[ExI] another step towards uploading

[Anders Sandberg]

On 2013-10-02 05:05, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote:
> A technique capable of directly reading nanoscale molecular
> distributions of multiple molecular species (a prerequisite for
> individual brain physiology reconstruction) is the holy grail of brain
> uploading. Near-field MRS could be it, perhaps.
>

I wonder how much and what information is actually needed to deduce 
synapse types. Obviously, just cataloging the local chemical species 
would give a ground truth. But we also know vesicle size and electron 
density gives about a bit of information (roughly, excitatory or 
inhibitory). Voltammetry reveals levels of dopamine, serotonin and 
noradrenaline. No doubt other markers indicate other properties, likely 
in a noisy and overlapping manner. But from a machine learning 
perspective, if we had good data sets of multimodal data we could try 
training classifiers that could tease out a proper decision tree. 
Comparing with real ground truth is of course essential, so we need a 
"chemical dissection method" for synapses to use as test set. But I 
suspect that in the end we will end up with surprisingly simple 
statistical models.


-- 
Dr Anders Sandberg
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford Martin School
Oxford University