A transplant seems unnecessary if there’s any realistic change of probe technology advancing. Surely it’d be possible to grow the same neurones in wet lab, use brain probes to connect them to a living person, and keep the tinkering inside someone’s head to a minimum.
(Putting aside the profound ethical issues) In that case, neuronal material could even be swapped out on the fly if one batch is proving ineffective for a given task (or, a new batch could have old signals replayed to it to get it up to speed).
Is there something I’m missing on the neuroscience end? I’m not at all familiar with the field.
Is there something I’m missing on the neuroscience end? I’m not at all familiar with the field.
I’m not a neuroscientist either, but if you’re not at all familiar with the field, then yes of course there’s stuff you’re missing.
As I wrote:
The butcher number. Current electrodes kill more neurons than they record. That doesn’t scale safely to millions of connections.
Bad feedback. Neural synapses are not strictly feedforward; there is often reciprocal signaling and regulation. Electrodes wouldn’t communicate that sort of feedback, which might be important for learning.
Current systems are are still low numbers of active connections. Maybe this can be scaled up, but seems quite hard to scale it up by several orders of magnitude.
More zoomed out, I think the only method that would definitely work is germline engineering (well, and WBE, but that has its own problems). Everything else is speculation—what should make us think you can increase someone’s deep problem solving ability that way?
A transplant seems unnecessary if there’s any realistic change of probe technology advancing. Surely it’d be possible to grow the same neurones in wet lab, use brain probes to connect them to a living person, and keep the tinkering inside someone’s head to a minimum.
(Putting aside the profound ethical issues) In that case, neuronal material could even be swapped out on the fly if one batch is proving ineffective for a given task (or, a new batch could have old signals replayed to it to get it up to speed).
Is there something I’m missing on the neuroscience end? I’m not at all familiar with the field.
I’m not a neuroscientist either, but if you’re not at all familiar with the field, then yes of course there’s stuff you’re missing.
As I wrote:
Current systems are are still low numbers of active connections. Maybe this can be scaled up, but seems quite hard to scale it up by several orders of magnitude.
More zoomed out, I think the only method that would definitely work is germline engineering (well, and WBE, but that has its own problems). Everything else is speculation—what should make us think you can increase someone’s deep problem solving ability that way?