X-Message-Number: 3569 From: (Thomas Donaldson) Subject: CRYONICS: re: identity of connections in brains Date: Sun, 1 Jan 1995 17:51:24 -0800 (PST) Hi! This is a (very delayed) response to Mike Darwin's posting about the nonidentity of identical twins. As I recall, I doubted that the nerve connections and distribution would be identical in twins; and (although I knew some of the things Mike mentioned) he filled out that information a lot with things I didn't know. So I thank him. If, of course, we are to be rigidly empirical about it, we should wait until brain maps have actually been done. But for the present, what we have seems good enough until or if we somehow stumble on a reason to question it. And by the way, if our brain maps are NOT identical, then it may prove possible to ultimately recreate a copy, but one person's memories could not easily be read into another person ... even someone genetically identical. Furthermore, any attempt to store someone on a computer would also have to store the nerve map too. (Remember that if anything we work like neural nets do, though our precise design and operation isn't yet worked out: and if the connections are different between people, then it would be as if my memories were kept in my own special language individual to me, and no one else's brain could interpret them). And to further explicate these statements, they also mean that we could not simply be stored in a computer and then loaded into the body of a clone. A VERY advanced nanotechnology might so control growth of a brain that it would match the connections of the one in storage, but that's quite far away. Long long life, Thomas Donaldson Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=3569