Preparing for a simulated future, brain mapping/scanning

[vernes]

Should one wish to preserve his brain for the remote possibility the future might offer a way to return to life, what kinds of scanning technology are at our disposal to ensure an abundance of data for a correct reconstruction of a digital version of a brain AND it's stored information?

What vital information could be missing? What technology would be needed to be able to retreive this information?

[Steffen]

Well, if this could be answered so easily, I'm sure someone had already tried all that...
You do not only want to read out the biological arrangements with every single synaptic spine, which could at least theoretically be possible, although you would have a really huge amount of information to store on your harddrive. Of course scanning all that would take a while and you would have to do very high resolution scanning. I can't tell you if this is possible in the living brain. Perhaps someone else knows. (Perhaps we need intracellular structures as well?)
Furthermore, you want the stored information to be read out. If you're lucky, the stored information are already given in your reconstruction (simulation) of the biological matter. What I mean is the arrangement of every single neurite and it's components. If you're not lucky, I could not tell you where to get the information from.
And this was only the easy part. Now think about yourself or what is commonly called "the soul". Nobody knows how that is represented in the brain. So if you would like to restore "yourself" in the future, the biological arrangements and the stored information are not sufficient. You first have to find out what "you" actually are. Some say it's quantum physics, some say something else. I don't know.

[vernes]

Mh, I was hoping this forum would be ablaze with the chatter of the finest of minds in the field of neuroscience.
And who would flock to my post in an attempt to point out the flaws in my arguments and offer some insight to the technological possibility on how to achive my self imposed end-goal.

Or maybe I should be a bit more patient. 

[Steffen]

I'm sorry I can't tell you more.
To point out flaws in your arguments you should make some arguments in the first place In this post you only point out some philosophical und ethical questions, but what is your opinion?  I normally don't like this philosophical stuff and therefore do not answer posts like that (sorry), but if you get a little more precise especially in this thread, you might get some answers. And of course patience is always a good thing

[Dr_Neuro]

First of all, the brain is a large system of connections. The number of connections and the strength of those connections is largely unknown and ever changing. I'm sure you've heard someone say, "I'm not the same person I was when I was 16". Essentially, that is more true than most people think. The changes that have occurred in your neural dynamics and structure since you were sixteen, hell, since yesterday, have changed so much that your brain would not even be recognizable if you had the technology to scan ever connection. Every singe moment of life is invaded with constant input from your environment.Those inputs change the connections in specific areas constantly. Were you to scan your entire brain today, connection by connection (if it were possible), and you recreated ALL of those connections on a computer (however, the connections alone are not everything, you also have to take into consideration the strength or "Weights" of those connections and the neural dynamics that can be specific from neuron to neuron) you would have a conscious computer that is essentially you that picks up from that day. Because your experiences and the computers experiences are exponentially different from that point on, the computer would cease being you within a second of being initiated. It would be like the computer was created as a genetic twin of your brain, once that brain is born, the two of you will become more and more different at an exponential rate. However, were you to be able to scan your brain at the point of death and recreate that, you could have a conscious computer that is essentially you. This would not be satisfying though, as a computer would not have the ability to interact with the environment in the same ways that you could. A philosopher by the name of Alva Noe states that consciousness is not just neural structure, but also the way that those neural structures interact with the environment. You interact in certain ways based off of not only your brain, but your body. Someone who is blind has a very different consciousness than they would have had they not been born blind.

This argument is feudal anyways, you are basically talking about cloning yourself in a mechanical way to recreate your present self. If we clone a sheep and kill the original, we do not say that the original sheep lives on as the clone. They start the same but because no two organisms or conscious beings can experience the same things at the same time, they become independent conscious vessels with independent personalities and attributes. The computer would start out essentially the same, would quickly become its self, losing your attributes over time and gaining its own (just like you have since the day you were born). Essentially, the computer has experienced everything that you have in your life leading up to that point. Your education, your parents (the computer would feel that it was born of your mother), it would remember the second grade. However, after you started it, it would have it's own experiences which makes your "end goal" unrealistic and logistically and philosophically impossible.

Steffen, I would like to address your comment on the "soul". I don't believe it's as elusive as you suggest. We are biological beings made up of molecules and atoms. The brain is neural connections. If you completely recreated a brain with a computer model, that computer would have the feeling of a "soul". Somewhere, that is neurologically programmed.


I hope this has answered some questions Vernes. Of course, my disclaimer is that these are simply my theories on conscious computers. These are not laws or known facts. If you have any questions please as and maybe, if you would like, I could back up my arguments with more technical answers.

[vernes]

Well, despite any possible reason there might be behind choosing to to create a simulation of one's brain. The problem remains:Whille I still be around when the technology finally is created?
My prediction is negative, and as such, I will need to make preperations now in order to have available sufficient data on which a correct model can be build.

So the question remains, what is sufficient data?
Diffusion spectrum imaging created from MRI data offers alot of insight into the wiring of neurons, but offer little information about the state of the brain.
What technologies are currently at our disposal that could help create a brain as near as possible to perfect with the interpolation of different types of data about the brain?

[Genecks]

Well, despite any possible reason there might be behind choosing to to create a simulation of one's brain. The problem remains:Whille I still be around when the technology finally is created?
My prediction is negative, and as such, I will need to make preperations now in order to have available sufficient data on which a correct model can be build.

So the question remains, what is sufficient data?
Diffusion spectrum imaging created from MRI data offers alot of insight into the wiring of neurons, but offer little information about the state of the brain.
What technologies are currently at our disposal that could help create a brain as near as possible to perfect with the interpolation of different types of data about the brain?

In reference to the person who posted about a sheep clone, that would be a simple genetic clone. However, a full clone, in my opinion, would be a clone that is built together atom by atom. I suspect the best way to go about doing that would be to have some kind of rapid-prototyping nanotechnological device that can deconstruct the physical and reconstruct it into a digital format.

Perhaps one would not even need a nano-technological device. There might be potential in using radiative technologies to determine molecular and atomic composition and then recording (if not destroying and recording) that composition. However, I believe to get a complete and accurate reading, complete and rapid decomposition by reading device would be necessary. This might involve multiple light rays decomposing the organism while recording the molecular and atomic data.

I suspect it would need to be stored in some kind of quantum drive, as you would need to save the information of each atom, the cybernetics of each atom, and the current energy states (which would be doubly important).

One could only hope that storing information related to classical physics would be good enough and that the actual quantum data is not necessary to store.

At the most reductionist level, you would need at least the amount of energy that the person is composed of. However, that's more than likely not going to happen. You would need more energy for storage, the programming language, and so forth. Certainly, it might even take a football field of today's most cutting-edge computer technology to store a human's existence.

I say atom-by-atom, because we lack the current knowledge to fully understand how many neuronal aspects, such as dendritic spines, work in relation to memory and cognition. However, an atom-by-atom technique would be a brute-force technique that would ensure complete accuracy without questioning what kinds of materials can be left out of the equation. Not only do we not understand the function of many things, but we still lack knowledge of many structures that exist within the human body and neuronal frameworks.

I'm going to assume that we have the technology to do this, but there is a lack of gathered resources to do this.

If people were to start on such a mission, I suspect they would start with simple organisms, such as fruit flies or worms. Perhaps even waterbears would be sufficient.

[Genecks]

As an update to my previous post, I thought I'd mention that I've been knocking around the idea of using rotifers as a model organism for eventual realization of "mind uploading."

I think rotifers are a good choice, because they have a nervous system, a body, and few cells. Limiting the number of cells, I believe, helps limit the extensive networking that must be investigated.

Furthermore, rotifers show many modern cellular mechanisms.

links may lead to more information:

- http://faculty.uml.edu/rhochberg/hochberglab/
- http://faculty.uml.edu/rhochberg/HochbergLab/Neuroinformatics/RND.htm

[Wieslaw]

What technologies are currently at our disposal that could help create a brain as near as possible to perfect with the interpolation of different types of data about the brain?

The best description of suitable technology you will find in the P.O. Haikonen book "Robot Brains" (short, 200 p. approx.).
Artificial brain model is also proposed in the following article: "Episodic Memory - Key to Thinking" http://mindconsciousness.wordpress.com/2011/03/07/episodic-memory-key-to-thinking/

[samnemo]

Regarding simulated future (  ), this recent article on a simulation of neocortical columns shows some nice similarities with experimental data:
 http://www.frontiersin.org/computational_neuroscience/10.3389/fncom.2011.00019/abstract
The NEURON model is available here:
 http://senselab.med.yale.edu/ModelDB/ShowModel.asp?model=138379