Minor nitpick, but in section IV I think it’s unlikely that hemispherectomy and brain shrinkage can stack linearly while preserving a human-like consciousness, because successful hemispherectomy requires the preserved half to rewire some structures to the functions normally carried out by the removed half (source) whereas halving the amount of tissue greatly reduces the resources available for that. The situation reminds me of neural net compression. We can prune or use quantization, compressing the net by some factor, but the techniques don’t stack perfectly because they eliminate some of the same redundancies.
Slightly more relevant is the evolutionary argument that any easy change to the brain that decreases its power consumption or volume must give up something very evolutionarily valuable, since brains use a huge amount of energy and increase deaths from childbirth. That is, the architecture of meat brains isn’t too inefficient. While this doesn’t refute the idea of transferring consciousness gradually, it makes me skeptical that we can do so with general-purpose hardware economically.
Minor nitpick, but in section IV I think it’s unlikely that hemispherectomy and brain shrinkage can stack linearly while preserving a human-like consciousness, because successful hemispherectomy requires the preserved half to rewire some structures to the functions normally carried out by the removed half (source) whereas halving the amount of tissue greatly reduces the resources available for that. The situation reminds me of neural net compression. We can prune or use quantization, compressing the net by some factor, but the techniques don’t stack perfectly because they eliminate some of the same redundancies.
Slightly more relevant is the evolutionary argument that any easy change to the brain that decreases its power consumption or volume must give up something very evolutionarily valuable, since brains use a huge amount of energy and increase deaths from childbirth. That is, the architecture of meat brains isn’t too inefficient. While this doesn’t refute the idea of transferring consciousness gradually, it makes me skeptical that we can do so with general-purpose hardware economically.