[ExI] how large is a human mind?

Rafal Smigrodzki rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com
Tue Jan 1 02:24:29 UTC 2013


Does anybody know how large is the individual, indexical part of an
average human?

What I mean is the part of a human's mind that needs to be specified
aside from generic information in order to store it. I am assuming
that a parsimonious way of storing humans would be to have a set of
generic data sets describing common features (e.g. features of the
average low-level input or output cortical area, the thousand-fold
repeated recognizers in charge of detecting oriented lines or the
millions of stored motor subroutines) which would then be combined
with individual, indexical data to produce a sufficiently accurate
copy.

This is similar to the storage of individual human genomes as sets of
divergences from a common reference genome sequence with a small
number of common haplotypes. According to the wik, the compression
ratios vary from 60 to 750 fold, which means an individual genome can
be stored as a 4 MB file (James Watson's genome is used as an example
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~dnazip/ )

A scan file of a human brain may be 20,000 TB and it should be
possible to massively reduce the size of the file by replacing
descriptions of the biological neural network subunits with
non-biological but equivalent computational elements. The amount of
compression achievable might be a few orders of magnitude. What I am
asking about goes further: After building a detailed non-biological
computational equivalent of an individual, it should be still possible
to continue compression for storage purposes by using a library of
reference mind substructures (recognizers) to substitute for a large
fraction of the individual's subnetworks. For example, the cortical
recognizers for dogs are most likely shared by everybody who has seen
enough dogs, and these could be replaced in a compressed version of
the individual with links to reference dog recognizers (i.e. low-level
and intermediate level elements of sensory cortices capable of
processing dog images/sounds/etc). The recognizers specifically
marking some dogs as personal pets, linking to names and emotional
centers would however be the definition of an individual, the essence
of what makes him different from other individuals.

So how small could we make this individual file? 200TB? 2 TB? 200 GB?

My vague feeling is that the lower part of the range is more plausible
but I am giving this very large range of numbers to express my lack of
confidence in the estimates. Still, it should be rather cheap to pay
for individual storage which means the competition for survival in the
M-brain substrate could be about paying for single gigabytes of
storage space.

Rafal



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