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Substrate-independent minds
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Randall
J. Randall Murphy
Optogenetics
According to the researchers, this is the first time humans have sent a message ‘almost directly’ into each other’s brains.
‘We anticipate that computers in the not-so-distant future will interact directly with the human brain in a fluent manner, supporting both computer- and brain-to-brain communication routinely,’ they wrote.
Human-to-brain technology is also gaining traction. In May, German scientists showed how seven pilots used mind control to fly with ‘astonishing accuracy.’
In a simulation, several of the pilots managed the landing approach under poor visibility, while one was able to land a few metres from the runway’s central line.
Meanwhile, in June, University of Oregon researchers unveiled a device that claimed to be able to monitor memories in near real time to see what a person is thinking
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2737532/Could-soon-send-emails-telepathically-Scientist-transmits-message-mind-colleague-5-000-miles-away-using-brain-waves.html#ixzz3COFQ4xhB
‘We anticipate that computers in the not-so-distant future will interact directly with the human brain in a fluent manner, supporting both computer- and brain-to-brain communication routinely,’ they wrote.
Human-to-brain technology is also gaining traction. In May, German scientists showed how seven pilots used mind control to fly with ‘astonishing accuracy.’
In a simulation, several of the pilots managed the landing approach under poor visibility, while one was able to land a few metres from the runway’s central line.
Meanwhile, in June, University of Oregon researchers unveiled a device that claimed to be able to monitor memories in near real time to see what a person is thinking
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2737532/Could-soon-send-emails-telepathically-Scientist-transmits-message-mind-colleague-5-000-miles-away-using-brain-waves.html#ixzz3COFQ4xhB
Randall
J. Randall Murphy
I think someone else ran across the same thing and posted it in another thread. It's interesting, but using an EEG detector to gather signals and transmit them via a communications network isn't really telepathy any more than using a blue-tooth earpiece with your cellphone, only blue-tooth earpieces work better by utilizing the brains own audio detectors and neural pathways. But still, it is interesting, and the potential for useful devices, like headsets that can help people with disabilities to communicate certainly can't be overlooked ( not to mention all the remote control and gaming possibilities ). It's one more step toward the singularity.
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Re: the first sentence of the article being discussed --
"According to the researchers, this is the first time humans have sent a message ‘almost directly’ into each other’s brains."
it would produce a hearty laugh at a parapsychology conference. Why not send it to Dean Radin?
"According to the researchers, this is the first time humans have sent a message ‘almost directly’ into each other’s brains."
it would produce a hearty laugh at a parapsychology conference. Why not send it to Dean Radin?
As you read this, your neurons are firing – that brain activity can now be decoded to reveal the silent words in your head
TALKING to yourself used to be a strictly private pastime. That's no longer the case – researchers have eavesdropped on our internal monologue for the first time.
Brain decoder can eavesdrop on your inner voice - tech - 29 October 2014 - New Scientist
Several other researchers are also investigating ways to read the human mind. Some can tell what pictures a person is looking at, others have worked out what neural activity represents certain concepts in the brain, and one team has even produced crude reproductions of movie clips that someone is watching just by analysing their brain activity. So is it possible to put it all together to create one multisensory mind-reading device?
In theory, yes, says Martin, but it would be extraordinarily complicated. She says you would need a huge amount of data for each thing you are trying to predict. "It would be really interesting to look into. It would allow us to predict what people are doing or thinking,"
The mindreading machine that can listen to the 'voices in your head' | Daily Mail Online
TALKING to yourself used to be a strictly private pastime. That's no longer the case – researchers have eavesdropped on our internal monologue for the first time.
Brain decoder can eavesdrop on your inner voice - tech - 29 October 2014 - New Scientist
Several other researchers are also investigating ways to read the human mind. Some can tell what pictures a person is looking at, others have worked out what neural activity represents certain concepts in the brain, and one team has even produced crude reproductions of movie clips that someone is watching just by analysing their brain activity. So is it possible to put it all together to create one multisensory mind-reading device?
In theory, yes, says Martin, but it would be extraordinarily complicated. She says you would need a huge amount of data for each thing you are trying to predict. "It would be really interesting to look into. It would allow us to predict what people are doing or thinking,"
The mindreading machine that can listen to the 'voices in your head' | Daily Mail Online
The science behind total recall: New player in brain function and memory -- ScienceDaily
Dr. Keith Murai, the study's senior author and Associate Professor in the Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery at McGill University. "Our findings show that the brain has a key protein that limits the production of molecules necessary for memory formation. When this brake-protein is suppressed, the brain is able to store more information."
Dr. Keith Murai, the study's senior author and Associate Professor in the Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery at McGill University. "Our findings show that the brain has a key protein that limits the production of molecules necessary for memory formation. When this brake-protein is suppressed, the brain is able to store more information."
boomerang
Paranormal Adept
Quite fascinating. There may be a key here to understanding the link between certain types of brain injury at an early age and subsequent development of the "rain man" savant.
Soupie
Paranormal Adept
A Worm's Mind In A Lego Body
Take the connectome of a worm and transplant it as software in a Lego Mindstorms EV3 robot - what happens next?
It is a deep and long standing philosophical question. Are we just the sum of our neural networks. Of course, if you work in AI you take the answer mostly for granted, but until someone builds a human brain and switches it on we really don't have a concrete example of the principle in action. ...
The key point is that there was no programming or learning involved to create the behaviors. The connectome of the worm was mapped and implemented as a software system and the behaviors emerge. ...
Mr. Busbice essentially recreated the 302 neuron network of C. elegans in a software substrate, and simple--but very functional and "intelligent"--behavior emerged. Pretty fascinating. The following is even more fascinating:
We don't know how this "simple" system of 302 neurons produces the behavior that it does... The human brain has approximately 86 billion neurons.
302
86, 000, 000, 000
boomerang
Paranormal Adept
What we are discovering about "emergence" is but the tip of the iceberg. Emergence may easily pick up where post modern particle physics will eventually stall.
"The con[n]ectome may only consist of 302 neurons but it is self-stimulating and it is difficult to understand how it works - but it does."
Why shouldn't it work? The computer's builders merely copied [to a limited extent] a primitive sensorimotor network already refined over millions of years of natural evolution -- enabling C. elegans and its peers to get about in their world functioning in far more complex (and self-constructing) ways than the robot we see bumping into walls in the video. While this experiment might be an advance in robot technology, it can’t be seen as an advance of any kind in knowledge by scientific or philosophical disciplines concerned with life, consciousness, or mind.
The following paper provides an insightful overview of the complexity of the knowledge being sought in those disciplines.
LINK RESET: Measuring consciousness: relating behavioural and neurophysiological approaches
Why shouldn't it work? The computer's builders merely copied [to a limited extent] a primitive sensorimotor network already refined over millions of years of natural evolution -- enabling C. elegans and its peers to get about in their world functioning in far more complex (and self-constructing) ways than the robot we see bumping into walls in the video. While this experiment might be an advance in robot technology, it can’t be seen as an advance of any kind in knowledge by scientific or philosophical disciplines concerned with life, consciousness, or mind.
The following paper provides an insightful overview of the complexity of the knowledge being sought in those disciplines.
LINK RESET: Measuring consciousness: relating behavioural and neurophysiological approaches
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Soupie
Paranormal Adept
Why shouldn't it work? I guess that's a fair question since we don't know why it does work, haha.
As per an article @smcder shared in another thread, brains are like alien technology which we are trying to reverse engineer.
Yes, the above scientists "merely" copied the network of neurons of C. elegans, but no one knew if it would give rise to the behavior displayed by the robot body. Moreover, we don't seem to know how the "simple" network of 302 "simple" neurons guides such behavior. It's simply fascinating!
Regarding consciousness and mind... How do we know it's not an advance? Is there something it is like to be a network of 302 neurons being fed a continual stream of physical data about the environment? How can we know there is not?
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smcder
Guest
For context, here is the article I linked in another thread (@Soupie, please link to my post on the thread you reference ... thanks, I don't remember where it was)
Our Brains as Alien Technology - Neuroanthropology
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smcder
Guest
Emergent Properties (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Emergence is a notorious philosophical term of art.
A variety of theorists have appropriated it for their purposes ever since George Henry Lewes gave it a philosophical sense in his 1875 Problems of Life and Mind. We might roughly characterize the shared meaning thus: emergent entities (properties or substances) ‘arise’ out of more fundamental entities and yet are ‘novel’ or ‘irreducible’ with respect to them. (For example, it is sometimes said that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain.)
Each of the quoted terms is slippery in its own right, and their specifications yield the varied notions of emergence that we discuss below. There has been renewed interest in emergence within discussions of the behavior of complex systems and debates over the reconcilability of mental causation, intentionality, or consciousness with physicalism.
We can't know. But is that a ponderable question with any real substance that can support speculation let alone research? It's a lot like the Medieval question 'how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?'. Meanwhile we have decades of neuroscientific, psychological, and phenomenologically descriptive substance to evaluate in the interdisciplinary field of Consciousness Studies. The paper I linked above is a must-read for anyone who seeks to understand the complexity of the consciousness/brain/mind problem that confronts us. The paper I link below is another must-read, confronting and critiquing the presuppositions of computationalism, computational neuroscience, and the information-integration hypothesis that currently dominate that which trickles down to the reading public in press releases such as the one you linked. I've linked both of the papers I recommend in the Conscious and the Paranormal thread, where we can begin to recognize the issues in consciousness research.
Mens Sana Monogr. 2014 Jan-Dec; 12(1): 11–34.
doi: 10.4103/0973-1229.130283
PMCID: PMC4037891
What Explains Consciousness? Or…What Consciousness Explains?
Donelson E. Dulany
Abstract:
In this invited commentary I focus on the topic addressed in three papers: De Sousa's (2013[16,17]) Toward an Integrative Theory of Consciousness, a monograph with Parts 1 & 2, as well as commentaries by Pereira (2013a[59]) and Hirstein (2013[42]). All three are impressively scholarly and can stand—and shout—on their own. But theory of consciousness? My aim is to slice that topic into the two fundamentally different kinds of theories of consciousness, say what appears to be an ideology, out of behaviourism into cognitivism, now also influencing the quest for an “explanation of consciousness” in cognitive neuroscience. I will then say what can be expected given what we know of the complexity of brain structure, the richness of a conscious “vocabulary”, and current technological limits of brain imaging. This will then turn to the strategy for examining “what consciousness explains”—metatheory, theories, mappings, and a methodology of competitive support, a methodology especially important where there are competing commitments. There are also increasingly common identifications of methodological bias in, along with failures to replicate, studies reporting unconscious controls in decision, social priming—as there have been in perception, learning, problem solving, etc. The literature critique has provided evidence taken as reducing, and in some cases eliminating, a role for conscious controls—a position consistent with that ideology out of behaviourism into cognitivism. It is an ideological position that fails to recognize the fundamental distinction between theoretical and metaphysical assertions.
Keywords: Brain imaging, Causal learning, Consciousness, Ideological influence, Mentalistic metatheory, Volitional control
What Explains Consciousness? Or…What Consciousness Explains?
boomerang
Paranormal Adept
Interesting link and I have it bookmarked for when I can take the time to read closely enough to do it justice.
"Emergence" can indeed be used as a kind of catch-all basket in lieu of cause and effect understanding. I think what may be changing is progress in mathematical description and predictions of how complex behaviors and seemingly orchestrated responses may arise through the one-on-one interaction of dynamic parts, each having only a very simple set of rules. There may be something akin to the Heisenberg principle at work in emergence, wherein we may measure a system as either a set of interactions based on simple rules, or a varied but delimited set of "emergent" behaviors intertwined with those rules. But not both simultaneously. But--I am waay in over my head with this kind of speculation.
What I think is more apparent are diminishing returns in looking ever smaller and smaller in particle physics. There is some hope (perhaps) that classical analysis of fundamental law may be somehow turned on its head. Instead of studying natural law by breaking open smaller and smaller black boxes in order to understand the macro world, perhaps science will be able to better characterize operations at ever smaller scales by understanding the emergent macro phenomena smaller packets of matter and energy produce.
Science in pursuit of the human mind is doing what science has always done and is supposed to do: Tell us not the "why", but the "how". Understanding how the brain stores and processes information is growing exponentially. But this can only be the "how" and not the "why" of self-awareness.
Now I am so far out on the limb it's about to snap. But hopefully, there is at least a grain of truth here.
Randall
J. Randall Murphy
Returning to the very beginning of this thread: What do we really mean by "substrate independence"? At first it seems fairly straight forward. It means possessing experience and thought without the associated hardware ( e.g. brain ). However looking closer that that idea, what is being suggested is that experience itself simply exists without a "thing" to cause it. In which case, where does it come from in the first place? We know we didn't just pop into existence at the beginning of the universe. All substantial evidence suggests we were born here on Earth and that our experience emerges from that circumstance. So at the very least it would seem that a substrate was required to bring our experience into being in the first place. And there is no substantial evidence that the phenomena of experience continues after the substrate that has given rise to it is removed. So why should we assume that in the absence of any substrate, the phenomena of experience would continue to exist?
The obvious answer is that the phenomena of experience seems to require a substrate in order to exist, and this means that if the original substrate ceases to function, the only way to maintain a sense of experience is to have another substrate someplace else take over the functions provided by the original. Therefore, if as some people claim, that upon the death of the brain ( our biological substrate ) we retain a sense of experience, what substrate has taken over the functions of our former brain? Where is it located? Supposing this phenomena is real, simply because we cannot pinpoint the location of the substrate doesn't mean there isn't one. Perhaps it's the same substrate that gives rise to everything else in the universe, maybe even the universe itself. But if that's the case can we really claim to be the same person we were when we were running on our original substrate? I don't think so. We would be on a sort of cosmic life support system, ethereal copies, mere remnants of our original selves.
The obvious answer is that the phenomena of experience seems to require a substrate in order to exist, and this means that if the original substrate ceases to function, the only way to maintain a sense of experience is to have another substrate someplace else take over the functions provided by the original. Therefore, if as some people claim, that upon the death of the brain ( our biological substrate ) we retain a sense of experience, what substrate has taken over the functions of our former brain? Where is it located? Supposing this phenomena is real, simply because we cannot pinpoint the location of the substrate doesn't mean there isn't one. Perhaps it's the same substrate that gives rise to everything else in the universe, maybe even the universe itself. But if that's the case can we really claim to be the same person we were when we were running on our original substrate? I don't think so. We would be on a sort of cosmic life support system, ethereal copies, mere remnants of our original selves.
Soupie
Paranormal Adept
My understanding of the term is that while minds require a physical substrate to embody or realize them, theoretically any physical substrate will do.
One definition I've been able to find supports this:
VWN Virtual Dictionary: Substrate-Independence
"Substrate-Independence is one of the main ideas developed by philosopher Nick Bostrom, one of the leading minds behind the Simulation Argument. Substrate-independence is the simple, logical, yet profound idea that mental states can reside on multiple types of physical or digital substrates. A conscious, intelligent, self-aware person can reside in an organic brain, a silicon brain, a magnetic brain - the physical construction is fundamentally irrelevant."
Thus, the answer to your question might be (a) you would not be the same person, but you never were the same person, or (b) it would simply be more of the same: some development/change and turnover of substrate, but essentially the core pattern (you) remains.
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