- Joined
- Sep 12, 2007
- Messages
- 555
- Reaction score
- 0
Studying neuroscience has made me little depressed. If all that makes us an individual is information stored in our brains, then once our brains die that's the end. The depressing part is when I learned about how many diseases cause neurons to die, deleting our personalities a tiny piece at a time until nothing is left but an empty husk. Even if some deity actually runs an afterlife, I'd rather continue living in this existence with all my memories intact, if it were possible.
So there's these folks out there that seek to dodge this problem by having their brains frozen. Could never work, right - there's billions of cells in the brain, and the freezing process is going to cause serious damage to every single neuron, process, mitochondrion, the rest. Everything is mortally wounded when a person dies and is frozen.
Well, one of the firms (Alcor) wrote some technical papers where they describe how and why they think this technology could work.
For the same of discussion, let me simplify their arguments :
1. They argue that all of the information stored in our brain (our memories) is stored as groupings of protein structures. So, if a particular neuron has "X" number of dendritic spines and "Y" number of receptors of a particular type, that neuron is storing information encoded in the X + Y. It's more complex than this : there's epigenetics, self amplifying proteins, and a whole mess of other things that have a role in determining what information a neuron is storing.
2. After a brain is frozen to the temperature of liquid nitrogen, all of those proteins are still there. Today, if we took a single neuron and examined it under an atomic force microscope, we could eventually (it would take years) figure out precisely how many molecules of each protein were present in that neuron. We could write down "there's 4234324 AMPA receptors" here and there's "4343" molecules of protein Y here. If we had an accurate computer simulation of a neuron, we could enter that data in and create a simulated neuron that behaved almost exactly like the original neuron behaves.
In short, we'd have copied the information stored in that neuron into another form.
3. So if one believes that the information is still present in a dead person's mind, then using some fantastic future technology one could actually recover the memories stored there. Using further fantastic technology, one could create a rebuilt/restored version of the original person who had the same memories as the original person. That person, if awake, would believe that they were the original.
4. The Alcor folks argue that said fantastic future technology is a long way off, but is a logical result of current technological trends. Scientists are working on designing machines that are built atom by atom and have atomic level gears and pumps and valves and injection probes and so forth.
Some day, a machine could be build that would resemble a tiny microchip. On one side of the device it would be fed with energy, atoms as feedstock, and data input. On the other side of the device, it would be capable of laying down a pattern, atom by atom, for any arbitrary structure you dream up.
All this would occur at very low temperatures (so that the atoms you lay down don't move around too much) and in vacuum.
Science fiction? Well, the biochem class I'm taking has thousands of examples of real life proteins that add specific atoms to biological molecules, under far more chaotic conditions than this man-made machine would operate under.
How would you build such a fantastically complex machine? Well, you might use roboticly controlled atomic force microscopes to slowly and painstakingly build the first one. Then, once you've built the first "atomic replicator" at the cost of billions of dollars, you start it working....building the next "atomic replicator" much faster. You then have those two "atomic replicators"...
What about designing an atomic replicator? Human beings could never design a device so complex, could they? Well, this machine would basically have functional units, each of which is able to add a particular element to an object being constructed. So you'd just have an army of thousands of engineers design each functional unit once, and the atomic replicator would be a grid of billions of these things. I've read that currently, quantum mechanics mean that atomic level machines are hard to design, but somehow biological proteins work....
CONCLUSION
I know of no legitimate objections to the arguments made by Alcor. I can't claim nanotechnology isn't possible because I myself am a large object made atom by atom. Every part of me, down to the water molecules in my cells, was moved around atom by atom. (aquaporins are atomic level channels. Amino acids are synthesized carbon atom by carbon atom)
Alcor argues that once we can make anything we want atom by atom, we would build machines that could, atom by atom, cut through the frozen brain samples they have. Data storing the position of every important molecule (water and ions would be ignored) would be kept in some gigantic computer memory...also made atom by atom, so the computer would fit in a closet.
And, once we can store in a computer memory the exact details of all of the billions of synapses in the brain, we could run a high speed simulation of neurons and quickly and easily build a working "artificial intelligence" who would be a simulation of a dead person. Presumably that dead person would have been a world class expert in neuroscience or nanotechnology. The simulation would run on computer circuits made atom by atom, and so would run about 10 million times quicker than a biological brain. The 'artificial intelligence', given 10 million years to work for every real world year, would be able to rapidly and easily solve any remaining problems in the way of bringing everyone back to life, from Walt Disney to all the other kooks who froze themselves.
I'm just a pre-med medical student. What am I missing, here? Why won't another 100-200 years of technological progress bring about some kind of comparable technology to what I describe? Why could a dead person's brain not be rebuilt and brought back into functioning order if you had more computing power than all the human beings on the planet combined and the ability to move individual atoms around on a massive scale?
Granted, Walt Disney might not wake up to see such a weird future world. I think there would be consequences to technology like I'm describing : I don't thing the world would resemble anything any of us alive have ever seen. The main point of my question is what technical limitations would stop this from happening. Also, granted, spiritually, who knows what "God" might do. Maybe he'd send the soul of the person back from heaven/hell to reinhabit the rebuilt body. Maybe he'd give the new body a fresh, new soul. Maybe God isn't real and none of the above would happen. That is irrelevant for determining what would happen if you tried to do this, unless you believe that God would become upset and intervene.
Some arguments I've seen are that since it's never been done before (well, some chimps got chilled and revived) one can't scientifically say if it is possible at all. From that reasoning, one cannot credibly argue that a manned mission to Mars is possible : no one has ever built a rocket with that kind of range and payload capacity.
So there's these folks out there that seek to dodge this problem by having their brains frozen. Could never work, right - there's billions of cells in the brain, and the freezing process is going to cause serious damage to every single neuron, process, mitochondrion, the rest. Everything is mortally wounded when a person dies and is frozen.
Well, one of the firms (Alcor) wrote some technical papers where they describe how and why they think this technology could work.
For the same of discussion, let me simplify their arguments :
1. They argue that all of the information stored in our brain (our memories) is stored as groupings of protein structures. So, if a particular neuron has "X" number of dendritic spines and "Y" number of receptors of a particular type, that neuron is storing information encoded in the X + Y. It's more complex than this : there's epigenetics, self amplifying proteins, and a whole mess of other things that have a role in determining what information a neuron is storing.
2. After a brain is frozen to the temperature of liquid nitrogen, all of those proteins are still there. Today, if we took a single neuron and examined it under an atomic force microscope, we could eventually (it would take years) figure out precisely how many molecules of each protein were present in that neuron. We could write down "there's 4234324 AMPA receptors" here and there's "4343" molecules of protein Y here. If we had an accurate computer simulation of a neuron, we could enter that data in and create a simulated neuron that behaved almost exactly like the original neuron behaves.
In short, we'd have copied the information stored in that neuron into another form.
3. So if one believes that the information is still present in a dead person's mind, then using some fantastic future technology one could actually recover the memories stored there. Using further fantastic technology, one could create a rebuilt/restored version of the original person who had the same memories as the original person. That person, if awake, would believe that they were the original.
4. The Alcor folks argue that said fantastic future technology is a long way off, but is a logical result of current technological trends. Scientists are working on designing machines that are built atom by atom and have atomic level gears and pumps and valves and injection probes and so forth.
Some day, a machine could be build that would resemble a tiny microchip. On one side of the device it would be fed with energy, atoms as feedstock, and data input. On the other side of the device, it would be capable of laying down a pattern, atom by atom, for any arbitrary structure you dream up.
All this would occur at very low temperatures (so that the atoms you lay down don't move around too much) and in vacuum.
Science fiction? Well, the biochem class I'm taking has thousands of examples of real life proteins that add specific atoms to biological molecules, under far more chaotic conditions than this man-made machine would operate under.
How would you build such a fantastically complex machine? Well, you might use roboticly controlled atomic force microscopes to slowly and painstakingly build the first one. Then, once you've built the first "atomic replicator" at the cost of billions of dollars, you start it working....building the next "atomic replicator" much faster. You then have those two "atomic replicators"...
What about designing an atomic replicator? Human beings could never design a device so complex, could they? Well, this machine would basically have functional units, each of which is able to add a particular element to an object being constructed. So you'd just have an army of thousands of engineers design each functional unit once, and the atomic replicator would be a grid of billions of these things. I've read that currently, quantum mechanics mean that atomic level machines are hard to design, but somehow biological proteins work....
CONCLUSION
I know of no legitimate objections to the arguments made by Alcor. I can't claim nanotechnology isn't possible because I myself am a large object made atom by atom. Every part of me, down to the water molecules in my cells, was moved around atom by atom. (aquaporins are atomic level channels. Amino acids are synthesized carbon atom by carbon atom)
Alcor argues that once we can make anything we want atom by atom, we would build machines that could, atom by atom, cut through the frozen brain samples they have. Data storing the position of every important molecule (water and ions would be ignored) would be kept in some gigantic computer memory...also made atom by atom, so the computer would fit in a closet.
And, once we can store in a computer memory the exact details of all of the billions of synapses in the brain, we could run a high speed simulation of neurons and quickly and easily build a working "artificial intelligence" who would be a simulation of a dead person. Presumably that dead person would have been a world class expert in neuroscience or nanotechnology. The simulation would run on computer circuits made atom by atom, and so would run about 10 million times quicker than a biological brain. The 'artificial intelligence', given 10 million years to work for every real world year, would be able to rapidly and easily solve any remaining problems in the way of bringing everyone back to life, from Walt Disney to all the other kooks who froze themselves.
I'm just a pre-med medical student. What am I missing, here? Why won't another 100-200 years of technological progress bring about some kind of comparable technology to what I describe? Why could a dead person's brain not be rebuilt and brought back into functioning order if you had more computing power than all the human beings on the planet combined and the ability to move individual atoms around on a massive scale?
Granted, Walt Disney might not wake up to see such a weird future world. I think there would be consequences to technology like I'm describing : I don't thing the world would resemble anything any of us alive have ever seen. The main point of my question is what technical limitations would stop this from happening. Also, granted, spiritually, who knows what "God" might do. Maybe he'd send the soul of the person back from heaven/hell to reinhabit the rebuilt body. Maybe he'd give the new body a fresh, new soul. Maybe God isn't real and none of the above would happen. That is irrelevant for determining what would happen if you tried to do this, unless you believe that God would become upset and intervene.
Some arguments I've seen are that since it's never been done before (well, some chimps got chilled and revived) one can't scientifically say if it is possible at all. From that reasoning, one cannot credibly argue that a manned mission to Mars is possible : no one has ever built a rocket with that kind of range and payload capacity.
Last edited:
I like the quoting billy madison even if no one else got it, especially the OP
