On 23 Jul 2011, at 00:25, meekerdb wrote:
On 7/22/2011 2:55 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
I'm saying that if you kept randomly replaced neurons it would
eventually look like dementia or some other progressive brain wasting
disease.
But that's contradicting your assumption that the "pegs" are
transparent to the neural communication:
"If the living
cells are able to talk to each other well through the prosthetic
network, then functionality should be retained"
Whatever neurons remain, even it it's only the afferent/efferent
ones, they get exactly the same communication as if there were no
"pegs" and the whole brain was neurons.
If it were possible to spare certain areas or categories of
neurons then I would expect more of a fragmented subject whose means
of expression are intact, but who may not know what they are about to
express. A partial zombie, being fed meaningless instructions but
carrying them out consciously, if involuntarily. Of course, there may
be all kinds of semantic dependencies which would render someone
comatose before it ever got that far. If i remove all vowels from my
writing there is a certain effect. If i remove all of the verbs there
is another, if i switch to 50% chinese it's different from going 50%
binary, etc. You would have to experiment to find out but i think the
success would hinge as much on reraining organic composition as
reproducing logical characteristics.
You're evading the point by changing examples.
It does raise in my mind an interesting pont though. These
questions are usually considered in terms of replacing some part of
the brain (a neuron, or a set of neurons) by an artificial device
that implements the same input/output function. It then seems,
absent some intellect vitale, that the behavior of that brain/person
would be unchanged. But wouldn't it be likely that the person
would suffer some slight impairment in learning/memory simply
because the artificial device always computes the same function,
whereas the biological neurons grow and change in response to
stimuli. And those stimuli are external and cannot be forseen by the
doctor. So what he needs to implant is not just a fixed function
but a function that depends on the history of its inputs (i.e. a
function with memory).
That would just mean that the neuronal level is too much high for
being the substitution level. Better to chose the DNA and metabolic
level.
Bruno
On Jul 22, 3:19 pm, meekerdb<meeke...@verizon.net> wrote:
On 7/22/2011 4:16 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
I have already addressed this point - you can have a living person
with a prosthetic limb but you can't replace a person's brain
with a
prosthetic and have it still be that person. The limb only works
because there is enough of the body left to telegraph sensorimotive
action through/around the prosthetic obstacle. On one level, the
more
neurons you replace, the more obstacles you introduce. If the
living
cells are able to talk to each other well through the prosthetic
network, then functionality should be retained,
I think your theory is incoherent. If the neurons can "talk to each
other" thru the "pegs" then all the neurons except the afferent
neurons
of perception and the efferent neurons of action could be replaced
and
the person would *behave* exactly the same, including reporting that
they felt the same. They would be a philosophical zombie. They
would
not *exhibit* dementia, catatonia, or any other symptom.
Brent
but the experience of
the functionality I would expect to be truncated increasingly. The
living neurons will likely be able to compensate for quite a bit of
this loss, as it is likely massively fault tolerant and
redundant, but
if you keep replacing the live cells with pegs, eventually I think
you're going to get decompensation, dementia, and catatonia or some
zombie like state which will likely be recognizable to other human
beings.
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
Groups "Everything List" group.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com
.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en
.
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Everything List" group.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
