
Mind Emulation Foundation - gk1
https://mindemulation.org/
======
Barrin92
_" While we are far from understanding how the mind works, most philosophers
and scientists agree that your mind is an emergent property of your body. In
particular, your body’s connectome. Your connectome is the comprehensive
network of neural connections in your brain and nervous system. Today your
connectome is biological. _"

This is a pretty speculative thesis. It's not at all clear that everything
relevant to the mind is found in the connections rather than the particular
biochemical processes of the brain. It's a very reductionist view that
drastically underestimates the biological complexity of even individual cells.
There's a good book, _Wetware: A Computer in Every Living Cell_ , by Dennis
Bray going into detail on how much functionality and physical processes are at
work even in the most simplest cells that is routinely ignored by these
analogies of the brain to a digital computer.

There is this extreme, and I would argue unscientific bias towards treating
the mind as something that's recreatable in a digital system probably because
it enables this science-fiction speculation and dreams of immortality of
people living in the cloud.

~~~
dsiroker
I’ve posed this claim to dozens of neuroscientists. If you consider the
connectome just the static connections then you might be right. If you include
the dynamics of the brain (the biochemical processes) as part of the
connectome then most neuroscientists would agree that is sufficient to produce
the emergent property of mind. The honest answer is we don’t know yet. That
said, it’s likely not necessary to model every atom’s interaction with one
another so there must be a level of abstraction sufficient enough to emulate a
mind. Our foundation is trying to identify what is the minimal level of
abstraction necessary to emulate a mind.

~~~
jchrisa
In support of the requirement for high-fidelity (atom-for-atom) modeling is
the notion that an evolved computer would converge toward behaviors that
supervene on specifics of the host environment. If porting a binary to another
CPU architecture is tough, how easy will it be to port a mind to a simulated
simple physics? How many edge cases will it have to get right to even run at
all? If brains are hacks designed over millions of generations to surf
overlapping fitness functions, it makes sense they'd find implementation (real
physics) dependent optimizations that compound in ways which fall apart in toy
physics. That's not to say we can't add cool peripherals.

ps even with atom-for-atom modeling, how do you know the behavior doesn't
depend on relations which are not computable? If physics ranges over the
reals, some of those edge cases might be hard to find with a simulator.

~~~
cylon13
I can hit myself in the head and I don't lose my train of thought, instantly
lose consciousness, or die. If consciousness relied on the precise positions
of individual atoms (as far as that makes sense with moving particles) it
would be way more fragile than we've observed it to be. The fact that your
brain is resilient to being knocked around a bit is evidence towards the
underlying mind being at least slightly higher level than where strong quantum
effects live and also fairly redundant.

~~~
im3w1l
I agree, but I think there is a case to be made that there is important state
separate from just which cells connect to which and how strongly, but is also
more coarse grained than single atoms floating around.

The cytoskeleton may be found out to have a role to play. The number and
locations of ion pumps. Or epigenetic changes in clusters of brain cells.

------
VikingCoder
My favorite books about mind emulation:

* "Fall, Or Dodge in Hell" by Neil Stephenson [1]

* "Permutation City" by Greg Egan [2]

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07PXM4VMD/ref=dp-kindle-
redirect?...](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07PXM4VMD/ref=dp-kindle-
redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1)

[2] [https://www.amazon.com/Permutation-City-Greg-Egan-
ebook/dp/B...](https://www.amazon.com/Permutation-City-Greg-Egan-
ebook/dp/B00FDWCPV2)

~~~
abecedarius
Whole Brain Emulation Roadmap
[http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/Reports/2008-3.pdf](http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/Reports/2008-3.pdf)

The Age of Em
[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0198754620/](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0198754620/)

~~~
sriku
Thumbs up for "The Age of Em". A nice example of how to assume a technology
and work out economic consequences. Hanson goes into some good detail and
includes physical constraints, emergent properties like relative time elapsed
for simulated minds when transferring between locations and such.

------
dsiroker
(I’m the founder & CEO of the Mind Emulation Foundation)

Flattered to see this hit the front page! This is a project I’ve been
passionate about for a while and been keeping it mostly under the radar.

Now that it’s public, I’m happy to answer any questions the HN community has.

~~~
anvandare
Not really a question, more of a remark: both the destructive and non-
destructive approaches result in the same thing: a copy of 'you', not actually
'you'. (The same is true when you go to sleep, of course. Whoever wakes up
isn't you either)

What you would need is a Ship of Theseus approach - preserving the
consciousness stream while neuron after neuron is being replaced by a digital
version, slowly, to convince the stream into thinking it's still the same. You
can't just take a single scan; you have to keep scanning continuously and keep
a running feedback stream between the (decreasing) wetbrain and the
(increasing) bitbrain to ensure the illusion of continuity.

(But to be honest, I don't actually believe in consciousness or a Self.
Whoever started writing this short comment wasn't 'me', and neither am I,
nothing is)

~~~
dsiroker
The gradual replacement approach (as you describe it) is a useful thought
experiment that gets people more comfortable with the possibility of mind
emulation but the end state is the same for both approaches. One just
intuitively _feels_ more _you_ than the other, but as you said, it's likely
all an illusion so doing it while you "sleep" is probably enough to make _you_
sufficiently happy to be alive when you wake up non-biologically.

~~~
type0
This would be like Bicentennial Man in reverse. Call me skeptic but it sounds
like a good foundation for a new novel and not like a good basis for
Foundation.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bicentennial_Man](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bicentennial_Man)

------
mcculley
I am always amused at this kind of approach to immortality. While the copy of
me that is reborn would appreciate my preparedness, that doesn't make this
copy any less unhappy about dying.

~~~
dsiroker
When you wake up in the morning billions of your cells have changed from the
night before. Are you any less you?

It is possible one day you will go to sleep biologically and wake up non-
biologically. It’s just a matter of sufficiently emulating the processes that
were present when you were the biological you.

~~~
mcculley
I have meditated enough to be unconvinced that even the me that goes to sleep
is the same guy who woke up that morning.

I try to be good to the guy who wakes up with my memories and body the next
morning. That makes me no less unhappy about dying.

~~~
makx
I'd even go so far as to say that the me from 10 minutes ago isn't the same me
as now. Consciousness isn't continuous, it arises and ceases. It's our memory
that gives us the illusion of continuity. And this is what makes me absolutely
unconcerned about dying. From what I read, this is what the Gautama Buddha
meant with Anatta[1].

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatta](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatta)

------
keiferski
Recent work in philosophy has called into question the notion that the
mind/cognition/identity is entirely independent from the body.

[https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/embodied-
cognition/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/embodied-cognition/)

Personally I think Western culture in particular has neglected the physical
aspects of existence. The idea that our bodies are simply vessels for our
minds seems more the result of cultural neglect than anything.

~~~
dsiroker
We are not claiming they are entirely independent, quite the contrary. The
mind is an emergent property of the body. Just like music is an emergent
property of sound waves.

~~~
keiferski
But if your mind and self is formed by and dependent on your body, how can you
transfer it to a bodyless existence without losing that self?

The mind as an emergent property of the body is also not an established
philosophical or scientific fact, and is quite dependent on positivism, which
has plenty of issues.

It seems to me that at best, you’re creating a surface-level copy, but one
inherently limited to contemporary scientific knowledge. Not to say that this
isn’t interesting or useful, but it’s certainly not the same ‘self.’

~~~
dsiroker
The notion of self is an illusion the mind creates. (There are many benefits
for doing so, not least of which is self-preservation which is helpful to
producing progeny and so therefore is selected for during natural selection.)

To answer your question directly: one can transfer an emergent property of a
system to another system by sufficiently transferring the mechanism that
produce that emergent property in the first place. A good analog would be
emulating the hardware of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) entirely in
software [1].

[1] [https://jsnes.org/](https://jsnes.org/)

~~~
keiferski
The self is far more complex than the simplistic positivist notion of it. And
again, this only works if you assume that at the time of the mind creation,
your knowledge is complete. That seems fairly ignorant considering the history
of science, not to mention the inherent limitations of empirical knowledge.

The NES example is not really a good one because it’s a created object and
knowledge of it is complete, therefore replicating it is possible.

Even then, assuming all of this didn’t matter- I still don’t see how the mind
maintains itself in a new body. It’s not as if a human mind is a static
entity-it constantly comes into contact with the world through its embodied
form and this reinforces and extends this notion of identity. Assuming you
could emulate it on a computer, it would seem logical that the mind would
change to adapt to its new body, thus no longer being the same self.

Ultimately any “transfers” will actually just be the creation of new minds,
which IMO is more interesting anyway.

~~~
dsiroker
> The NES example is not really a good one because it’s a created object and
> knowledge of it is complete, therefore replicating it is possible.

One could replicate the NES hardware without any knowledge of how it was built
by reverse engineering it

> Ultimately any “transfers” will actually just be the creation of new minds,
> which IMO is more interesting anyway.

I actually agree but in the same way that you have a "new mind" when you wake
up in the morning. The continuity of self is an illusion. "I" would be very
happy to one day wake up having been transferred into a non-biological system
the same way that "I" would be very happy to wake up tomorrow.

~~~
simion314
>One could replicate the NES hardware without any knowledge of how it was
built by reverse engineering it

Not sure if one could do that if that person is not very familiar with similar
projects. Give the NES system to a scientist from 1800 and tell me what they
could conclude.

------
darepublic
Once you become immortal, someone can put you in hell

~~~
WealthVsSurvive
I think there is a fundamental paradox at the root of consciousness and
thought: once we succeed in alleviating suffering by discarding the body, we
are already in hell. What is the purpose of a mind without a body? To witness?
To what ends? There's a reason that the lower brain is at the seat of the
throne. Maybe we should focus more on cooperating and less on becoming a
purposeless husk. If the string is too tight it breaks, if it is too loose it
will not play.

~~~
FeepingCreature
If you can emulate a brain, you can _probably_ emulate a body.

~~~
WealthVsSurvive
But to emulate the body, you must emulate the environment that shaped it, so
now we're talking microverse creation. You could at best emulate the full set
of current functions, but without the environment that model would be subject
to incompleteness, entropy. You could perhaps watch for change, using the
human corpus as input; all set conclusions seem to lead back to AI as human
local intelligence orchestrator, rather than AI as emulation of human thought,
maybe the two becoming one over time.

~~~
FeepingCreature
> But to emulate the body, you must emulate the environment that shaped it, so
> now we're talking microverse creation.

Yes, this is called "virtual reality" and "physics engine". The brain does
_not_ need its environments to be 100% indistinguishable from its ancestral
environment; if it did, we could never move away from where we were born.

------
miketery
The best I've seen the topic of mind and computation bridged and well
communicated has been by Joscha Bach. Recommend watching this video on
Computational Meta-Psychology [1]. Also his 3 hour conversation with Lex
Fridman is a whole other amazing rabbit hole [2].

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRdJCFEqFTU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRdJCFEqFTU)

[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-2P3MSZrBM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-2P3MSZrBM)

------
prerok
I'm not convinced.

1\. We still don't know what the memory engrams truly are (
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engram_(neuropsychology)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engram_\(neuropsychology\))
). I once read that aside from relying on the interconnections of the neurons
they also rely on specific proteins created during memory creation. They are
then vital for memory recollection.

2\. We know that the connections between neurons are important but we just
realized that the support cells (glia) also affect the firing mecanism: they
are not only support but a filter as well (
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glia) )

3\. Inhibitory interneurons provide a way for synchronous firing of neurons to
form a learning experience:
[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-13170-w](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-13170-w)

All in all to replicate the brain functionality we would need to fully
replicate the chemical composition of the brain to the lowest level
(molecules).

I'm not holding my breath.

~~~
dsiroker
> They are then vital for memory recollection.

Even if specific proteins are needed for memory creation (which is debatable
[1]) it doesn't mean you need to model those proteins to retrieve the stored
memories from the structures that they created. You can read data from a hard
drive without modeling the CPU or memory bus of the computer that stored the
data.

> support cells (glia)

Glia cells are the order of 40-50 microns [2] and can easily be seen with an
electron microscope. In fact, they are present in the Lichtman paper [3]
linked from the Mind Emulation website.

[1]
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2745628/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2745628/)
[2]
[https://psych.athabascau.ca/html/Psych402/Biotutorials/4/par...](https://psych.athabascau.ca/html/Psych402/Biotutorials/4/part1.html)
[3]
[https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(15)00824-7](https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674\(15\)00824-7)

~~~
prerok
Glia cells can be seen, sure. But to my knowledge we still don't understand
their impact.

Anyway, my point is that even if you are able to recreate the structure you
would need to replicate the functionality.

A better analogy would be that even if you have the data on the hard drive you
would need a special program that would know how to interpret it. In this case
the data also contains a time variant exactly when the data applies which is
not captured within the structure unless you go to the molecular level.

------
dontreact
So the C. Elegans connectome was done in 1986, and we still haven't made a
fully functional model of the c. elegans brain. I'm not sure that this bottom
up approach (synapses -> model -> behavior) will work better than a top down
approach that has been making a lot of progress in AI (behavior -> model)

~~~
dsiroker
OpenWorm [1] has made a lot of progress toward building a fully functional
model and when it simulates a worm's behavior it is almost indistinguishable
from the real thing. Here is a video they produced in 2013 of C. elegans
moving:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaovWiZJUWY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaovWiZJUWY)

[1] [http://openworm.org/](http://openworm.org/)

~~~
nicoffeine
It's modeling the firing of neurons contracting muscles. C. elegans is capable
of learning about its environment, looking for food, finding a mate, and so
forth.

It's only 1mm long and has 300 neurons.

You're going to scale to 86 billion neurons by 2084?

I hate to call shenanigans, but the idea that you will have made any real
progress on a mammal of any size in 60 years is not realistic. If "Life is
Precious" (as stated in your pitch) why not spend the money on things that are
possible for humans that are alive?

------
ivan_ah
Focussing on synaptic connections seems rather simplistic. For full
"emulation" they would probably need to emulate the electric fields and
neurotransmitter concentrations, otherwise just-the-spikes simulation will
probably capture only a small percentage of brain dynamics.

~~~
ravi-delia
You're probably right, at least in terms of neurotransmitter concentration,
but I doubt that synaptic connections are only a 'small percentage' of brain
dynamics.

------
mrkstu
This is so ahead of the curve of reality that it’s easy to dismiss- BUT at the
least it’s possible that it could lead to some interesting basic research
being done. Hopefully that, rather than misleading rich marks and separating
them from their cash is the real goal.

~~~
dsiroker
Thank you for your optimism. The goal is to fund and conduct basic research.

------
sieste
That plot half way down the page where they fit a straight line through 2
points and predict to be able to map human brains by 2084 made me laugh.

~~~
dsiroker
The y-axis is logarithmic so it’s actually representing exponential
improvements which is a fair upper-bound assumption given the rate of
improvement in cost to map a human genome was better than exponential.

~~~
sieste
I get that. It's just that for an excel-trapolation 2x outside the observed
range based on only 2 data points, 2084 is a strangely precise estimate. I
find it hard to take this seriously.

~~~
dsiroker
Pull requests welcome. :)

------
TedDoesntTalk
> the body will be partitioned such that it could be scanned with an electron
> microscope

"Partitioning" the brain will destroy some of the nanometer-scale tissue as it
is sliced.

------
jarinflation
this could effectively lead to the creation of heaven, an afterlife that would
eliminate the notion of death. I never quite understood why the entire human
species, once made aware of the non zero probability of this working, not
diverted most of its entire global energy, time and resources towards this
effort. I can only imagine it is because most people have no capacity to
really imagine, or outright refuse to ever imagine, death. In a way I do envy
them.

~~~
gallerdude
You're basically arguing a techno-religious Pascal's Wager, so my contra-
argument is the same: if the nonzero probability is a 0.1% chance, would you
really risk your one and only life dedicated to something that has a 99.9%
chance of not happening, whether it be real or techno-heaven?

~~~
roca
You're implicitly assuming that accepting the Wager means "losing" your one
and only life. OK, it depends on your utility function, but most religious and
techno Wagers don't require immediate martyrdom.

------
grugagag
Ive been wondering whether this was possible and/or feasible. We don’t know if
the “brain in the vat” would alter their original personality, which is very
likely having that it has to live in foreign artificial environment. The mind
itself could become depressive and unwilling to tick because why would it?
Just so it exists while not really existing phisically?

------
smoyer
Reading this reminds me of a great Cory Doctorow / Charlie Stross book - "The
Rapture of the Nerds"
([https://craphound.com/category/rotn/](https://craphound.com/category/rotn/))

------
camdenlock
My hesitation with mind emulation is not so much with the technical side; I
think it’s fairly clear that we’ll get there.

However, the question of responsible stewardship looms large, and is rarely
addressed. With whom am I entrusting my mind? How can I be sure that such
stewardship won’t be transferred to another party at some point? Who’s to
guarantee that my mind won’t be installed into an eternal torment sim?

The stewardship questions have always bothered the hell out of me, and the
lack of convincing answers has always led me to avoid buying completely into
the preservation of my body for future scanning and uploading into a sim.

------
zzzeek
It's been done:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainstorm_(1983_film)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainstorm_\(1983_film\))

------
mcculley
How does having the connectome get you the mind? Don't you need the weights in
the neurons? I thought I also read that neurons are not discrete units, that
there might be weights within the dendrites/axons.

~~~
dsiroker
The connectome includes the weights.

~~~
mcculley
Do you have a reference somewhere that says that? The Wikipedia entry for
connectomics does not imply that and I've not read of anything that can get
the weights out of neurons.

~~~
dsiroker
Connectome: How the Brain's Wiring Makes Us Who We Are [1]

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Connectome-How-Brains-Wiring-
Makes/dp...](https://www.amazon.com/Connectome-How-Brains-Wiring-
Makes/dp/0547678592)

------
YeGoblynQueenne
At this point, I wonder if it would make sense to establish a Time Travel
Foundation, to ensure that such dangerous technology does not fall into the
wrong hands once it is, inevitably, created.

------
lamename
I'm not as critical of these goals as some, but to not even mention another
dimension of complexity beyond connections: electrophysiological firing
pattern, is quite an oversimplification.

~~~
dsiroker
With a sufficiently robust representation of the connectome including its
spatial orientation one can also emulate the electrophysiology.

------
PaulHoule
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Annals_of_the_Heechee](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Annals_of_the_Heechee)

------
m3kw9
Get ready for the pseudo science terms to get investor money

------
namuol
Imagine the torture of being the result of an early "success" in such an
experiment. There's a real pickle of an ethical dilemma here.

~~~
RandallBrown
If you haven't, you should check out the book Fall, or Dodge In Hell by Neal
Stephenson. It explores this concept very deeply. (Sometimes far too deeply.)

------
lawlessone
>a reasonable estimate for the first human brain being mapped would in 2084.

:(

------
new_realist
Looks like a bunch of kids have watched too much Westworld.

------
drewbug
Any major difference from the Carboncopies Foundation?

------
gverrilla
is this troll content?

