[MURG] Future of MURG

[Eugen Leitl]

On Sun, Oct 19, 2003 at 05:36:40PM -0400, Yan King Yin wrote:
> Hi
> 
> 1. I think many of us here have overlooked the 'chemical'
> / molecular aspects of neuroscience for uploading.

What makes you think so?

> The possible signaling pathways out of thousands of
> molecular species (receptors, secondary messengers, etc)

You will need these to fully parametrize the neuron.

> are combinatorically explosive and we need a project
> perhaps even harder than the human genome project
> to completely elucidate those pathways.

Given a good enough cell modeling environment, you'll get these from a cell
scan at molecular resolution. You will only need this once, to fully
parametrize the cell.
 
> One assumption that everyone here (including me) has

You're assuming too much.

> made is that there is no internal memories inside a
> neuron. But this is probably false, and that chemical

Memory = state.

> information in neurons might be quite substantial. This

Lacking molecuar memory, there's not enough machinery within a neuron to
store a lot of state (that is relevant to information processing).

> also includes gene activation states as Joe pointed out.

Well, duh.
 
> Unless we have a quantitative estimate of how much
> 'missing information' is out there, uploading will not be
> a science and funding will be a problem.

I don't understand inasmuch uploading is different from applied computational
neuroscience, and biology modelling in general. I don't see how a decent PI
would fail to get funding for a realistic (accurate enough to resolve mutants
and individuals) nematode simulation. The imaging part alone is sufficient
novelty.
 
> 2. I think we need to talk about the financing problem
> seriously IF you guys are serious about uploading at
> all. We need to figure out the financing problem right

Hello? This is an internet mailing list. We already failed abysmally with a
collaborative software project of rather trivial scope. Research group?
Funding? You're obviously in the wrong movie here.

> now, not when we're half way into the project(s).
> I've worked really hard on all these things and deserve
> some credits as well =(

-- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
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