposeless husk. If the string is too tight it breaks, if it is too loose it will not play.
- FeepingCreature 6y agoIf you can emulate a brain, you can probably emulate a body.
- WealthVsSurvive 6y agoBut to emulate the body, you must emulate the environment that shaped it, so now we're talking microverse creation. You could at best emulate the full set of current functions, but without the environment that model would be subject to incompleteness, entropy. You could perhaps watch for change, using the human corpus as input; all set conclusions seem to lead back to AI as human local intelligence orchestrator, rather than AI as emulation of human thought, maybe the two becoming one over time.
- FeepingCreature 6y ago> But to emulate the body, you must emulate the environment that shaped it, so now we're talking microverse creation. Yes, this is called "virtual reality" and "physics engine". The brain does not need its environments to be 100% indistinguishable from its ancestral environment; if it did, we could never move away from where we were born.
- 6y ago
- mrkstu 6y agoThis is so ahead of the curve of reality that it’s easy to dismiss- BUT at the least it’s possible that it could lead to some interesting basic research being done. Hopefully that, rather than misleading rich marks and separating them from their cash is the real goal.
- dsiroker 6y agoThank you for your optimism. The goal is to fund and conduct basic research.
- smoyer 6y agoReading this reminds me of a great Cory Doctorow / Charlie Stross book - "The Rapture of the Nerds" (https://craphound.com/category/rotn/ https://craphound.com/category/rotn/)
- Barrin92 6y ago"While we are far from understanding how the mind works, most philosophers and scientists agree that your mind is an emergent property of your body. In particular, your body’s connectome. Your connectome is the comprehensive network of neural connections in your brain and nervous system. Today your connectome is biological. " This is a pretty speculative thesis. It's not at all clear that everything relevant to the mind is found in the connections rather than the particular biochemical processes of the brain. It's a very reductionist view that drastically underestimates the biological complexity of even individual cells. There's a good book, Wetware: A Computer in Every Living Cell, by Dennis Bray going into detail on how much functionality and physical processes are at work even in the most simplest cells that is routinely ignored by these analogies of the brain to a digital computer. There is this extreme, and I would argue unscientific bias towards treating the mind as something that's recreatable in a digital system probably because it enables this science-fiction speculation and dreams of immortality of people living in the cloud.
- ebg13 6y ago> It's not at all clear that everything relevant to the mind is found in the connections rather than the particular biochemical processes I wouldn't expect anyone to consider the connectome to be absent the processes inside each of the individual neurons that are connected. I consider this to mean just that it's an emergent property of the collection working in concert. After all, everything is just connections all the way down, even deep inside individual cells.
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- mcculley 6y agoHow does having the connectome get you the mind? Don't you need the weights in the neurons? I thought I also read that neurons are not discrete units, that there might be weights within the dendrites/axons.
- dsiroker 6y agoThe connectome includes the weights.
- mcculley 6y agoDo you have a reference somewhere that says that? The Wikipedia entry for connectomics does not imply that and I've not read of anything that can get the weights out of neurons.
- dsiroker 6y agoConnectome: How the Brain's Wiring Makes Us Who We Are [1] [1] https://www.amazon.com/Connectome-How-Brains-Wiring-Makes/dp/0547678592 https://www.amazon.com/Connectome-How-Brains-Wiring-Makes/dp...
- orbifold 6y agoThat is because there are no weights to begin with. In actual biological neurons synapses perform a rather complicated biochemical dance involving vesicles, ion channels, second messengers, whenever an action potential arrives. Some of that can be described by simple ODEs which might contain a constant that you could call “weight” but the actual physical synapses know nothing about that.
- dsiroker 6y ago(I’m the founder & CEO of the Mind Emulation Foundation) Flattered to see this hit the front page! This is a project I’ve been passionate about for a while and been keeping it mostly under the radar. Now that it’s public, I’m happy to answer any questions the HN community has.
- anvandare 6y agoNot really a question, more of a remark: both the destructive and non-destructive approaches result in the same thing: a copy of 'you', not actually 'you'. (The same is true when you go to sleep, of course. Whoever wakes up isn't you either) What you would need is a Ship of Theseus approach - preserving the consciousness stream while neuron after neuron is being replaced by a digital version, slowly, to convince the stream into thinking it's still the same. You can't just take a single scan; you have to keep scanning continuously and keep a running feedback stream between the (decreasing) wetbrain and the (increasing) bitbrain to ensure the illusion of continuity. (But to be honest, I don't actually believe in consciousness or a Self. Whoever started writing this short comment wasn't 'me', and neither am I, nothing is)
- dsiroker 6y agoThe gradual replacement approach (as you describe it) is a useful thought experiment that gets people more comfortable with the possibility of mind emulation but the end state is the same for both approaches. One just intuitively feels more you than the other, but as you said, it's likely all an illusion so doing it while you "sleep" is probably enough to make you sufficiently happy to be alive when you wake up non-biologically.
- type0 6y agoThis would be like Bicentennial Man in reverse. Call me skeptic but it sounds like a good foundation for a new novel and not like a good basis for Foundation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bicentennial_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bicentennial_Man
- 6y ago
- mcculley 6y agoI am always amused at this kind of approach to immortality. While the copy of me that is reborn would appreciate my preparedness, that doesn't make this copy any less unhappy about dying.
- dsiroker 6y agoWhen you wake up in the morning billions of your cells have changed from the night before. Are you any less you? It is possible one day you will go to sleep biologically and wake up non-biologically. It’s just a matter of sufficiently emulating the processes that were present when you were the biological you.
- mcculley 6y agoI have meditated enough to be unconvinced that even the me that goes to sleep is the same guy who woke up that morning. I try to be good to the guy who wakes up with my memories and body the next morning. That makes me no less unhappy about dying.
- dsiroker 6y agoThat is a refreshing perspective.
- AlphaSquared 6y agoFrom an Islamic religious perspective, the soul is taken out of the body when you sleep and then put back into it when you wake up. Much the same way as when you die. So there you have it :)
- deathanatos 6y agohttps://existentialcomics.com/comic/1 https://existentialcomics.com/comic/1
- makx 6y agoI'd even go so far as to say that the me from 10 minutes ago isn't the same me as now. Consciousness isn't continuous, it arises and ceases. It's our memory that gives us the illusion of continuity. And this is what makes me absolutely unconcerned about dying. From what I read, this is what the Gautama Buddha meant with Anatta[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatta
- zzzeek 6y agoIt's been done: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainstorm_(1983_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainstorm_(1983_film)
- sieste 6y agoThat plot half way down the page where they fit a straight line through 2 points and predict to be able to map human brains by 2084 made me laugh.
- dsiroker 6y agoThe y-axis is logarithmic so it’s actually representing exponential improvements which is a fair upper-bound assumption given the rate of improvement in cost to map a human genome was better than exponential.
- gverrilla 6y agois this troll content?
- TedDoesntTalk 6y ago> the body will be partitioned such that it could be scanned with an electron microscope "Partitioning" the brain will destroy some of the nanometer-scale tissue as it is sliced.
- keiferski 6y agoRecent work in philosophy has called into question the notion that the mind/cognition/identity is entirely independent from the body. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/embodied-cognition/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/embodied-cognition/ Personally I think Western culture in particular has neglected the physical aspects of existence. The idea that our bodies are simply vessels for our minds seems more the result of cultural neglect than anything.
- dsiroker 6y agoWe are not claiming they are entirely independent, quite the contrary. The mind is an emergent property of the body. Just like music is an emergent property of sound waves.
- keiferski 6y agoBut if your mind and self is formed by and dependent on your body, how can you transfer it to a bodyless existence without losing that self? The mind as an emergent property of the body is also not an established philosophical or scientific fact, and is quite dependent on positivism, which has plenty of issues. It seems to me that at best, you’re creating a surface-level copy, but one inherently limited to contemporary scientific knowledge. Not to say that this isn’t interesting or useful, but it’s certainly not the same ‘self.’
- dsiroker 6y agoThe notion of self is an illusion the mind creates. (There are many benefits for doing so, not least of which is self-preservation which is helpful to producing progeny and so therefore is selected for during natural selection.) To answer your question directly: one can transfer an emergent property of a system to another system by sufficiently transferring the mechanism that produce that emergent property in the first place. A good analog would be emulating the hardware of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) entirely in software [1]. [1] https://jsnes.org/ https://jsnes.org/
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- dontreact 6y agoSo the C. Elegans connectome was done in 1986, and we still haven't made a fully functional model of the c. elegans brain. I'm not sure that this bottom up approach (synapses -> model -> behavior) will work better than a top down approach that has been making a lot of progress in AI (behavior -> model)
- dsiroker 6y agoOpenWorm [1] has made a lot of progress toward building a fully functional model and when it simulates a worm's behavior it is almost indistinguishable from the real thing. Here is a video they produced in 2013 of C. elegans moving: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaovWiZJUWY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaovWiZJUWY [1] http://openworm.org/ http://openworm.org/
- nicoffeine 6y agoIt's modeling the firing of neurons contracting muscles. C. elegans is capable of learning about its environment, looking for food, finding a mate, and so forth. It's only 1mm long and has 300 neurons. You're going to scale to 86 billion neurons by 2084? I hate to call shenanigans, but the idea that you will have made any real progress on a mammal of any size in 60 years is not realistic. If "Life is Precious" (as stated in your pitch) why not spend the money on things that are possible for humans that are alive?
- prerok 6y agoI'm not convinced. 1. We still don't know what the memory engrams truly are ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engram_(neuropsychology) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engram_(neuropsychology) ). I once read that aside from relying on the interconnections of the neurons they also rely on specific proteins created during memory creation. They are then vital for memory recollection. 2. We know that the connections between neurons are important but we just realized that the support cells (glia) also affect the firing mecanism: they are not only support but a filter as well ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glia ) 3. Inhibitory interneurons provide a way for synchronous firing of neurons to form a learning experience: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-13170-w https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-13170-w All in all to replicate the brain functionality we would need to fully replicate the chemical composition of the brain to the lowest level (molecules). I'm not holding my breath.
- dsiroker 6y ago> They are then vital for memory recollection. Even if specific proteins are needed for memory creation (which is debatable [1]) it doesn't mean you need to model those proteins to retrieve the stored memories from the structures that they created. You can read data from a hard drive without modeling the CPU or memory bus of the computer that stored the data. > support cells (glia) Glia cells are the order of 40-50 microns [2] and can easily be seen with an electron microscope. In fact, they are present in the Lichtman paper [3] linked from the Mind Emulation website. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2745628/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2745628/ [2] https://psych.athabascau.ca/html/Psych402/Biotutorials/4/part1.html https://psych.athabascau.ca/html/Psych402/Biotutorials/4/par... [3] https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(15)00824-7 https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(15)00824-7
- prerok 6y agoGlia cells can be seen, sure. But to my knowledge we still don't understand their impact. Anyway, my point is that even if you are able to recreate the structure you would need to replicate the functionality. A better analogy would be that even if you have the data on the hard drive you would need a special program that would know how to interpret it. In this case the data also contains a time variant exactly when the data applies which is not captured within the structure unless you go to the molecular level.
- PaulHoule 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Annals_of_the_Heechee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Annals_of_the_Heechee
- drewbug 6y agoAny major difference from the Carboncopies Foundation?
- camdenlock 6y agoMy hesitation with mind emulation is not so much with the technical side; I think it’s fairly clear that we’ll get there. However, the question of responsible stewardship looms large, and is rarely addressed. With whom am I entrusting my mind? How can I be sure that such stewardship won’t be transferred to another party at some point? Who’s to guarantee that my mind won’t be installed into an eternal torment sim? The stewardship questions have always bothered the hell out of me, and the lack of convincing answers has always led me to avoid buying completely into the preservation of my body for future scanning and uploading into a sim.
- jarinflation 6y agothis could effectively lead to the creation of heaven, an afterlife that would eliminate the notion of death. I never quite understood why the entire human species, once made aware of the non zero probability of this working, not diverted most of its entire global energy, time and resources towards this effort. I can only imagine it is because most people have no capacity to really imagine, or outright refuse to ever imagine, death. In a way I do envy them.
- gallerdude 6y agoYou're basically arguing a techno-religious Pascal's Wager, so my contra-argument is the same: if the nonzero probability is a 0.1% chance, would you really risk your one and only life dedicated to something that has a 99.9% chance of not happening, whether it be real or techno-heaven?
- roca 6y agoYou're implicitly assuming that accepting the Wager means "losing" your one and only life. OK, it depends on your utility function, but most religious and techno Wagers don't require immediate martyrdom.
- lostmsu 6y agoMathematically that makes sense if the life expectancy of an upload is greater than 100 000 years.
- jasperry 6y agoHow can you be sure that if we could eliminate death, we would also be able to make life so great that our mind would find it worthwhile to keep living century after century? In other words, if we enabled people's minds to continue forever, how do we know it would be heaven and not hell?
- roca 6y agoI am not at all sure I want my mind copied. It is very hard to destroy or even contain all copies of information. Thus, I find it very plausible that if a copy of my mind is created, at least one copy will be effectively enslaved or tortured. Possibly more copies would find themselves in heaven than in hell, but how we weight that tradeoff is subjective, and I'm a bit of a pessimist so I would prefer not to take the risk, thanks. (Especially since as a Christian I believe my original mind is likely to reach God's heaven.)
- lawlessone 6y ago>a reasonable estimate for the first human brain being mapped would in 2084. :(
- m3kw9 6y agoGet ready for the pseudo science terms to get investor money
- miketery 6y agoThe best I've seen the topic of mind and computation bridged and well communicated has been by Joscha Bach. Recommend watching this video on Computational Meta-Psychology [1]. Also his 3 hour conversation with Lex Fridman is a whole other amazing rabbit hole [2]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRdJCFEqFTU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRdJCFEqFTU [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-2P3MSZrBM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-2P3MSZrBM
- namuol 6y agoImagine the torture of being the result of an early "success" in such an experiment. There's a real pickle of an ethical dilemma here.
- RandallBrown 6y agoIf you haven't, you should check out the book Fall, or Dodge In Hell by Neal Stephenson. It explores this concept very deeply. (Sometimes far too deeply.)
- grugagag 6y agoIve been wondering whether this was possible and/or feasible. We don’t know if the “brain in the vat” would alter their original personality, which is very likely having that it has to live in foreign artificial environment. The mind itself could become depressive and unwilling to tick because why would it? Just so it exists while not really existing phisically?
- YeGoblynQueenne 6y agoAt this point, I wonder if it would make sense to establish a Time Travel Foundation, to ensure that such dangerous technology does not fall into the wrong hands once it is, inevitably, created.