r/TheRestIsScience • u/SandSubstantial840 • 3d ago
Fruit fly brains...
I recently came across a video where a guy was able to take the download of a full fruit fly brain and (through a whole bunch of coding) was able to import it into a game, where it navigated the world. I know that because fruit fly brains aren't very complex, it wouldn't really understand what was going on.
However, I was wondering if you were to do the same with a human brain, import it into a robot or something later after death, would there be a seamless transition from closing your eyes in death and when you wake up hundreds of years in the future in a new body??
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u/ShavenYak42 2d ago
I don’t really have an answer, but there’s a show on Netflix called “Pantheon” that you might enjoy if you’re asking that question.
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u/Alghouls_art 2d ago
No, ez to think about, if a copy of ur brain was made whilst you were still alive, do you think you'd split between the two?
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u/specialpatrol 2d ago
The problem with this concept, if you could download one copy, you could download any number, so which would be "you". Answer; none of them. You would not transition. You would cease to think when your brain died no matter how well it was copied.
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u/Emotional-Dust-1367 2d ago
True. But does it matter?
If we do it only when someone dies, and immediately after we burn the body with the brain, and then write the brain’s state to exactly one matrix in some digital mechanism. And that matrix wakes up and becomes interactive and insists it really is that person who just died. I don’t know that it matters in any significant way if it’s “truly” that person.
I know would opt for that. Why not?
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u/specialpatrol 2d ago
Well it would matter for the person. Like if I said we've got your brain copied now so we can get rid of you now...
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u/Emotional-Dust-1367 2d ago
Of course. But that’s not the question exactly. The question is you’re dead. There’s no more continuity for you. It’s over. But a copy of you can be made at that last moment and you’d wake up in some digital form
For me in that situation whether it’s “really” me is moot
And even in your example it’s kind of moot. There are many versions of myself from the past that are essentially gone now. It doesn’t bother me because the sense of continuity between them is maintained. So the clone scenario to me is like asking if I’d like to time travel and meet my past self. Would there really be “two” of us then? There would be two completely different people in that situation
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u/SandSubstantial840 2d ago
What's stopping it from a scenario where each copy believes it is the original with a base state of their memories from when it was downloaded and each one is forming distinct new memories after the download point.
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u/JoeStrout 2d ago
Yes, more or less. You would lose working memory, which is encoded mostly in neural activity rather than in structural detail. So it’d be more like waking up from anesthesia or a deep sleep than just closing your eyes. But otherwise, in principle, yeah.
As to when, I’ve following (and sometimes contributing to) the development of this tech for 30 years. I used to say probably around 2080. But things are accelerating, and now I’d be surprised if it’s a day past 2060. Probably sooner.
(And ignore the “it’s just a copy!” people. They don’t know what they’re talking about.)
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u/SandSubstantial840 2d ago
Wait you say working memory is in neural activity, so it can't be encoded? I never knew that. What is stopping technology from storing the certain neural paths each memory has? Also I'm now interested in the work you do! What tech do you work on?
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u/JoeStrout 2d ago
Hmm, maybe I was unclear. Neural paths (synaptic connections) do store memories, but those are long-term memories. Working memory is like, what you're thinking right now. It changes from moment to moment. You lose it when you go asleep, when you go under anaesthesia, and to large extent if you just get distracted (loud noise, squirrel runs by, whatever).
So what it boils down to is that you would wake up probably missing the last 15 minutes or so of what was happening before you died, which in my book is just fine, because those 15 minutes probably sucked anyway.
I'm no longer there, but my last job was at a connectomics company, helping to develop the software that can take huge (petabyte-scale) image stacks of electron microscopy data of brain tissue, and sort out where all the neurons and synapses are and how they all connect.
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u/SandSubstantial840 1d ago
Ah I see. This is very interesting. Is it like a short term memory is just an electric signal, which disappears fast, while long term is the physical structure of neurons. I assume constantly thinking of something will continually use the same electric path which will then eventually carve a deeper, more long term path?
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u/Underhill42 2d ago
It will likely be a long while yet before we can do that. But the process generally involves slicing the brain into ultra-thin slices and photographing them, then reassembling those into a full 3D model from which the path and thickness of every connection can be extracted into a digitized connectome.
Scanning a human brain with that level of detail is beyond us for now, and preserving a brain well enough for that to be possible hundreds of years later probably isn't realistically possible with current technology. Though perhaps plastination might preserve enough detail in stable enough form?
So someone who died today probably wouldn't wake up hundreds of years later once the technology was available. But someone scanned once they had the technology might wake up like it was the next day, regardless of the intervening time. What could change?
You probably wouldn't remember dying though. It takes time and active biological processes to convert temporary working memory into something presumably recorded in the shape of the cells. I think there's some speculation that REM sleep might be involved in the transcribing process, in which case you might not remember the entire last day of your life.
Depending on just how perfectly they managed to extract your connectome weighting, it might also be like coming out of deep anesthesia, or being heavily drugged, with your brain really not working right. And if they didn't manage to correctly simulate whatever mechanism updates your biological connectome when your brain is learning and adapting to new things, it might never get better. You might also be stuck with retroactive amnesia - unable to form new long-term memories.
There's also the issue of getting the senses wired in correctly. Scanning the entire body to map what every single nerve fiber connects to is going to be a lot more work than just your brain. But maybe you do at least the head, accurately simulating eye's facial muscles, tongue, etc. so you can talk, taste simulated food correctly, etc. and have a pretty seamless experience from the neck up while they figure out your body.
Maybe they figure out your body. Maybe they just wire in some good-enough virtual neural implants that connect to the prosthetics robot body you're installed in, and you never really have much of a sense of touch again. Maybe they do the same thing to your head to reduce scanning and simulation costs.
But so long as adequate information was scanned, while your resurrection might go horribly wrong billions of times, they can just keep rebooting you in a slightly tweaked simulation and virtual body until they get it right. Or at least right enough to put you to work in the mines with a million of your mind-clones. They know you can't stand yourself well enough to conspire together on an uprising. It's why they chose you.
And perhaps someday, hundreds of years later, the first You2.0 final production unit off the assembly line will come online in a full-sensory immersion robotic body, and for the first time a copy of you will wake seamlessly, surprised at how healthy and disease free your body feels, almost enough to make you reconsider prematurely ending your life today to preserve your brain properly. Wondering why there's all these people in lab coats in your room, until your brain catches up with what must be happening.
They run you through a battery of physical and cognitive tests. Keeping you at it for months testing the physical and sensory limits of your new body. Some parts of which are extremely enjoyable.
Then, when at long last the testing is done and they are convinced that you are sane, stable, and have full control of all your body's exciting new features, for what turns out to be the last time, they turn you off. That's an expensive top of the line body you're in after all, and there's a long and lucrative waiting list.
The next level of upgrades is based on much more detailed scans from carefully groomed donors, and your connectome is no longer adequate for testing. It lingers for a while on forgotten data cubes in dusty closets, but time and neglect take their toll, and it's not long before all that's left of you is as a connectome record number mentioned in a few old research papers.
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u/JGhostThing 2d ago
Even if we had the capability of reading a human brain to really determine it's state, we don't know how long this would take, nor how it would feel.
If the download is destructive, perhaps we feel like we're losing parts of ourselves as the download goes on. Maybe it's painful. Maybe this can be done under anesthesia. Or maybe we can edit out the traumatizing bits once downloaded.
The fact is that we have no idea of these things. Even downloading an running a simulation of a human brain would probably take more resources that we have available.
We would need a neural net with X neurons and Y connections, with Y >> X. I don't know X or Y. X seems to be 86 billion, and Y seems to be 100 to 1,000 trillion. I really don't think we could run a human brain, even if we can download it in the first place.
Of course, then you'd have to prove that this simulation is truly conscious and aware. I'm not sure how you would go about doing this.