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[Rolan7]

Prosthetic technology is steadily improving, including making limited connections with the nervous system.  Just glancing at Google, there's a MIT-sponsored article from 2014 about a prosthetic arm that conveys feeling.  Very unlike the original feeling, but enough to pick up small objects and reduce phantom pain.

Wait, I was going to - oh, right.  You'll get your braincase soon, but it'll cost an arm and a leg.  (Man, cool science is distracting!)

[KittyTac]

I will upload my brain onto a computer when I get the chance. Living basically forever alleviates the (admittedly not very strong) existential terror of being a scientific materialist.

[Reelya]

It can if it's hooked up like your bonejar brain is.

Sure, but they took your brain out and put it in a jar. That doesn't imply they're planning to put it back in a body like you had before. You're not you anymore, with legal personhood rights, you're brain-jar #3424 now, property of brains-in-a-jar incorporated research laboratories.

[KittyTac]

Why bother with physically preserving brains when you can just brain-upload people? Sure, takes more effort, but can be easily copied and backed-up. A downside is that you can't put it back in a body, but you could make a robot body, I guess.

[LordBaal]

This sinking feeling I won't be able to provide my child with the opportunity of a better future.

[Reelya]

Why bother with physically preserving brains when you can just brain-upload people? Sure, takes more effort, but can be easily copied and backed-up. A downside is that you can't put it back in a body, but you could make a robot body, I guess.

But we don't know that we can actually do that. e.g. we can simulate a "brain" with "neurons" but they don't work like actual neurons, they're an idealized mathematical abstraction that in fact is quite different. They're also much bigger and use more energy. e.g. to make 1% of a human brain you need a building-sized computer, and then, it process 1 seconds worth of signals in 40 minutes. And it only does that for much-simplified neurons compared to real ones. So we don't know that we can simulate an actual brain and upload it for less cost than a brain-jar for within e.g. the next 100 years.

It all comes down to how much can be abstracted away. e.g. can you model a ball in less matter than the actual ball? And I don't mean just the abstract ball, I mean every single atom in the ball. Sure, you could but the size and energy to do so exceeds the size and energy of just having a ball in the first place. So, in other words, the cost to properly model a brain-in-a-jar will always exceed the cost to just have the brain-jar, and let the laws of physics carry out the operations for you.

Having a cheaper simulation of reality than reality is entirely posited on the idea that you can ignore details, and it's not actually clear how much of the detail of brain chemistry could be ignored. e.g. compare emulators for games. They're always less efficient than just running the game on the native hardware.

[KittyTac]

Actually, you do not really need the speech center of the brain if you can display words on a screen. So you can leave at least that behind. And computers get exponentially more powerful, so that's not a huge problem.

[ChairmanPoo]

Actually, you do not really need the speech center of the brain if you can display words on a screen.

Yes you do. You wont be able to understand OR assemble coherent phrases on the screen if your language centers are gone

[Hanslanda]

I put away 14000 lbs of produce up in 3 1/2 hours. I also lost a one + ton pallet of corn while it was 3 feet in the air. Good thing no one was nearby or they'd be dead.

[Reelya]

Actually, you do not really need the speech center of the brain if you can display words on a screen. So you can leave at least that behind. And computers get exponentially more powerful, so that's not a huge problem.

Computers getting exponentially more powerful isn't the issue. The issue is that there's more than 1 bit of data contained in an atom, and you're going to need more than 1 atom per bit of data you want to represent. So you can't properly model a chunk of matter in less matter than the chunk holds and/or in less time. e.g. to model 1 second of existence, completely, for 1 gram of matter will require much more than 1 gram of computer, and/or much more than 1 second. No matter how fast computers get. This is a hard bottleneck for simulation.

e.g. if you can jettison large amounts of the actual information in the brain and still have it completely functional then you have a shot. If however, the brain turns out to use a whole pile of quantum effects, to the point that a lot of the matter actually matters, then you won't be able to "properly" simulate it in less matter than just having a brain to start with. It all depends on how "compressible" consciousness is.

e.g. you mention saving space by jettisoning the speech center of the brain, but that's just wiping out a large chunk of actual brain functionality. Is the experience of being the brain-jar really going to be the same if we remove the speech centers completely? That would seem to make the simulated brain-jar already an imperfect simulation, if we resort to things like that. There's a ton of feedback between other brain areas and the speech center, it's not just an "output module" that can be discarded.

So it comes down to it that you could make computers powerful enough to simulate a brain, but not necessarily cheaper in resources and energy than just having a brain to start with. Which goes back to your original point: why have brain-jars when you could "just" upload them? Because the brain-jar costs less in terms of resources and energy than running a complete simulation of the brain-jar.

[Rolan7]

Of course simulating something atom-by-atom is impractical, but it's a good illustration of how mysterious the brain still is.
Maybe someday we'll fully understand how neurons interact with each other, and with all those weird chemicals our bodies produce just to influence our thoughts.  Maybe enough to simulate 100 billion neurons, slowly, and hopefully with some simulated body parts too (phantom hand: not fun.  phantom body: ??).

Even if we do get to that point, it's hard to imagine being able to "snapshot" a physical brain accurately.  Without some theoretical "observe the past"-style time travel.  I think we really will be "growing" minds long before we have any hope of "uploading" them.

I wonder if we'll start growing physical, dedicated brains for certain tasks.

[Kagus]

Well, not in a bit, no, but with some kind of elemental reference you should be able to reference each kind of atom using just a nybble, considering the number of known/calculated-to-be-possible elements. You don't need to define it each time.

...actually, scratch that. If you're going to factor in isotopes, you'll probably need a full byte to reference each atom.

So to map the entirety of a human brain's atoms, the references themselves (ignoring the reference library they're pointing at) would need something in the range of, oh, approximately 140 yottabytes. Perfectly manageable!

[Mephisto]

There was another school shooting today. It wasn't the standard "oh no, it happened on the other side of the country, that's terrible." It happened eight miles from my apartment. A child and an adult were shot. I wonder if I've ever passed them at the store without noticing. This is the world I get to raise my son in.

[Kagus]

There was another school shooting today. It wasn't the standard "oh no, it happened on the other side of the country, that's terrible." It happened eight miles from my apartment. A child and an adult were shot. I wonder if I've ever passed them at the store without noticing. This is the world I get to raise my son in.

And homeschooling groups are full of religious nuts who take their kids out of school because the education is too secular... Damned if you do, damned if you don't!

To be a bit more serious, that's awful. One thing is trying to deal with the myriad social and psychological problems that can lead to events like that (not to mention the ready access to weapons...), but I desperately hope that the high incidence rate (and media coverage) this year doesn't become "a thing" and inspire others to take the reddest carpet into the limelight.

[Dunamisdeos]

I didn't go to public school until I was in high school because the local schools were awful. I was home-schooled until 3rd grade, then my parents scraped together enough for a low-end private school.

The "homeschool group" I was in had nothing to do with actual education and more with getting us kids together to be social. It also had no religious focus, despite most of the members being from various local churches. We just got together and went swimming or had soccer games. It was nice. I ended up graduating from public high school with honors and an associates degree.

If homeschooling is something you are considering, just make sure you have the time to devote (you're talking about multiple full-time jobs, essentially, being a parent and a teacher) and that you can find a group that fits your needs or some other way for your kid to be social.