[ExI] Essential Upload Data

[Re Rose]

     Well, yes, a full genome sequence is meaningful in context, but
useless without tools to understand the hierarchical tiers of information
in it, and the information thatis not in it. If you are an alien life form
with no idea of: DNA structure and function, the identity of the specific
set of amino acids the organisim can metabolize or acquire -
unavailable information from the genome, by the way - and other
peculiaritiies of earthly biological evolutionary strategies, like
essential metals and other external nutrients, you will not be able to make
any sense at all of the sequence. And then there are epigenetic marks,
which are another heirarchical layer of data, not captured in the genome
alone but essential for interpreting it. So yes, there is some information
in the bare sequence - but how to unlock even that? That's the concept I
was going for. Without all the additional external information that is not
present, plus knowledge of coding sequences, delineation of exons and
introns, control sequences, error-correction mechanisims, etc, the
organism simply cannot be reconstructed.

    My contention (I state again) is that the neural copies we are talking
about likewise do not contain all the information necessary to recreate the
person.

     What does contain all the information? Your body. Hence we cycle back
to my original posting - I think "you" as a conscious agent are one unit, a
whole entity, and saving the connectome or neural spiking data will not
save "you".

You could recreate a different entity, maybe. Its just not YOU. With luck
it may indeed seem like you to others. I think in fact that is a highy
likely outcome, especially if you are in a host that looks like you. It may
not seem like you after awhile to your closest family and friends, but to
the world at large, yeah, that's you.

     To your points --  *"Preserving the brain so information is not lost"*
- I'm saying you lose all sorts of information by simply preserving the
brain. Both "*extract the information (probably the hardest part) and store
it (the easiest part)" and "use the stored information to recreate the mind*"
are also problematic, I'm saying all the information is not there but feel
free to extract what you can!! Electrical information will most likely be
gone and with that, much of the correlation data and specific neural codes.
The smallest dendritic spines and many of the mid sized ones are not
readable, and may be damaged due to their size and filamentousness, and
100% of the dynamic interaction information will be gone, as well as the
hornal signalling patterns.

Uh oh.

--Regina

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Message: 2
Date: Fri, 15 May 2020 08:28:02 +0100
From: Ben Zaiboc <ben at zaiboc.net>
To: extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
Subject: Re: [ExI] Essential Upload Data
Message-ID: <6a0c54b9-390e-c62c-9fef-1ce7a3a8fca9 at zaiboc.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-1252"; Format="flowed"

On 14/05/2020 23:00, Re Rose wrote:
> You can have raw data, like back in 2000 when we had the human genome.
> remember that? There were coffee table bvooks with the sequence
> printed out. But the sequence alone - raw data - was meaningless. We
> are still learning, 20 years later, how to interpret it. By no means
> can that data be used to reconstruct a human *unless* you have tons of
> other information.
>

I think this is an exaggeration, to say the? least. A full copy of a
genome is far from meaningless, even if we don't yet know how to
interpret it. Yes, tons of other information is needed to do that
(without which the genome itself is useless, but not meaningless), but
this information is different from the information in the genome, in
that it applies to *all* genomes, as far as we know, so once it is
figured out, suddenly any and all stored genomes can be understood.

This is the same with stored brain data. Even if we had it, we wouldn't
yet be able to make use of it, but once we figure out how, that
knowledge will apply to all stored brain data-sets, and suddenly we'll
be able to do uploading.
Of course, we still don't even know how to get the brain data in the
first place, but it's being worked on right now, so there are three steps:

1) preserve the brain so that the information is not lost
2) extract the information (probably the hardest part) and store it (the
easiest part)
3) use the stored information to recreate the mind

As far as we know, so far we can do number 1. Probably. But if you know
of extra necessary information that all the people involved in actually
doing this don't, please let us know what it is.

Several groups are working on number 2, and so far we probably have very
little clue how to do number 3. That will involve figuring out the
procedures that will apply to all uploads, so once we know that,
uploading will become a practical proposition (assuming number 2 is
cracked by then).

--
Ben Zaiboc
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