[ExI] How to open a blocked door

[Stuart LaForge]

On 2023-10-21 07:48, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote:
> …> On Behalf Of BillK via extropy-chat
> Subject: [ExI] How to open a blocked door
> 
> This cat may be a possible Mensa member!  :)
> 
> <https://twitter.com/catshouldnt/status/1715066397376876669>
> 
> (45 seconds video}.
> 
> BillK
> 
> BillK, we know that humans display a wide span of mental abilities,
> even though the size and shape of the brain is similar to all.  We
> don’t know why the heck that is; experts in the field such as Billw
> can offer only limited insights.  But think of the problem solving
> span of the smartest people you know vs the not.

Actually over the last month, dozens of high impact papers in Science 
and Nature have reported work that has shed light on this very question. 
Until very recently, we thought the brain was constructed of two basic 
cell types: neurons which processed information and glial cells which 
provided structural support to hold the brain together. After a huge 
collaborative effort called The Neuroscience Multi-omic Archive (NeMo) 
to analyze which genes were active in which cells in which regions of 
the brain to construct a catalog of brain cells, it turns out that we 
were highly mistaken. There are over 3000 types of brain cells all which 
have specialized functions.

Here are 23 papers in a special October issue of Science alone:
https://www.science.org/collections/brain-cell-census

The largest atlas of the human brain ever produced:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03192-2

Here is the NeMo archive if you want to browse the actual data:
https://nemoarchive.org/

I used to think it was mostly the connections between neurons that made 
the brain so complex. But there are huge amounts of data rolling in that 
is demonstrating that biological brains are even more complex than I 
thought they were. And this complexity, of how many and where each of 
the 3000 cell types of the brain are, could readily explain big 
differences in intelligence between two brains of the same mass 
belonging to the same species as well as intelligence differences 
between species. This new data has implications for both AI and 
uploading. We might not be as close to obsolescence as transformer LLMs 
have had us thinking we were.

Stuart LaForge