<div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><span style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif">On Sat, Dec 27, 2025 at 6:07 PM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <<a href="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org">extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org</a>> wrote:</span></div></div><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><font face="tahoma, sans-serif" size="4"><b><span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">>></span>That probably would be good enough
resolution<span class="gmail_default" style=""> for an </span>upload
but unfortunately it was just for one cubic millimeter, the
average human brain contains about 1,<span class="gmail_default">4</span>00,000 cubic millimeters.</b></font></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div>
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<span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">> </span>On the surface, this sounds quite discouraging,</i></font></div></blockquote><div><br></div><font size="4" face="tahoma, sans-serif"><b>It would be very difficult but such a scaling up would not be unprecedented. In August 1942 only one microgram of the element Plutonium had been made, but by August 1945 hundreds of kilograms of Plutonium had been manufactured (and <span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">b</span>y 1994 <span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"> </span>111.4 tons had been produced); of course it required a gargantuan factory in Hanford Washington, and $2 billion in 1940s dollars, to do so<span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">.</span> <br></b></font><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div>
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<span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">> </span>The x-y resolution mentioned was overkill, by at least 10 times, and
the z resolution less so, but still probably higher than necessary.
Let's say it was just about right, though. That means approx. 14
trillion bytes for 1 cubic mm.</i></font><br></div></blockquote><div> </div><font size="4" face="tahoma, sans-serif"><b>I think you could get by with a much much smaller file size because for an upload it doesn't matter what a neuron looks like, what matters is what other neurons it is connected to, which can be described by a list, and how that neuron response to signals received from those other neurons, which can be described by a matrix. An AI would be able to deduce those numbers from the neuron's appearance and save those numbers and discard the now irrelevant <span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">i</span>mage information. </b></font></div><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><br></div><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><font size="4" face="tahoma, sans-serif"><b>And I know for a fact that most people have been <span class="gmail_default" style="">vastly </span>overemphasizing the complexity of the brain<span class="gmail_default" style="">. W</span><span class="gmail_default" style="">e</span> know the upper bound of how much information would be required to construct a human brain at the time of birth<span class="gmail_default" style="">,</span> and it's not very large. DNA<span class="gmail_default" style=""> also</span> places an upper bound on how complex a seed AI would have to be. In the entire human genome there are only 3 billion base pairs. There are 4 bases<span class="gmail_default" style="">,</span> so each base can represent 2 <span class="gmail-il" style="">bits</span>, there are 8 <span class="gmail-il" style="">bits</span> <span class="gmail-il" style="">per</span> <span class="gmail-il" style="">byte</span><span class="gmail_default" style="">,</span> so that comes out to 750 meg. Just 750 meg, that's about the same amount of information as an old CD disk could hold when they first came out 40 years ago! </b></font></div><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><span style="font-family:"arial black",sans-serif;font-size:large"><br></span></div><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><span style="font-family:"arial black",sans-serif;font-size:large">And that's for an entire human body,</span><span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:"arial black",sans-serif;font-size:large"> </span><span style="font-family:"arial black",sans-serif;font-size:large">only about a third of that</span><span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:"arial black",sans-serif;font-size:large"> 750 meg has anything to do with the brain. And even the stuff that is about the brain, most of it has nothing to do with intelligence, it's just information about metabolism that any cell needs in order to stay alive. </span><span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:"arial black",sans-serif;font-size:large">And </span><span style="font-family:"arial black",sans-serif;font-size:large">the 750 meg isn't even efficiently coded, there is <u>a ridiculous amount of redundancy</u> in the human genome</span><span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:"arial black",sans-serif;font-size:large">. </span></div><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:"arial black",sans-serif;font-size:large"><br></span></div><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><div><span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:"arial black",sans-serif;font-size:large">And then there is this: </span></div><div><br></div></div><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><a href="https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2014-07-25-82-our-dna-%E2%80%98functional%E2%80%99"><font face="tahoma, sans-serif" size="4"><b>Only 8.2% of our DNA is functional</b></font></a></div></div><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:"arial black",sans-serif;font-size:large"><br></span></div><font size="4" face="tahoma, sans-serif"><b>And yet that tiny amount of information was enough to reshape the surface of a planet, and enough to make an intelligence that was smarter than itself. Of course I've been talking about the amount of information required to make a newborn baby, I haven't mentioned the all important memory information. Computer scientist Hans Moravec estimated that an adult human has between 1 and 10 TB of memory information. My new iPhone has 2 TB of memory capacity. </b></font><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><font size="4" face="georgia, serif"><i><span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">> </span>Another factor will be the time needed to scan an entire brain. And there's also the problem of the scanning method dumping heat into the tissue surrounding the area being scanned, potentially messing up the structure and chemical environment.</i></font></blockquote><div><br></div><font size="4" face="tahoma, sans-serif"><b>That wouldn't be a problem if the brain was at the temperature of liquid nitrogen and Aldehyde-Stabilized Cryopreservation<span class="gmail_default" style=""> was used. I'll be damned if I can understand why the hell ALCOR doesn't offer it! </span></b></font><div><font face="tahoma, sans-serif" size="4"><b><br></b></font></div><div><font face="tahoma, sans-serif" size="4"><b><span class="gmail_default" style="">John K Clark</span></b></font></div><div><font size="4"><b style=""><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><br></font></b></font></div><div><font size="4"><b style=""><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><br></font></b></font><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div><br></div>
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