[ExI] 1 mm^3 of brain

[Darin Sunley]

The static map is intriguing. Implementing logic to make it run - if they
haven't already - will be scary.

The instant we have a running upload, or even a good-sized chunk of one,
the odds that we haven't been living in a simulation all along collapse.

On Tue, May 14, 2024, 9:55 AM Jason Resch via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>
>
> On Tue, May 14, 2024 at 8:13 AM Stuart LaForge via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>> I have not had time for a close look yet, but I thought you guys would
>> appreciate this:
>>
>>
>> https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/05/09/1092223/google-map-cubic-millimeter-human-brain/
>>
>> "A team led by scientists from Harvard and Google has created a 3D,
>> nanoscale-resolution map of a single cubic millimeter of the human
>> brain. Although the map covers just a fraction of the organ—a whole
>> brain is a million times larger—that piece contains roughly 57,000
>> cells, about 230 millimeters of blood vessels, and nearly 150 million
>> synapses. It is currently the highest-resolution picture of the human
>> brain ever created."
>>
>
> Stuart,
>
> Thank you for sharing this. I've incorporated it into an article I am
> working on which covers this exact topic. I am including a link here in
> case it might be of further interest to you or other members of this list:
>
> https://drive.google.com/file/d/17hj92VycZd5ZHY9P1FU3PGhiOqjsKfPQ/view?usp=drive_link
>
> These subsections cover some of the recent (and past) progress in
> integrating with, simulating, and scanning human (and non-human) brains.
>
>
>>
>> That is some crazy resolution, but how much resolution constitutes
>> functional isomorphism? Are rational numbers sufficient to preserve
>> identity or are real numbers required?
>>
>
> I think it is doubtful that real numbers (i.e. infinite precision) are
> important to the workings of our brains. As Chalmers writes:
>
> "There is good reason to believe that absolute continuity cannot be
> essential to our cognitive competence, however. The presence of background
> noise in biological systems implies that no process can depend on requiring
> more than a certain amount of precision. Beyond a certain point,
> uncontrollable fluctuations in background noise will wash out any further
> precision. This means that if we approximate the state of the system to
> this level of precision, then we will be doing as well as the system itself
> can reliably do. It is true that due to nonlinear effects, this
> approximation may lead to behavior different from the behavior produced by
> the system on a given occasion--but it will lead to behavior that the
> system might have produced, had biological noise been a little different."
> -- David Chalmers in "The Conscious Mind
> <https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Conscious_Mind/0fZZQHOfdAAC?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover&bsq=%22There%20is%20good%20reason%20to%20believe%20that%20absolute%20continuity%22>"
> (1996)
>
> I cover this topic in great detail in these subsections, which deal with
> the question of computability, both in physics, and in our brains:
>
> https://drive.google.com/file/d/1et-TdQ6oVKcHGv0fJ1k0njFTGb9T93j1/view?usp=drive_link
>
> Jason
>
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