X-Message-Number: 26134 From: Date: Thu, 5 May 2005 07:26:32 EDT Subject: Uploading technology (1.ii.0) a technology in itself Uploading technology (1.ii.0) Here I ponder on the uploading task, it is not somethink we can wait from a general science and development progress. In the research community, there is a number of people interested in neuron and brain modeling. Some have in their agenda the idea to produce some applications such shape identification in robotic vision. The neuron used may be far from the real ones, they are simply information processors with some neuron inspiring side. Doing that is not a bad thing, simply it has few interest for uploading. Another subject is doing models to understand the brain, this is a research purpose interesting for neurobiologists. Many features in these models are not optimized for electronics based systems. many elements in the biological neuron are constrained by the biochemistry and not by the information handling. More important, these systems ask for a understanding of the neural network, and look at some progress in that domain. This may be more than what is asked for uploading. Think for example about that analogy: Assume someone give you a text in chinese, and you don't read it. There are two questions: In the fist you must copy the text, in the second you must answer it. Well, even if you don't understant, you can do the copy if you master the brush handling. To answer the text content is another mater. Tthe brain is a similar problem: If you can scan it at molecular level and you understand the neunon working (the brush practice), you can copy the full brain (given the picture reading software and the receiving support). Now, if you want to build an artificial brain or an expanded brain, you have to understand how it works. This is quite another task. We are far from the ability to "invent" a brain. Copying one the dumb way without understanding what is the content, is far simpler or at least ask for far less science and knowledge. So it seems the uploading is a technology in itself and must be done for itself, waiting simply and watching progress will bring nothing. Yvan Bozzonetti. Content-Type: text/html; charset="US-ASCII" [ AUTOMATICALLY SKIPPING HTML ENCODING! ] Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=26134