Very much a thing and one of the many reasons I'm becoming more of a recluse, shared public spaces are becoming rather unpleasant. Mostly in the US and LatAm, a fair amount in the UK, not so much in Germany.
There are fewer and fewer shared public spaces every year anyway. It feels like everything is getting taken over by franchises that want to maximize customer throughput.
While the connections are important I think the individual cell behavior is also very important and that is driven by DNA. Brain cells last a lifetime and can modify their own DNA so each one ends up being unique. I do wonder how much of behavior/consciousness is encoded in the cells DNA versus the connections between the cells.
Do you have a citation for the notion they can modify their own DNA? I would fairly easily believe they can modify its expression, but I’m skeptical of the idea they can modify the sequence.
If they freeze the vesicles that deliver transmitters and make them analyzable, you've got all the information you need. In terms of a modern ANN, it's the connections (axons) and the weights (transmitters/receptors in tandem).
That said, this article doesn't get to the point in the free section. How are they collecting the information? Slicing is inherently destructive. Someone's got to manufacture an entirely novel imaging modality. Perhaps they could scan millimeters ahead of the slice at a resolution high enough to image receptors. Not possible currently.
Take a gander at the OpenWorm project. It's a great example of how simple neuronal activity is (given details like the connections, number of receptors, and transmitter infrastructure). SOTA models of neuronal activity are simple enough for problem sets in undergraduate biomedical engineering programs.
Sure, to your point, we don't know. But the worm above (nematode) swims and seeks food when dropped into a physics engine.
My main point is that the scale of the human brain is well beyond the capabilities of modern imaging modalities, and it will likely remain so indefinitely. Fascicles we can image, individual axons we cannot. I guess, theoretically, we'll eventually be able to (but it's not relevant to us or any of our remote descendants).
> But the worm above (nematode) swims and seeks food when dropped into a physics engine.
Nematode worms have an oxytocin analogue called nematocin that is known to influence learning and social behaviors like mating. As far as I can find, the project doesn't account for this, or only minimally, but aims to in the future.
It's not surprising that immediate short-term behaviors like movement depend mostly on the faster signaling of the connectome. But since we know of other mechanisms that most definitely influence the connectome's behavior, and we know we don't account for those at the moment, it is not accurate to say that the connectome is "all the information you need".
I agree that mapping the connectome of the human brain is impractical to the point of impossibility. But even if we could, the resulting "circuit diagram" would not capture all the details needed to fully replicate human cognition. Aspects of it, sure. Maybe even enough to make it do useful tasks for EvilCorp LLC while being prodded with virtual sticks and carrots. But it would be incomplete.
I saw a putative 3D animation of a fly whose brain had been digitized and then run in a simulation. It buzzed around, sipped food it had found on the ground, even rubbed its forelegs together as flies do. A true Dixie Flyline. We live in strange times...
> If they freeze the vesicles that deliver transmitters and make them analyzable, you've got all the information you need. In terms of a modern ANN, it's the connections (axons) and the weights (transmitters/receptors in tandem).
This is exactly what I’m doubting, how can you be so sure?
Yeah but it wasn’t though. I found your answer unconvincing. I suppose “we don’t know” is an answer but that is nothing like “we have all the information we need”
It is my understanding that for the animals where we have a simulation of the full connectome the behavior you see approximates the real behavior reasonably well, so maybe the jury is still out as to whether it is sufficient or not.
> There are a 16,000 new lives being born every hour. They're all starting with a fairly blank slate. Are you genuinely saying that they'll all be left behind because they didn't learn your technology in utero?
> No. That's obviously nonsense.
That's does not obviously follow, I do worry about the ever increasing proportion of humanity who are no longer 'economically viable' and this includes people who are not yet born.
That’s not always true, and increasingly less so, particularly the Australians and the crime of child sex tourism. I am sure it’ll be expanded to hate crimes and disturbing the peace laws as well and from there used as a political cudgel to suppress opposition to government policies. At least for now you have to be a citizen of the country but the UK has stated an intention to extradite US citizens for online hate crimes.
Humans, like all animals, have not stopped evolving. A random caveman from 200K years ago would have very different genetics to that of a typical HN reader and even more so of the best of the HN readers.
Around 3,200 years ago there was a notable uptick in alleles associated with intelligence.
Whan I go to the Stacioners, I ever aske for mitigated Gal and meteoric Iron fillings. I fynde that it maketh the derkest and most persistente inke. Make sure that thou onlie bye swan quill, not goose, and specifie that they sholde onlie be from the right-handed wing.
It’s not about combatting the state and more of supplanting the state. Where the state has abandoned the streets to crime a local neighborhood watch can pick up the slack. People can then pay their neighborhood watch and vote to cut their local government taxes. The state is strangely ok with a high degree of street level violence in that it mostly affects those without power and provides a continuing justification for increased state powers - actually fixing the problem would undermine the justification. An example of this would be in South Africa where private security is playing an ever increasing role in policing. Once private security becomes large enough they become a real threat to the government as they are usually better organized and suffer less corruption.
I did not find that movie to be realistic at all but I can see why other people do. I think it it’s far more likely to be a CIA faction led ‘attempted coup’ similar to the 2016 on in Turkey. I think Turkeys coup was likely run by their secret police as a way to flush out dissidents and heavily suppress them. So I would expect a Jan 6 but with more of a real actionable plan created by informants and doomed to quickly fail followed by a de-MAGAfication program similar to de-Baathification in Iraq or de-Nazification in Germany.
It’s practically impossible for an indigenous insurgency to be effective without state backing, so the real question is who would be willing provide such support and under what circumstances. Similar to how France supported US independence as a way to hurt the UK. Or the UK supporting Native Americans to attack the US (war of 1812).
Being able to effectively organize enough to create home grown weapons and fight an insurgency is a signal to a 3rd party that you are organized and committed and worthy of further support. From there it can snowball.
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