[MURG] two things to consider

[digfarenough]

Hello all. I'm unsure if these have been discussed
before, but I don't recall it being so.

1. Most uploaders seem to concentrate on the brain and
the spinal cord, but it seems to me that to upload
only those two parts of the nervous system might cause
problems.

Consider the eye. Visual information is processed in
the retina even before it reaches the optic nerve.
Presumably one would want the ability to see
post-upload, and to do so requires some means of
getting said information into the brain's visual code.
Since the retina undergoes plasticity and is
presumably tuned up to work with the LGN and V1 and
such, a person's retina is unique and would need to be
uploaded just like the rest of the brain if vision is
to work properly.

I think there is a similar concern with sensory and
motor nerves. For the brain to properly control and
get sensations from either a virual or robotic body,
you'd need all the wiring to be as it was with a
biological body. That is, a heat sensory nerve from
the tip of your left thumb will enter the spinal cord
at a particular location in a person. Although the
fiber bundle is likely located at a stereotyped
location on the spine, by merely uploading the spine
you couldn't tell which fiber was from the left thumb
and which was from the left index finger. A similar
problem would exist for effector nerves.

I have no great fix for this in mind (other than
scanning the whole body for the nerve paths), but I
thought I'd start a discussion on it.

I welcome comments, but, as always, my responses may
be slow.
 -Eric


	
		
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