[yusefnapora]

How do you get from “ Right now, nobody knows from whence personhood rises” to (paraphrasing) “once we can recreate the connectome, we can back people up?”

If we don’t know what it even is, why is it so inevitable that we’ll be able to recreate it in another medium?

[ben_w]

My original comment said:

> connectome — neural structure — in small animals, there's even a possibility we may expand this to human brains (though we don't know how long this will take us to do!)

I don't know how to phrase it as any less "inevitable" without saying it's "impossible".

That said, a restore from backup may be easier than understanding/accurately simulating at exactly the correct depth to do whatever the important thing turns out to be and not waste effort on unnecessary things*: we've known for a long time that it's possible to encourage neurons to grow in certain ways with electrical stimulation. At some point in the research process, I expect someone to try to use this to replicate an existing pattern (probably in something simple like a fruit fly) — if that organism seems to remember things that only the original had learned, that would be interesting.

I expect that people will do the same test with the digital version of the connectome and eventually get it to also remember something from the original living brain, and that people will even then continue argue that the the digital version is still missing something. And that this argument will continue even if the simulation is scaled up to a human.

And even if we can not simply store the copy but allow it to develop in the simulation (human brains do change over time), I expect these arguments to continue even if that digital human connectome simulation learns something, then is downloaded into an organic brain in the fashion I have described, and the new living human brain discusses things that only the simulation had experienced.

Right now, on the topic of personhood, we don't even know the right questions.

* in one extreme, a computer can simulate any physical process. Right now, it looks like quantum mechanics is sufficient for all chemistry, and hence all biology, and hence brains. But it may be wildly excessive to simulate all the way down to that level — we don't know, we have much to learn. On the other, neural nets in AI are widely recognised to be toy models, and lots of people assume they're too simple to explain biological cognition — again, we don't know, we have much to learn.