It’s worth noting that a 5nm SEM imaging pass will give you loads more information than a connectome, especially in combination with fancy staining techniques. It just so happens that most people doing SEM imaging intend to extract a connectome from the results.
That said, given the current state of knowledge, I don’t think there’s good reason to expect any one particular imaging technology currently known to man to be capable of producing a human upload. It may turn out that as we learn more about stereotypical human neural circuits, we’ll see that certain morphological features are very good predictors of important parameters. It may be that we can develop a stain whose distribution is a very a good predictor of important parameters. Since we don’t even know what the important parameters are, even in C. elegans, let alone mammalian cortex, it’s hard to say with confidence that SEM will capture them.
However, none of this significantly impacts my confidence that human uploads will exist within my lifetime. It is an a priori expected feature of technologies that are a few breakthroughs away that it’s hard to say what they’ll look like yet.
It’s worth noting that a 5nm SEM imaging pass will give you loads more information than a connectome, especially in combination with fancy staining techniques. It just so happens that most people doing SEM imaging intend to extract a connectome from the results.
That said, given the current state of knowledge, I don’t think there’s good reason to expect any one particular imaging technology currently known to man to be capable of producing a human upload. It may turn out that as we learn more about stereotypical human neural circuits, we’ll see that certain morphological features are very good predictors of important parameters. It may be that we can develop a stain whose distribution is a very a good predictor of important parameters. Since we don’t even know what the important parameters are, even in C. elegans, let alone mammalian cortex, it’s hard to say with confidence that SEM will capture them.
However, none of this significantly impacts my confidence that human uploads will exist within my lifetime. It is an a priori expected feature of technologies that are a few breakthroughs away that it’s hard to say what they’ll look like yet.