Ready to Upload?

Here are the benefits of mind uploading.

It’s interesting, but he seems to completely ignore the power problem, and I can just see a world where traffic jams are replaced with packet collisions.

I also wonder how well a brain simulation can take into account all the influnce of our bodies on our brains. We don’t need terminally-bored silicon entities.

Update:

But if the simulation is accurate enough most of the silocon entities will be religious. This link is interesting enough for a post of its own, so I may repent and give it one later. A snippet:

The religion-as-an-adaptation theory doesn’t wash with everybody, however. As anthropologist Scott Atran of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor points out, the benefits of holding such unfounded beliefs are questionable, in terms of evolutionary fitness. “I don’t think the idea makes much sense, given the kinds of things you find in religion,” he says. A belief in life after death, for example, is hardly compatible with surviving in the here-and-now and propagating your genes. Moreover, if there are adaptive advantages of religion, they do not explain its origin, but simply how it spread.

An alternative being put forward by Atran and others is that religion emerges as a natural by-product of the way the human mind works.

That’s not to say that the human brain has a “god module” in the same way that it has a language module that evolved specifically for acquiring language. Rather, some of the unique cognitive capacities that have made us so successful as a species also work together to create a tendency for supernatural thinking. “There’s now a lot of evidence that some of the foundations for our religious beliefs are hard-wired,” says Bloom.

Lucy Goes Digital

This is really cool. The most famous fossil homonid in the world has been scanned.

Medical CAT scans like those done in hospitals show a cross-section of a patient’s body with 1-2 mm resolution. But because Lucy isn’t a living patient, much higher-energy X-rays can be used. The computed tomography, or CT, scans done on Lucy reveal internal details on the order of 5-50 microns — less than the width of a human hair. That level of detail could yield unprecedented insight into our ancestors.

Here’s great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-(oh, c’mon she lived 3.2 million years ago)-great-great-great-grandma’s jawbone:

There goes what’s left of The Lancet’s credibility

Anti-vaccine hero Andrew Wakefield, publisher of the infamous 1998 Lancet paper supposedly linking MMR vaccines with autism, is not just incompetent but, apparently, a total fraud.

In brief, the laboratory used was set up such that cross contamination between the plasmids used to maintain the measles virus sequences and the area where the PCR was done. PCR is very sensitive; if there is contaminating plasmid sequence, it is very easy to amplify and detect it even when there is nothing in your samples. Indeed, I’ve experienced this very problem on occasion in my own lab. Unfortunately, in the case of Wakefield’s research, no controls were done to make sure that contamination was detected in the negative controls. Finally, Wakefield’s results were roundly refuted in an attempt to replicate his work that was published last year. As you can see, Wakefield’s work and ethics are about as bad as it gets.

Or so I thought, until readers started sending me this article published in The Times, again by Wakefield’s nemesis Brian Deer. Holy crap. If only a fraction of the allegations in this article are true, not only is Wakefield an unscrupulous and incompetent scientist but he’s a scientific fraud as well.

1998 is the year my daughter was born and, as a worried new parent, I was almost taken in by this cretin and the useful idiots in the press. So I take this decipt rather personally – and am doubly glad I’ve become a confirmed skeptic. As far as I’m concerned both Wakefield and The Lancet have blood on their hands.