[MURG] two things to consider

[Randal A. Koene]

Hi Eric,

You're right to bring this up. The senses are indeed tuned to the brain
and vice versa. Uploading the whole body is probably unnecessary, but the
coded communication between the senses (specific to one person) and the
brain should be understood and emulated. In a way, that is an upload of
those senses, even if a compressed one.
(The preceding all assumes we are talking about uploading that seeks to
preserve as much as possible of the original sensation of being.)

Cheers,
       Randal

On Sun, 23 May 2004, digfarenough wrote:

> 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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