MIND UPLOADING

Whole brain emulation (WBE), mind upload or brain upload (sometimes called "mind copying" or "mind transfer") is the hypothetical futuristic process of scanning the mental state (including long-term memory and "self") of a particular brain substrate and copying it to a computer. The computer could then run a simulation model of the brain's information processing, such that it would respond in essentially the same way as the original brain (i.e., indistinguishable from the brain for all relevant purposes) and experience having a conscious mind.

The terms “whole brain emulation”,” mind uploading” and “substrate independent minds” have been used informally in recent years to describe a set of related ideas regarding hypothetical possibilities for transferring or emulating the functioning of a human’s brain or “mind” on a synthetic substrate. It is my aim to propose a common frame work in which these ideas can be discussed. It should be clear that the outset that these ideas require a great deal of speculation and rest on some difficult to define concepts. In order to proceed I will refer to this set of ideas as “mind substrate transfer (MST)”

Your brain could be backed up, for a deadly price

When we die, the neural connections that make memories start to degrade. But what if our brains could be preserved? What if our memories could be backed up like computer data?

According to the Brain Preservation Foundation, the connectome is a map of the brain’s neural connections, or those between brain cells. These connections are called synapses. Synapses are structures that pass electrical or chemical signals between neurons. In other words, synapses allow brain cells to communicate with each other, and these structures are important for memory formation. Using a technique called aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation — also referred to as vitrifixation — Nectome believe that they could preserve human synapses, along with the memories they have helped to form.

       How does vitrifixation work?

“Vitrifixation” comprises two processes: fixation and vitrification. Fixation involves using a chemical called glutaraldehyde to solidify synapses and prevent them from degrading. In order to enhance preservation further, the brain is stored at -122°C. This way, it can be stored for hundreds of years, according to Nectome. A chemical called ethylene glycol is applied to the brains prior to freezing, to stop the formation of ice crystals. As concentrations of ethylene glycol increase, the brain is put into a vitreous, or glass-like, state. This is the verification process. If you think that this all sounds a bit far-fetched, you might be interested to know that Nectome have already managed to preserve an entire rabbit brain using vitrifixation. The technique has already reached human testing. Earlier this year, McIntyre and colleagues used vitrifixation to preserve the brain of an elderly woman just 2.5 hours after she died. Talking to MIT Technology Review, McIntyre claims that the lady’s brain is “one of the best-preserved ever.” There is one problem, however: although 2.5 hours between death and brain preservation doesn’t seem like too long, the brain suffers a great deal of damage in that time.

In order for the brain to be fully preserved through vitrifixation, it needs to be fresh. Ideally, the procedure needs to be performed as a person is nearing the end of their life.

This means that for Nectome to move their idea forward, they need to find people willing to die to have their brains fully preserved, in the hope that their memories can one day be retrieved and transformed into a computer simulation.

THEORATICAL BENEFITS AND APPLICATIONS

1.    “Immortality” or backup

In theory, if the information and processes of the mind can be disassociated from the biological body, they are no longer tied to the individual limits and lifespan of that body. Furthermore, information within a brain could be partly or wholly copied or transferred to one or more other substrates (including digital storage or another brain), thereby – from a purely mechanistic perspective – reducing or eliminating "mortality risk" of such information. This general proposal was discussed in 1971 by bio gerontologist George M. Martin of the University of Washington.

2.    Space exploration

An “uploaded astronaut” could be used instead of a "live" astronaut in human spaceflight, avoiding the perils of zero gravity, the vacuum of space, and cosmic radiation to the human body. It would allow for the use of smaller spacecraft, such as the proposed StarChip, and it would enable virtually unlimited interstellar travel distances.

STEPHEN HAWKING

“I THINK THE BRAIN IS LIKE A PROGRAMME IN THE MIND. WHICH IS LIKE A COMPUTER, SO IT IS THEORITICALLY POSSILE TO COPY THE BRAIN ONTO A COMPUTER AND SO PROVIDE A FORM OF LIFE AFTER DEATH”

GOOGLE VENTURES

“If you ask me today, is it possible to live to be 500? The answer is yes,” Bill Maris says one January afternoon in Mountain View, California. The president and managing partner of Ventures. Bill Maris has $425 million to invest this year, and the freedom to invest it however he wants. He's looking for companies that will slow aging, reverse disease, and extend life.

WHY IS MIND UPLOADING STILL A HYPOTHESIS?

Whether or not any form of mind uploading to go beyond biological immortality and reach as post human existence is possible is increasingly seen as a set of technological problems, especially by transhumanists. None the less, there are a number of technical and philosophical problems with mind uploading currently inadequately addressed.

            You are dead

Death, no matter what some people say is bad. Dying whilst literally trying to live forever would bad too. Destructive methods that kill you and replace you with a duplicate that thinks there you might not be enough.

            Left over copies

Most forms of duplication of yourself lead to the problem of having an extra version of yourself which, in sci-fi at least, tends of quickly get killed off. However, this is even more problematic when you consider things such as non-destructive uploading, you can disagree with you, which you is the real you. Breaks in consciousness are scary.

       What about the soul?

                               

For the purposes of secular discussion, we usually discount the possibility of a soul as immeasurably things cannot by our current understanding of the laws of nature affect or interact with us. For deeper exploration of this issue religious transhumanism may have the answers for you.

       Loss of identity coherence

             

Even if a form of consciousness continuity is possible, the new substrate may not be able to function is such a way that 'you' are 'you' for much longer. This could lead to anything from becoming a schizophrenic vegetable to a human hating AI-like paperclip maximizer within seconds.

            Non-consensual copies

Is your mind your intellectual property? Because you may run into all sort of problems. First of all, what if a powerful AI scanned you or even ran a powerful simulation of you in order to see how you'd respond to millions of scenarios? How do you know you're not in that simulation already? 

MOHAMED NAVEED

World's First Computer

In 1946 the first computer was announced. It was called ENIAC, which stood for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer. ENIAC took up a large room and required several people to operate. She operated with vacuum tubes and could output 5,000 addition problems in one second. The computer used 170,000 watts of power, weighed 28 tons, had 17,840 vacuum tubes, filled a large building and cost $487,000.
(By today's standards, that is about ten million dollars!) It took several people to run her. It was basically a larger super-fast calculator with some input features via punch cards. ENIAC required constant maintain as there was always a tube going out. On average, one would go out about every other day. It took about fifteen minutes to locate the bad tube. It's longest continuous period of operation without a failure was 116 hours. Aside from the 17,480 vacuum tubes, ENIAC had 7,200 crystal diodes, 1,500 relays, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors and around 5 million hand-soldered joints. The typical computer you use today is of course tens of thousands of times faster.

ENIAC's design and construction was financed by the United States Army, Ordnance Corps, Research and Development Command, led by Major General Gladeon M. Barnes. The total cost was about $487,000, equivalent to $7,195,000 in 2019. The construction contract was signed on June 5, 1943; work on the computer began in secret at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering the following month, under the code name "Project PX", with John Grist Brainerd as principal investigator. Herman H. Goldstine persuaded the Army to fund the project, which put him in charge to oversee it for them.

Watch a Video Of The ENIAC And How 

Computer Technology Has Advanced Since
That Time

Although ENIAC was designed and primarily used to calculate artillery firing tables for the United States Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory (which later became a part of the Army Research Laboratory),its first program was a study of the feasibility of the thermonuclear weapon

ENIAC was formally dedicated at the University of Pennsylvania on February 15, 1946 and was heralded as a "Giant Brain" by the press. It had a speed on the order of one thousand times faster than that of electro-mechanical machines

Programming

ENIAC could be programmed to perform complex sequences of operations, including loops, branches, and subroutines. However, instead of the stored-program computers that exist today, ENIAC was just a large collection of arithmetic machines, which originally had programs set up into the machine by a combination of plugboard wiring and three portable function tables (containing 1200 ten-way switches each). The task of taking a problem and mapping it onto the machine was complex, and usually took weeks. Due to the complexity of mapping programs onto the machine, programs were only changed after huge numbers of tests of the current program. Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Meltzer, Fran Bilas, and Ruth Lichterman were the first programmers of the ENIAC.

Main ENIAC parts

The main parts were 40 panels and three portable function tables (named A, B, and C). The layout of the panels was (clockwise, starting with the left wall): 

Left wall

• Initiating Unit
• Cycling Unit
• Master Programmer - panel 1 and 2
• Function Table 1 - panel 1 and 2
• Accumulator 1
• Accumulator 2
• Divider and Square Rooter
• Accumulator 3
• Accumulator 4
• Accumulator 5
• Accumulator 6
• Accumulator 7
• Accumulator 9 

Back wall

• Accumulator 10
• High-speed Multiplier - panel 1, 2, and 3
• Accumulator 11
• Accumulator 12
• Accumulator 13
• Accumulator 14

Right wall

• Accumulator 15
• Accumulator 16
• Accumulator 17
• Accumulator 18
• Function Table 2 - panel 1 and 2
• Function Table 3 - panel 1 and 2
• Accumulator 19
• Accumulator 20
• Constant Transmitter - panel 1, 2, and 3
• Printer - panel 1, 2, and 3

An IBM card reader was attached to Constant Transmitter panel 3 and an IBM card punch was attached to Printer Panel 2. The Portable Function Tables could be connected to Function Table 1, 2, and 3.

 

Recognition

ENIAC was named an IEEE Milestone in 1987.

In 1996, in honor of the ENIAC's 50th anniversary, The University of Pennsylvania sponsored a project named, "ENIAC-on-a-Chip", where a very small silicon computer chip measuring 7.44 mm by 5.29 mm was built with the same functionality as ENIAC. Although this 20 MHz chip was many times faster than ENIAC, it had but a fraction of the speed of its contemporary microprocessors in the late 1990s^.

In 1997, the six women who did most of the programming of ENIAC were inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of FameThe role of the ENIAC programmers is treated in a 2010 documentary film titled Top Secret Rosies: The Female "Computers" of WWII by LeAnn Erickson. A 2014 documentary short, The Computers by Kate McMahon, tells of the story of the six programmers; this was the result of 20 years' research by Kathryn Kleiman and her team as part of the ENIAC Programmers Project.         

In 2011, in honor of the 65th anniversary of the ENIAC's unveiling, the city of Philadelphia declared February 15 as ENIAC Day.

The ENIAC celebrated its 70th anniversary on February 15, 2016.

MOHAMED NAVEED

ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT VIRUS!!!

WHAT IS A VIRUS???

          A virus is a small infectious agent that replicates only inside the living cells of an organism. Viruses can infect all types of life forms, from animals and plants to microorganisms, including bacteria and archaea.


*Archaea constitue of a domain of single-celled organisms* 

ROTAVIRUS

Origins

        Viruses are found wherever there is life and have probably existed since living cells first evolved. The origin of viruses is unclear because they do not form fossils, so molecular techniques are used to investigate how they arose. In addition, viral genetic material occasionally integrates into the germline of the host organisms, by which they can be passed on vertically to the offspring of the host for many generations. This provides an invaluable source of information for paleovirologists to trace back ancient viruses that have existed up to millions of years ago. There are three main hypotheses that aim to explain the origins of viruses:

1.      Regressive hypothesis

Viruses may have once been small cells that parasitised larger cells. Over time, genes not required by their parasitism were lost.

           

2.      Cellular origin hypothesis

Some viruses may have evolved from bits of DNA or RNA that "escaped" from the genes of a larger organism

3.      Co-evolution hypothesis

This is also called the 'virus-first hypothesis'and proposes that viruses may have evolved from complex molecules of protein and nucleic acid at the same time as cells first appeared on Earth and would have been dependent on cellular life for billions of years.

WHERE DID VIRUS COME FROM?

 WHERE DO NEW VIRUSES COME FROM??

HOW DO VIRUSES JUMP FROM ANIMALS TO HUMANS???

Role in human disease

·         Examples of common human diseases caused by viruses include the common cold, influenza, chickenpox, and cold sores. Many serious diseases such as rabies, Ebola virus disease, AIDS (HIV), avian influenza, and SARS are caused by viruses. The relative ability of viruses to cause disease is described in terms of virulence. Other diseases are under investigation to discover if they have a virus as the causative agent, such as the possible connection between human herpesvirus 6 (HHV6) and neurological diseases such as multiple sclerosis and chronic fatigue syndrome. There is controversy over whether the bornavirus, previously thought to cause neurological diseases in horses, could be responsible for psychiatric illnesses in humans. 

·         Viruses have different mechanisms by which they produce disease in an organism, which depends largely on the viral species. Mechanisms at the cellular level primarily include cell lysis, the breaking open and subsequent death of the cell. In multicellular organisms, if enough cells die, the whole organism will start to suffer the effects

                                   

1.      CANCER

·        Viruses are an established cause of cancer in humans and other species. Viral cancers occur only in a minority of infected persons (or animals). Cancer viruses come from a range of virus families, including both RNA and DNA viruses, and so there is no single type of "oncovirus" (an obsolete term originally used for acutely transforming retroviruses). The development of cancer is determined by a variety of factors such as host immunity and mutations in the host. Viruses accepted to cause human cancers include some genotypes of human papillomavirus, hepatitis B virus, hepatitis C virus, Epstein–Barr virus, Kaposi's sarcoma-associated herpesvirus and human T-lymphotropic virus.

EBOLA

2.     HOST DEFENCE MECHANISMS

·        The body's first line of defence against viruses is the innate immune system. This comprises cells and other mechanisms that defend the host from infection in a non-specific manner. This means that the cells of the innate system recognise, and respond to, pathogens in a generic way, but, unlike the adaptive immune system, it does not confer long-lasting or protective immunity to the host.

3.     PREVENTION AND CURE

·         VACCINES

Vaccination is a cheap and effective way of preventing infections by viruses. Vaccines were used to prevent viral infections long before the discovery of the actual viruses. Their use has resulted in a dramatic decline in morbidity (illness) and mortality (death) associated with viral infections such as polio, measles, mumps and rubella. Smallpox infections have been eradicated

·         ANTIVIRAL DRUGS

Antiviral drugs are often nucleoside analogues (fake DNA building-blocks), which viruses mistakenly incorporate into their genomes during replication. The life-cycle of the virus is then halted because the newly synthesised DNA is inactive. This is because these analogues lack the hydroxyl groups, which, along with phosphorus atoms, link together to form the strong "backbone" of the DNA molecule. This is called DNA chain termination.

 

REFERENCES:

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virus#Role_in_human_disease
2. youtube.com

MOHAMED NAVEED