Charlie Stross wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 12, 2000 at 10:00:43AM -0400, Robin Hanson wrote:
> >
> > I disagree that you need advanced nanotech to upload. It all depends on
> > just how detailed information you need on neurons and synapses. And it
> > could well be worth spending billions of dollars to scan just one brain,
> > given how much money could be made from copies of that one brain. We didn't
> > need advanced nanotech to read the human genome -- because it was worth
> > enough to read just one genome.
>
> Here's another possibility I haven't heard discussed ...
>
> Work on face recognition software has uncovered the fact that there are
> actually only something like 56 distinct 'eigenfaces' -- collections of
> distinctive features by which we can identify people. All of us have faces
> which contain features which are a mix of one or more eigenfaces.
>
> Given that as a species we are fairly genetically homogeneous, what
> are the chances that there exist a bunch of 'eigenbrains' -- phenotypic
> expressions of the human genome, in neural tissue, which all of us are
> just variations on? Yes, we develop neural circuits by killing off loads
> of synapses as we age (leaving only connections that _do_ something);
> and we all have different memories, stored presumably as physiological
> adaptations in the synapses of neurones. But if the overall architecture
> is the same, it might turn out that the cost of uploading is some massive
> amount (to map the first few dozen brains), then drops by several orders
> of magnitude (for mapping only the _differences_ from the standard model).
>
> -- Charlie
Alternately, what are the chances we have divergent or evolved brains?
I posit that humanity is evolving faster.
Ross F.
-- Ross Andrew Finlayson Finlayson Consulting Ross at Tiki-Lounge: http://www.tiki-lounge.com/~raf/
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