From: wreck@fmsrl7.srl.ford.com (R. Cage)
Newsgroups: sci.nanotech
Subject: Re: Multiple Experiences
Date: 27 Aug 92 02:04:47 GMT
Organization: Ford Motor Company Scientific Research Labs, Dearborn, MI

In article <Aug.21.18.26.44.1992.20235@planchet.rutgers.edu> hsr4@vax.oxford.ac.uk (Auld Sprurklie) writes:
"Aha! Realisation dawns!  Several things now fall into place - I hadn't twigged
"that you were thinking of replacing the brain altogether with a Mark II version

Well, yes and no.  Yes, insofar as the operating principles are concerned;
ions rushing along axons will have to be replaced with high-impedance
transmission lines for electrons, or optical fibers for photons.  Synapses
would have to be replaced appropriately as well, and I can only dream of
what can stand in for all the myriad applications of neurotransmitters.
The physics would change radically.  On the other hand, the physical
arrangement of the components would look very familiar.

"I can think of even more problems associated with having a high-speed brain
"lodged in a low-speed body; one has only to look at the behaviour of children 
"diagnosed as being very intelligent for their age but trapped in an immature 
"body which they have not yet learned to control, or at disabled individuals who
"appear to all intents and purposes to be cabbages but who possess bright, alert
"minds trapped in an unresponsive shell - the result can be intense frustration
"at the very least.

Exactly!

Now imagine being 10000 times as fast, but having 1/10000 of your
brain which you can devote to your body full time, and the other
9999/10000 can be paying attention to other things.  This is the
purpose of time-sharing your "brain" between threads of consciousness;
the whole runs very fast, but the parts can run at whatever lesser
speed is required of them to avoid the frustration factor.

This is what I've been trying to get at.  It's a strategy for
attention management for those who have to work with slow
phenomena and/or maintain a body rather than downloading into
cyberspace.  Rather than having the ability to only deal with
one thing at a time, and getting bored if it is too slow or
too far away, you can deal with many slower things at once.

"Slowing down the reworked brain when needing to handle the body is also likely
"to cause problems - if you're used to zipping along on a nifty 100MHz 486DX2,
"then being forced to behave as if you are a 4.77MHz 8088 could be equally as
"frustrating (apologies for the analogy, but I'm drawing on the behaviour of
"colleagues when forced to use slower machines or slow peripherals - the air
"becomes almost electrified with frustration!). 

And if all you need is the speed of a 4.77 MHz 8088, but you'd rather
be doing several things at once, you run Windows.

Imagine carrying on a few conversations, working on several projects,
reading the complete works of Dostoevsky (sp?), and playing a game of
tennis all at once.

".... this too is taken from observation
"of other colleagues who have not yet seen the need to use anything faster than
"an XT).

That's a good analogy.  There are some things which do not require
any more than the power of an XT, and devoting a faster processor
to them just means wasting more cycles waiting for keystrokes.  If
there are other tasks which the faster hardware can do, having the
faster computer spending an XT's worth of cycles on the former task
every second, and spending the remainder elsewhere, gets more work
done on the improved hardware while still matching the resource
needs of the former task.

"I suspect that it would be - if we're talking about interacting with large
"numbers of other individuals.  Have you ever tried holding a conversation with
"someone who has suffered a stroke and is slow to complete sentences ?  You find
"yourself trying to complete them, so frustrating does it become.

That's another good example.  Imagine being able to have your brain
go elsewhere for 75% of the time and do something else in such a
situation.  Waiting becomes much easier.  Patience would no longer
be a virtue, it would be a settable paramater. ;-)

"This suggests that any direct interaction with others will (a) have to be 
"limited to those capable of answering your questions at the speed of light (or
"whatever 10,000 times the present speed might be :)), since you will become
"impatient with those who fail to respond quickly enough, and (b) have to involve
"something other than speech as a mechanism - talking at even 1,000 times the
"current speed will not only wear your lips out, it'll push your output into
"the realms of ultrasound :).

[Can you keep your line lengths under 80 characters?]

I anticipate that most of one's interactions would be accomplished
virtually, by direct neural connection.  Trying to carry on even two
conversations with one set of speech muscles would be awfully hard.
It makes more sense to let one "thread" have access to the physical
speech and audio gear (lungs, throat, mouth, ears), and let the rest
communicate either by virtual speech or (if practical) faster mechanisms
such as thought-to-text, when invented.  You'd need some additional
hardware to talk to the outside world; microwave or infrared transcievers,
that sort of thing.

"If all cephalons are sharing common long term memories (and presumably skills),
"and one assumes that all experience modifies memory/skill in some way, then to 
"prevent complications the same strategies must be employed as are currently 
"utilised by servers, namely that when being accessed by any one cephalon any
"memory/skill will become locked and cannot be accessed by any other cephalon 
"until the process is completed.

I'm not sure that's necessary.  Insofar as many memories and other
things are stored holographically rather than discretely in the brain,
I am not even sure that it is *possible*.  Multiple simultaneous access
for reading is possible, and re-weighting the synapse connections by more
than one task at once may or may not cause problems.  We can but try.

"I think I may have mentioned in a previous post the vague details of the
"Encephalon Project at Odin (I presume this is why you chose the 'cephalon'
"tag) in which the aim was the creation of a complete model of the full brain -
"I've not seen anything more about that.

I just pulled the term out of the air, in order to try and make
some necessary distinctions.

"What was NMR and is now MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) is a mechanism for
"monitoring the chemical state of part of an organism (this necessarily very
"vague).  If the speed of MRI can be increased considerably...

Knowing how MRI works, I doubt that *very* much.  I see more
potential in SQUIDs, which can detail the currents flowing along
axons from their magnetic fields.  A mere chemical map probably
will not yield interconnection or synapse weighting data; the
resolution is far too poor to distinguish individual cells.

"But then a host of other ifs, buts, ands, and maybes are raised.  I cannot at
"present see a way to implement the reworked brain in situ without basing the
"new structure on a different chemistry; this in turn begs the question of
"interfacing the growing new brain with the old brain, the problems associated
"with the immune system recognising a 'foreign body' and reacting to it, and
"what happens if, for some reason, the new brain does not function as expected
"and one needs to return to the old brain (which presumably has been supplanted
"by the enhanced version since it might be difficult to house the two brains
"simultaneously - assuming I've understood correctly this time :)).

If the new hardware is small enough, it might be possible to put it
inside the cells of the old.  If the re-work isn't up to snuff, it
could be taken out a la Lieutenant Barkley of Star Trek, TNG.  Stuff
inside cells doesn't usually excite immune reactions.

"I suspect that simply copying the whole brain may open an even bigger Pandora's
"box than is likely with an attempt to create subset clones.

Maybe, but like photocopying a page of Chinese writing does not
require understanding what it means, while extracting a single
sentence does, duplicating entire brains may be easier and thus
may be accomplished first.

"Peter "This skull ain't big enough for the both of us" Brooks
-- 
Russ Cage                  wreck@fmsrl7.srl.ford.com (until 8/28/92)
            russ%rsi.uucp@destroyer.rs.itd.umich.edu (until whenever)
  *  When Ford pays me for my opinions, THEN they can call them theirs. *
                           _Bad_ cop.  No donut.