UKH

Hi.

What are your opinions on stem cells, stem cell research and stem cell therapy?

I am strongly in favor of stem cell research and stem cell therapy and strongly support them but the branch of Christianity that I born into - Greek Orthodox Church - has against stem cell research and called it murder and theft.

Stem cell therapy can be used to treat and torn ligaments and tendons, has been used to restore eye sight and maybe a possible cure for cancer.

For me, stem cell therapy can be used to repair a ligamemt on the back if my knee -I think the ECL - and in the near future a possible cure for my Dyspraxia.

I have found out quite a few universities run postgraduate courses in stem cell medicine and biology.

Sav

In reply to Mountain Spirit:

If that's truly the Greek Orthodox church's position, I'm completely bewildered by it.

Stem cells are just unspecialised cells with the potential to become any type of cell in the body- massively simplified from what little I remember of GCSE biology.
As stem cells used for therapies would be either donated willingly or grown in a lab for the specific use, a description as "theft" is simply incorrect. Stem cells are present in the earliest stages of the human embryo, but also in bone marrow and various other places in the adult human body. To describe it as "murder" is also nonsense.

In reply to ShortLock:


"Religion makes irrational claims shocker"

In reply to Mountain Spirit:

It's a very complex area of research that still has a long way to go before we can really hope for delivery on many of the promises made. Stem cells are a general term.

Embryonic stem cells are harvested from human embryos - either from terminations or embryos that were not planted as part of IVF procedures. Many religions object to either/both these practices so an objection to their use is a logical extension.

Induced pluripotent stem cells can be harvested from mature individuals but reprogramming them to make tissues of choice is very complicated, not well understood and involves genetic modification of the cells with attendant risks of generating cancers etc. The use of IPSs would overcome many moral objections but are a long way off. ES can be used in therapies now but are still at an early stage and it's morally more complex.

In reply to Mountain Spirit:

The Church perhaps needs to take a few basic science lessons before it opens its big stupid mouth. Still, it's nice to see them at least trying to get involved with the real world every now and then.

Umbilical cord tissue.

Placental blood.

Dental pulp.

Liposuction waste.

Menstrual blood.

All stuff that's going in the bin, all containing stem cells. Nobody gets killed. Nothing is stolen.

In reply to Mountain Spirit:

It’s certainly an interesting therapy. My vet has suggested it as treatment for my dogs osteoarthritis, so have been looking into it.
Its adipose derived stem cell therapy so the cells are extracted from the animals own fatty tissue and injected into the joints. From what I have read it isn’t being used in humans yet and any dog that shows any indications of cancer are not treated.
The cost is significant but a greater worry for me is it has to be done under general anaesthetic. He had that for the x-rays of his joints and a biopsy, and for a week afterwards refused to eat anything and became very weak. Fortunately he has started eating again but has gone from being very fond of food to being very fussy and only eating a small portion of his food. So I’m afraid another dose might kill him let alone the two or three to collect the source material and inject the cells.

In reply to ShortLock:
Strongly agreed

In a conference of Orthodoxies they said that 'advances and developments in Science are as big a threat to Christian minorities in the Middle East as IS'.

In reply to Chris Harris:
I agree with you 100%

In reply to hang_about:
Very interesting.

Thanks for this info.

It is very true that many religions ate against ES - I know the Catholic Church and Jahovah Witnesses are against Embryonic Stem Cells.

In reply to Mark Edwards:

Poor dog.

I don't have a dog myself but my brother and his female partner have a beautiful dog called Muki.

In reply to Mountain Spirit:

Sav

You may have been born into the Greek Orthodox Church but that doesn't mean they are right (or wrong). You have the choice to believe what you want to believe in. No one can force their beliefs on you.

And if there really is a god - and a heaven - and a hell, when I pop off, and God says I can't go to heaven because I've taken the micky out of christians, muslims, my next door neighbour, cursed a lot, and blasphemed now and again, then I can only say that God doesn't practice what he preaches = forgiveness and tolerance to others!
,

In reply to Chris Harris:


I'm not so sure about the 'nothing is stolen'. My view is that bits of people belong to the person they were part of. Classifying a bit of someone that companies will pay for as clinical waste and selling it without saying anything is close to theft.

In reply to Mountain Spirit:
I think a profound problem is opening up as a consequence of the seemingly exponential rate of scientific advance (I say "seemingly" because scientific advance is quite hard to define and measure, but I hope that the suggestion that it's accelerating is uncontentious) compared to the processes and opportunities we (society) have to digest its implications.

In other words, our ethical frameworks are lagging behind - by miles - our ability to generate startlingly new ethical conundrums.

Stem cells and the opportunities they present are just one example of this. Cloning, DNA sequencing, fertility technology, medical science at end of life, genetic engineering of crops, weapons technology, diagnostics, even the internet, have all exploded into a world not really able to properly assimilate, consider and judge the ethical implications.

Part of the problem is that our ethics framework tries to consider both the individual *and* the societal impact - but without really hammering out the balance of importance between the two, or even what scale of society we are considering.

The problem isn't new. The industrial revolution was full of it - and by the time the atomic bomb was made, the issue of ethics was very clear. However, the guiding framework has moved from predominantly one provided by religion to, well what?

Stem cells hold out mesmerising possibilities. But should we follow them? Ability to screen out or correct genetic "defects" has some tainted echoes in history, but why would we want some extremely nasty conditions to perpetuate? On the other hand, technology to rescue very premature babies is leading to individuals with a lifetime of health challenges - so why would we do that? Or medicalise the care of the over 80s? Or euthanasia? Very little sensible, rational, inclusive debate of these issues is happening; certainly not enough to produce an accepted "norm" of view.

Which is all a very long way of answering your question: I support the research but we need to put as much effort into rethinking our ethical frameworks as we do into breakthrough genetics and cell biology.

In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:


You really have no idea.

I was dealing with some umbilical cord tissue today.

The donor had signed all necessary Informed Consent forms. Without that, we can do absolutely nothing with a sample. Nothing.

We are licensed, regulated & inspected by the Human Tissue Authority & the Medicines & Healthcare Regulatory Authority.

They examine EVERYTHING you do, down to the last full stop. Nothing can be done without their prior approval.

In reply to Chris Harris:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1973229/NHS-hospital-sells-placentas-for-co...

I don't remember any paperwork about placentas when our kids were born, admittedly that was a few years ago now and maybe things have changed.

I do remember asking the dentist for a tooth they had pulled out (because I wanted to show my daughter what would happen if she ate too many sweets) and getting point blank told it was clinical waste and they were not going to return it to me.

It's not that long since the Alder Hey organ scandal. I'm sure there is a ton of extra paperwork since then, I am more skeptical that attitudes with regard to ownership and paying for stuff you want rather than expecting to get it for free have changed.

In reply to Dave Perry:

I totally agree with you.

In reply to Mountain Spirit:

We've all got them and I like mine, they are so adaptable...

In reply to Mark Edwards:


Complete waste of time. I work in stem cell research and also use them (increasingly rarely) in clinical practice. There is no good evidence the local or systemic stem cell therapy is of benefit for osteoarthritis in humans or dogs.

In reply to Mountain Spirit:
My understanding of the religious objections to using embryonic stem cells is that it's based on the question of when the soul enters the body. A common view is that it enters at the moment of conception - the sperm attaches to the egg and bam, the soul enters the egg and you've not got a zygote any more, you've got a person.

If there were prizes for ideas that are bat$hit mental, this would probably win one.

In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:


A 9 year old newspaper article.....


Yes they have. You would only be given any paperwork if your placentas wasn't going in the clinical waste - you don't have to consent that. If your placenta was wanted for research or commercial use, you would be approached long before the birth to have it all explained to you.
Even if you are paying to have your cells stored, you still have to sign all appropriate consent forms before the tissue can be stored.


Quite correct of the dentist.


It's 18 years.

In reply to Chris Harris:


Not correct at all. Simple theft. Obviously I own that tooth, it was part of my body. I paid her money to extract it, I did not sign any forms turning over ownership of anything. Therefore I still own the tooth. She point blank refused to return my property in a situation where I wasn't in a position to simply tell her to f*ck off, take it and leave. I have no idea about whether there is some law which lets her get away with that sh*t in the clinical situation, maybe there is, it doesn't matter morally it is theft.

In reply to Thrudge:



I looked into Islam's view on this subject - as I thought Islam would would be dead against stem cells but the surprising thing was that Islam has a progressive view on them....

In Egypt they are already running trials for certain conditions like MS and degenerative sight loss....

In highly religious Iran there is a lot debate amongst Muslim scholars on the issue.

Apparently the main con is that the technology can be used to clone a person just to produce stem cells and to harvest organs.

In reply to Mountain Spirit:

Maybe in a hundred years time. I believe we are a long, long way from being able to clone a person.

In reply to Oceanrower:
I agree....

They cloned a sheep - dolly the sheep - and it became ill very quickly.

Also scientists have managed to clone some organs and an ear.

In reply to Mountain Spirit:

Stem cells can be created by de-specialising existing cells, you don't need embryonic cells anymore. Apologies for imprecise use of language, not my field and a few years since I learned much about it. Potentially powerful new branch of medicine. I've no interest in the religious perspective.
Jk

In reply to Oceanrower:


Why?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_that_have_been_cloned

If we can clone sheep and dogs and horses and rhesus monkeys then why not a person? I wouldn't be surprised if it had already been done in secret.

In reply to Mountain Spirit:


Hi,

I am a scientist in one such university, and teach in a stem cell biology / regenerative medicine program. If you are interested in a career in this field please PM me. However, it is the same as any other field of biology in terms of job security etc...

As for stem cell use in the clinic, we are far away from most of the potential applications you have listed, and are years away from fixing tendons or even cartilage. Stem cell therapy works for bone and skin, and of course blood.

Everything else that has been tried is either purely experimental (stem cell treatment to restore retina function) or simple fraud, where dodgy clinics offer expensive but totally useless treatments to desparate patients. This includes stem cell treatment for cancer, but also neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson's or ALS. I find it shocking that such criminals are still allowed to operate in several countries.

Ethics will be less of an issue due to the development of iPS cells that you can make from, say, skin cells of a patient or suitable donor, and the therapeutic use of embryonic stem cells, and especially the creation of embryos for the sole purpose of harvesting such cells, is more of historic interest.

CB

In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:

The thing is how do you transfer memories and character - you can not put them onto a USB drive or floppy disk then transfer them into the clones.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_6th_Day

In reply to jkarran:
I agree 100%.

In reply to cb294:
They did it for a torn ligament on The States but it was done conjunction with Human Growth Hormone injections.

I have seen such scammers/fraudsters on the Internet. Most of them are based in S.E. Asia or The Far East.

One true case of sight restoration using stem cell research....

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katie_Piper

In reply to Oceanrower:

Not at all. Somatic cell nuclear transfer (the method used with Dolly the sheep) is in routine use for dozens of species. After earlier reports turned out to be fraudulent, generating early human embryos was finally confirmed in 2013 (a paper by Tachibana et al. published in Cell). The idea was to use such embryos to generate embryonic stem cells compatible with a given patient. However, the subsequent discovery of so called induced, pluripotent stem cells made that ethically tricky approach obsolete.

Technically, implanting such embryos would be no different from the techniques used for IVF treatment, but trying to get a cloned embryo to develop beyond a certain early stage, and even more impanting it, is of course highly illegal!

CB

In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:


Actually legally you do not own your body parts, in fact no body can "own" a body part. However, in one of those curious little legal twists, you can "own" a former body part that has been significantly changed by modification or disection

In reply to Mountain Spirit:

The only study I can find with a brief search was using cells expressing a surface protein found in other stem cells (I would be reluctant to call them tendon stem cells), infecting them with a virus that makes the cells produce a growth factor (BMP2, not Human Growth Hormone), and then see whether this helps engraftment of ACL transplants in a rat model. No way would want to do something like that in human ligaments.

CB

In reply to Mountain Spirit:


Although Dolly's 4 genetically identical twin clones didn't have Dolly's arthritis and lung cancer (caused by an infectious virus in sheep). So, whatever caused Dolly's premature end, it wasn't the cloning.

Also scientists have managed to clone some organs and an ear.

If you mean that infamous ear growing on a mouse photo, that isn't really what it seems. As I recall it was to demonstrate the use of a biocompatible scaffold on which to grow connective tissue and skin cells as proof of principle that the approach could be used to obtain a cosmetically acceptable repair.

In reply to Mountain Spirit:


Oh I don't know. I can think of quite a few regular UKC posters whose brain contents could be fitted onto a floppy disk quite easily.

In reply to Duncan Bourne:


I'm not a lawyer but it seems morally indefensible and completely illogical if the law says you don't own parts of your own body. I can't think of a stronger argument for ownership than something being part of you. I am sure that pretty much everyone feels emotionally that they own their own body.

When I go to Quick Fit and get the tires changed on my car or the exhaust fixed the guy asks me if I want to keep the old tires/exhaust they took off my car or if I want them chucked out. I don't see why I should have any less rights to a tooth that I pay a dentist to pull out my mouth.

In reply to Mountain Spirit:

Your body makes its own stem cells.

I had my own bone marrow stem cells transplanted back after having all my bone marrow destroyed using chemo.

In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:


Generally the act of wontonly discarding something relinquishes ownership, so any claim to ownership of surgically removed body parts would presumably be trivially extinguished if someone wilfully left them behind. As almost everyone does. I did keep a tooth once to scare future offspring with.

My limited experience of working with human tissue in the UK is that it's highly regulated at every stage with intensive reporting, and that the ethical dimension is taken very seriously.

We recently had the chance to walk out of a hospital with a placenta and umbilical - this would simply have required filling in some forms to acknowledge we understood and would follow safe disposal procedures etc. Interesting question of ownership as it's built with foetal DNA inside the mother using her goo. Does it belong to the foetus? (It's DNA), both parents (equal shares of the DNA) or the mother (incubation environment)?

I felt it belonged to medical science but the hospital did not have facilities to take them, so I then felt it belonged in an incinerator. What a waste of perfectly healthy vasculature.

Discarded body parts can carry all sorts of health risks, they're not labelled clinical waste for no reason.

In reply to Mountain Spirit:


Cloning is widely accepted to refer to a genetically identical copy not an all round identical copy.

There's a massive problem in that nobody knows what a consciousness is, so nobody knows how to clone or relocate one. There is good reason to believe that consciousness may be rooted in non-trivial quantum effects, which would rule out cloning it in a "laws of physics" sense.

Even if a transfer were technologically possible it seems most unlikely that a clone would have a compatible brain given the way brain development is affected and shaped by early years experience. Hell, it's become acknowledged that Lamarckian evolution is in play - stress levels in mice have been shown to affect the gene expression in their grandchildren through chemical modulating factors passed down through the germ cells.

If in the future consciousness can't be shunted between disparate individuals then I strongly doubt it could be shunted into a tank grown clone "6th Day" style.

I was more excited to see a Gyrodyne make an appearance. Also the film totally rips of Simak's 1951 short story "Goodnight, Mr James".

In reply to Duncan Bourne:

People seem, to sell their hair for wigs (amongst other bits) quite openly. Is this illegal, or fraud?

In reply to MG:


You could literally read the next sentence after the one you quoted above for your answer...

More generally, an individual has far stronger legal rights protecting their body parts from other people than property rights. I don't need ownership of property rights to my kidney when it is protected from others by far stronger laws.

Selling healthy organs from healthy people is a very rare business and sufficiently different from any other form of property that property rights are not a useful thing here.

A closer - but still poor - analogy are children, these also are strongly protected in law but not via property rights. As with organs you basically can't sell them so there is no reason for property rights, and creating a financial market is not in anyone's interest. So what would be the point in generating and assigning property rights other than fulfilling some arbitrary sense of ownership?

After body parts are removed property rights are still a nightmare - do you want someone walking out of a hospital with XYZ infected tissue? The person from whom it came can choose disposal, donation to science (in some cases), organ donation (in some cases), or to take ownership (in some cases, with overriding public health reasons guiding it).

Anyone who does anything with a removed organ without permission is in a world of legal trouble without property rights being involved.

In reply to wintertree:


Not really. Cut hair isn't changed from uncut at all. Is there actually a law that say you don't own your own bits, or is it just other laws override ownship is specific cases, such as organs?

In reply to MG:


Not a very strong argument; cut hair is no longer connected to the person and can't be reattached. That's a pretty major modification.

I have literally no idea on the legal status of cut hair but you seemed to be creating a straw man in direct ignorance of what Duncan said.

In reply to wintertree:

Well you could say anything removed is no longer connected!! If that means you own hair, why not teeth, or kidneys? I'm not at all creating strawmen, I am genuinely interested, and brought up hair as it seems to offer a counter example.

In reply to wintertree:



Very interesting

In reply to DancingOnRock:

You are right.

Do you remember that case on the news about the little girl with the rare blood cancer who had a stem cell transplant of her own stem cells?

It could be a possibility for at least my baf ECL - the doctor said it wouldn't be healed 100.

In reply to wintertree:

I don't see why you need to know what consciousness or how it works to discover how to relocate it. You can have completely untrue theories or no theory at all and still find a procedure that works in practice. People made fires long before they had any clue about chemistry.


More likely the quantum stuff is wishful thinking, it is trying to cling on to concepts like 'spirit' and put a scientific gloss on them to avoid accepting the consequences of a mechanistic view.

In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:


Well if it's that easy... We understand so little I don't believe there's even a hint of a protocol based on experience instead of understanding. This is where your silly "analogy" of fire falls down - ancient people will have seen fire start from one of a dozen natural causes giving them a bloody big hint on where to start. I've yet to see a lightning bolt transfer a person's consciousness.


Well quantum biology is coming to be recognised as a real thing in some areas so I'd not write it of yet. Understanding of the brain is at a very early stage, and proclaiming the unlikely as "wishful thinking" is as foolish as insisting that it must be happening.

The "mechanistic view" as you call it, or the classical mechanics view as it would more accurately be described, forbids free will, inspiration, ingenuity and perhaps the ability to undertake certain classes of formal proofs that humans have undertaken.

Edit: there are some getout clauses where a classical system can apparently have free will etc and not be rigidly determined by the moment of creation, but they rely on a source of genuine randomness, which itself can't come from a purely classical system without being predetermined. So there is scope for quantum effects to play a non-trivial role in consciousness by injecting random noise into an otherwise purely classical system.

Call it "spirit" if you want but conscious self awareness is not scientifically explained in any concrete sense, and is not scientifically reproducible. Although I disagree with your suggestion we'll be able to clone a human consciousness before we understand it, I think we might create a new non-human consciousness before we understand the human or computational/classical/quantum basis of consciousness. Its even odds as various synthetic brain projects race forwards against the human brain projects.

But cloning a human consciousness will at a minimum involve understanding where every piece of information that defines the consciousness is stored, and we are nowhere near that level. Technology to read it all out is almost unimaginable even if there are no quantum or deep sub-cellular molecular/structural components to that memory.

In reply to wintertree:


It doesn't matter if you need property rights, property rights are the default case.

Sure, there are issues with safety if tissue is diseased but that's not an argument against property rights. It is commonplace to own something but have safety limitations imposed on what you can do with it.

I think there is an underlying disrespectful attitude behind laws which pretend people don't own bits of their own body. It is an attitude which led to Alder Hey, the various scandals in Scotland about the handling of miscarried remains and led a dentist to feel she could flat out refuse to hand over an extracted tooth.

In reply to wintertree:


Reading out everything at once is the most obvious way of doing it but that does not make it the only one. Something less than an exact copy might still be conscious and useful. Maybe you could gradually converge the state of an artificial copy with the original over a long period of time. It's an engineering problem.

In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:


It's not an engineering problem because the nature of what has to be read out is not defined. Until there is an exhaustive list of the structures and signals required to (re)constitute a consciousness it is a much less well defined problem than "engineering".

Even if it were defined, all the engineering in the world doesn't have the fidelity to access more than a glimmer of the information in the recognised structures in an intact, functioning brain.

Perhaps consciousness is distributed in an analogy with a hologram and can be imprecisely copied. Certainly studies into recovery from brain damage support this. Then again others show the extreme fragility under other circumstances.

It's very interesting times with the research going on in many different fields on this,

In reply to wintertree:


Engineers find acceptable solutions to badly defined and incompletely understood problems all the time. It is quite normal for a useful technology to be created before the science is understood. People had fireplaces and chimneys and stoves long before they understood the chemistry of combustion. People built all kinds of complex structures before Newton formalized the maths of mechanics.

“Scientists discover the world that exists; engineers create the world that never was.” Theodore von Karman

In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:

Your optimism is commendable. I'm not often the pessimistic one around here but on this I absolutely am.

Again with your fire analogy there were plenty of consistent empirical observations of the behaviour of fire to work from - a form of science bourne of the fact fire was repeatable in a scientific sense. You can call the process engineering or science or happenstance, it doesn't bother me.

Consciousness is not a thing that can be manipulated in a way to determine consistent empirical observations. It's not tangible to us in the way fire was to our ancestors.

There gulf to be crossed is almost immeasurably large and I don't think a consciousness can be downloaded into another substrate - let alone a disparate one - until far more is known. The debate perhaps comes down to what you label that process of knowing more.

In reply to MG:
from the Student lawyer
http://thestudentlawyer.com/2013/07/12/property-rights-in-the-human-body/

The law in the UK, and in other jurisdictions, has not developed a consistent approach to establishing the legal status of the human body. The general prohibition against property rights in the human body originated in the context of corpses, but was extended over the centuries. Cases such as R v Bentham [2005] 1 WLR 1057 confirm living bodies are also included. In this peculiar case, the defendant committed a robbery giving the impression that his hand, which was concealed in his jacket, was a gun. He was charged with possession of an imitation firearm, but because he could not be said to be in possession of a part of his own body, the conviction was overturned by the House of Lords.

As regarding hair etc. in R v Kelly [1999] 2 WLR 384 it was held that parts of a human corpse could be property for the purposes of the Theft Act 1968 if they had acquired different attributes by the process of preservation or dissection.

One of the primary arguments for not allowing ownership of the human body is the risk of exploitation. That is, by recognising such a right we may find ourselves on the slippery slope back to slavery and other such sordid practices from our past that we would rather forget. There is a problem with this argument though. We are left in a position where we cannot exploit ourselves. So, I cannot sell my organs to bring myself out of poverty, for example, but others can exploit me by making parts of my body their own (and in some cases, make a fortune out of doing so!).
One of the primary arguments for not allowing ownership of the human body is the risk of exploitation.

Such was the position until the case of Yearworth v North Bristol NHS Trust [2009] 3 WLR 118 where the Court of Appeal recognised a property right belonging to the claimants over their own sperm.

In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:

The legal status of not owning body parts has it's roots (no pun intended) in anti-slavery laws and old grave robbing laws. There are odd exceptions you can sell your hair and sperm but not a kidney or bone marrow (see my other post to MG)

In reply to wintertree:


It isn't that hard to tell the difference between a stone, a mouse, a computer and a person. If you tried to copy a brain I think it would be pretty clear if you had failed completely, got at least some of it or pretty much got it all. It might be hard to tell the difference between near success and complete success. As soon as you get any kind of response in the copied brain you've got a starting point to tweak the process and try and get a bit more.

I think the main barrier to making progress with an engineering approach is going to be ethical rather than practical because it could leave a trail of failed experiments.


I think the way you learn more is to try and do it, once you get close enough to half way understand what is involved you assume it can be done, have lots of people try different approaches and see where they get stuck. It is more efficient when science is directed by engineering challenges rather than trying to complete the science before the engineering starts.

If we had taken the approach of waiting until we had the scientific knowledge before starting out on the engineering we would never have created personal computers, cellular phones or the internet.

In reply to Duncan Bourne:

Thanks. Interesting

In reply to Duncan Bourne:


It seems that the practical effect is that the hospital/dentist owns them because they have control of them after they are removed and can use the principle that the patient doesn't own their own body parts against the patient's interests.

In reply to wintertree:


I disagree, a least on a principal level. There is good evidence that conscience can be modified experimentally (both legally and using recreational drugs). Recent progress in mice on how memories are formed, and how memories can be erased or false memories implanted have even made it into the clinic to treat phobias and PTSD in experimental therapies.

Looking through your posts I get the impression that you hold conscience to be something fundamentally unknowable, almost mystic, or involving "quantum", which is the 21st century equivalent of declaring something off limits. I have never seen one compelling argument requiring such a "deep" explanation for the difficulties we have with explaining human conscience.

If (as I believe) conscience arises as an emergent network property of neuronal excitation states, it would be hard enough to analyze! We can't even map this comprehensivelz (yet) for a nematode worm with its 300 odd neurons! However, I think that there are a few good arguments for conscience being based in the network properties rather than the quantum mechanics of the molecules involved. First, the molecules are pretty much the same irrespective of organism, second, any parameter you can name for the presence of conscience appears gradually across evolution, or can fail independently in humans through disease, damage, or pharmacological manipulation (all of which do not act at a quantum level).

CB

In reply to Dave Garnett:

Yes I do mean that infamous ear growing on a mouse photo.

In reply to cb294:

Yes, consciousness can be altered, in the last year we may even have unlocked how anaesthetics work. You discuss memory but memory is not consciousness.

Arguments of emergence in a classical system do not explain the phenomenon of experiencing something; all outwards behaviours can be ascribed to emergent behaviour but the inwards behaviour of experiencing something (like the smell of Peterborough services. Again) has not been explained. Perhaps one day soon we will understand precisely how stimuli on a nematode work link through to its muscles (I do work with work behaviour), but even given a total understanding of that, we may be no closer to explaining how a consciousness feels and experiences that process,

Perhaps one day we will build an artificial device that attains this, perhaps we will even be able to understand it.

The other argument against a purely classical brain is that it would strictly preclude free will, as well as the arguments around Godel. I do not ascribe mystical effects to quantum but see it as one of the routes that could give people free will instead of constraining us to an entirely predetermined existence. Others may claim more or less mystical alternatives. As I said it could be as simple as quantum noise in microscopic processes , and not anything over macroscopic scales.

In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:


The hospital/dentist has control over them as they are obliged to dispose of clinical waste according to a strict set of rules.

You can't just hand over chunks of flesh to Joe Public, even if said flesh was recently attached to them.

In reply to wintertree:

Yes, memory is not consciousness, but is a prerequisite for consciousness. Any conscious mind must continuously make connections between sensory input, stored references, and emotional state.

It is now possible in several, technically independent ways (all still highly constrained) to alter the link between sensory input and anxiety, both in mice (well controlled) and humans (less so but much more useful).

As for the quantum level, most activation of transcription factors or ion channels is stochastic already at a physical chemistry level, and our cells are amazingly noisy information processing machines without invoking quantum effects.

I wish I had chosen neuro over development, exciting times in a field where the fundamental questions become accessible for the first time!

CB

In reply to Chris Harris:

Imagine the consequences of letting someone leave the dentists with their own tooth. Just as well we have medical professionals and government to protect us.

Hospitals hand over entire dead bodies to undertakers all the time so why is it so unthinkable to hand over bits of bodies, if necessary and there is some valid safety consideration to a licensed agent appointed by the owner of the piece of body.

In reply to Chris Harris:


Ignoring the fact that a tooth isn't a 'chunk of flesh', why not?

In reply to Oceanrower:
My wife had sex reassignment surgery. I was most disappointed that they wouldn't let her keep the testicles. I would have put them in a jar on my desk at work with a sign saying "This is what happened to the last person who asked me for Windows tech support".

Insisting on their disposal probably makes for a nicer society.

In reply to cb294:


I know, I spend a lot of time simulating various sources of noise in ion channels.

But classical noise can't grant free well, as it is fully deterministic. There is no space for free well in any non quantum system, with only non quantum inputs and processes. Such a system is ore determined to a fixed course. Chaotic for sure, but fixed.

In reply to Helen Bach:
I think you're right. By floppy I mean one of the minifloppies, 5.25 in, pre-DOS, say 200 kilobytes maximum? More than enough. I haven't got any of the original 8 in ones to experiment with.

As for self awareness? not sure about that - probably need a set of chemical flasks to hold that as self awareness is almost certainly based on reactive emotion from a neutral state and therefore is probably different in nature from the pure information content of processing/retention networks

In reply to wercat:

Looks like you are the UKC go to guy with regards floppy dicks. I see you omit 3.5 inch in your analysis. Accident? I think not.

In reply to Helen Bach:
no accident, I haven't reached that era yet! Too modern.

In reply to Toccata:


Thanks, that’s an interesting perspective. I have Google’d some scholarly articles on the subject but rereading them with a more sceptical view they admit that they are not double blind trials, a limited number of participants and the results mainly rely on the owners assessment of their dog’s health (which could well be biased if you had spent a few thousand pounds on the treatment).
As my dog seemed to have problems with anaesthetic I wasn’t really considering it but a part of me was wondering if the risk was offset by a possible improvement to his quality of life. Now at least I can be surer I am making the right decision.
Although I am now wondering at the motivation/competence of my vet in suggesting the procedure.

In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:


It is an interesting point, and from experience a somewhat vague one. For instance in the past it seemed to be more common to give patients their bady parts back (in some instances). I have been given teeth by my dentist when young and my father still has his gall stones in a jar somewhere. Is it against the patient's interest to hold onto a body part? I think that depends. For the most part I would say no. As once something is removed it is not really of much use. Though where someone "patents" a DNA sample, protein, whatever from someone else's body without bringing them in on it that seems to be a more morally dubious point.

In reply to Duncan Bourne:
The is a human tissue act. It depends on the nature of the tissue and the hospital must satisfy itself that the material will be stored and/or disposed of correctly.

https://www.hta.gov.uk/sites/default/files/Code_of_practice_5_-_Disposal_of...

Generally children's teeth fall out and are either kept in a small box or chucked in the bin. There's no health hazard involved.

Technically the patient and relatives own the material. What they can to do with it is controlled.

In reply to wintertree:

Where is the evidence that we have free will? We certainly can make choices, but are these choices free in the sense that they are not the deterministic outcome of our brain physiology?
I would argue that the level of complexity at which consciousness arises is sufficiently uncoupled from the chaotic noise at the level of e.g. channels or promoters that you do not need to invoke quantum effects as the source of freedom.

CB

In reply to cb294:


Well that's one of the big questions, isn't it. The other is "what is the basis for conscious experience" or "what is the basis for qualia".

Are we all soulless autonomata whose future is predetermined by classical mechanics or do we have genuine free will? Why do we experience things in a conscious way when our behaviour could apparently be created by emergent behaviour on a sufficiently advanced, predetermined Turing complete substrate that coldly does, without any sense of experience of doing.


There is no feeedom in classical mechanics. None. Put me in a dark, quiet room with no chaotic inputs and I still have my free will.

In reply to wintertree:
You can't have no chaotic inputs because the human brain isn't a basic input output machine.

Once the program starts running it's continually taking in chaotic inputs and storing them and feeding back information into itself. There is no reset and the longer the program runs the more chaotic feedback loops it builds and the more chaotic it gets.

Mapping all those loops and connections and the data being processed cannot ever be done.

In reply to cb294:

not sure how much complexity you'd need. Imagine, for the sake of argument, that you could make a biochemical cell capable of being happy or glum, a state of pain or pleasure. A simple electronic flip flop might be all the storage you'd need for an "experience" to flip. I think there is a qualitative difference between experience and network storage, however complex or simple. The pain/pleasure is an overlay on what is going on in the network, capable of interfacing with it to receive control levels and capable of being read as information.

In reply to wintertree:


If you got put in a room cold enough to eliminate thermal noise you wouldn't have free will because you would be dead.

Under operating conditions there's always going to be plenty of randomness to give the illusion of free will whether or not there is 'actual' free will.

In reply to DancingOnRock:

Oh yes, brain state has memory of past inputs, and the chaotic nature of past inputs will persist in some way.

The brain doesn't display any outward signs of being chaotic in its behaviour however, not surprising as the inputs are small compared to feedback from internal state.

But if those chaotic inputs derive from purely classical physics they can't grant free will. Only a predetermined existence.

In reply to wintertree:

Consciousness requires a certain complexity, and has arisen in evolution in a graded fashion whenever that threshold is reached: For all we can tell, an insect pretty much is an automaton, but in some mammal and bird species multiple experiments prove the presence a theory of mind, while the same experiments fail in different, even reasonably closely related species. I know that a possessing a TOM is not equivalent to being conscious, but is probably our best proxy. Also, the fact that you can induce different levels of unconsciousness in humans argues that it is a systems property of our brains that depends on the actual connectivity and disappears when you reduce it. To me this proves that consciousness emerges from the dynamic network complexity. Qualia IMO are just a means by which the system contextualizes input, memory, and predictions of system behaviour. I find the distinction highly artificial, the last dogmatic bastion of a dualist world view.

Our brains are biochemical machines with feedback loops piled on feedback loops, that more than able to amplify any stochastic fluctuation in the excitation state of a single neuron to be completely untraceable. For this, noise at the level of thermodynamics seems sufficient, not quantum effects or chaotic external input required.

CB

In reply to wercat:

I agree, more or less. You can clip a leg of a fly, and it will sense the damage. However, unlike a mouse (where foot pad injuries are a accepted way to administer pain in a standardized, quantitative way), it will not favour that leg, just extend it a bit more to conserve horizontal posture.

However, it is reasonably easy to dissect insect behaviour as a hierarchical cluster of "agents" that each promote a given behavioural output, and whose activity and relations can be mapped to specific neurons and their relations to others. A classic example is a mutant fly that is effectively lethal as it gets stuck in the food quite quickly, as it keeps falling on its face. As it turns out, a neuron driving a cleaning reflex (where the fly cleans its mouth parts with the front legs) fails to be inhibited by the walking pattern generator.

Even if our own behaviour is infinitely more complex likely, it s probably also cobbled together from such minimal "agents". What makes us human are the systems properties that connect these internally generated inputs, and our experiences are some part of our brain summing up system state. For this, you need complexity.

CB

In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:


CB is arguing that the brain isolates thermal noise from consciousness. I'm not so sure, but most thermal noise in biology is classical noise and classical noise can't be the basis for free will as it is predetermined

Illusion of free will - this is the big question - if it's all an illusion what experiences that illusion though? Or are we all actually zombies?

In reply to cb294:


Although thermodynamic noise in ion channel flows or receptor bindings remains classical and as such strictly deterministic, so leaves no space for actual free will, only the illusion of it.

The effects of anaesthesia are fascinating, it does seem that inhabiting specific ion channels turns consciousness of like a light which as you say hints that it's an emergent layer on the brain activity being switched off. Or perhaps they detatch consciousness from access to the memory and input/output components of the brain. It could still be running but unable to form memory of doing so - this is a recognised state that other chemicals can induce.

No evolution of a Turing machine (and by extension any classical brain) can explain the phenomenon of experiencing something with conscious self awareness. "Thoughts" can energy and fly around a network, but what actually experiences them?

In reply to wintertree:


I would argue that self awareness is merely some layer of the network monitoring overall network state, making predictions about network behaviour that would arise as a consequence of actions, monitoring inputs and matching them to memories, etc...

Emotions like pleasure or pain are simply shorthand for network states to be aimed for / avoided, and will have been selected for because a rough representation of network state that can be arrived at cheaply and quickly is sufficient and efficient.

While the exact way our consciousness is implemented may be hard to replicate in a computer, I don´t see why a fully classic computer should not achieve the same level of self-monitoring and control. If you would write such a computer program, for all practical purposes, even a fully deterministic machine would so strongly depend on initial conditions and contigencies of its operation to make it fully impossible to predict system output even without invoking quantum level effects.

This is true also for the layer / agent that monitors the system from within (our consciousness), thus creating the "illusion" of free will.

CB

In reply to wintertree:
my only experience of general anaesthetic was to go out like a light. The last thing I remember was the anaesthetist letting me know that he hadn't given me an anaesthetic yet, "just a relaxant ......."


"It went well" called the surgeon as my eyes opened. I instantly knew where I was and why, like a switch. There waswhat felt like a full jump forward in time with zero experience that I could recall in between. I wish you could get a video of going under and coming out so you could see just how it affected you

In reply to cb294:

so consciousness would just be like a global weather-system in the structure of the machine?

In reply to wintertree:


That is begging the question. You could equally argue that the brain is obviously a physical machine and physical systems can be simulated on computers which are evolutions of Turing machines therefore if the brain can experience consciousness then software running on a Turing machine can experience consciousness.

I don't think it is valid to draw scientific conclusions based on a philosophical perspective, the fact that you would like to have 'free will' doesn't make a theory which can only provide 'the illusion of free will' less likely to be true.

We need to forget the philosophy and try and build artificially intelligent machines and manipulate organic brains and see what happens. Maybe philosophical terms like free will and consciousness will turn out to be completely unhelpful in understanding how neural networks work like trying to understand combustion in terms of pholgiston.

In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:


Brains apparently have also done things a Turing machine probably can't do.

You can only argue a brain is a Turing machine if you can prove that there are no non-trivial quantum effects in the brain, by which I include quantum noise as well as more complex effects. Despite some confident proclamations this is not yet proven, and quantum effects are cropping up at unexpectedly large scales in biology.

As you say, it's not valid to draw scientific conclusions based on philosophy - but that doesn't make it any more valid to draw scientific conclusions based on science that doesn't yet exist. "Free will", "conscious self awareness" and the act of experiencing things all escape precise scientific definition or understanding. Until this is otherwise there are no scientific answers. All this before one considers the role of conscious observation in some prevalent interpretations of quantum mechanics.

How would software experience consciousness? Does a message flying around the wires that says how can I be in a box looking out at the world" equate to a person asking that question and experiencing that?

Interesting times.

In reply to cb294:


Perhaps we'll find out in the next couple of decades. Such a machine may be difficult to predict but it would still be entirely predetermined and thus fully lacking in free will.

So this whole thing basically boils down to a question of if you believe free will to be real or illusory. I'm not aware of any scientific consensus of proof here so it does all come down to belief.

In reply to DancingOnRock:

Cheers for that

In reply to wintertree:


Exactly, but I don´t see why implementing such a machine with membranes and channels is in any fundamental way different than building it with semiconductors.

Interesting times, as you say!

CB

In reply to wintertree:


I often think that folks get too hung up on freewill. The problem with freewill is that you can never know if you have it or not, as you can not replay the sequence of events that lead up to a decision to see if you would play it out differently. Generally speaking, in fact probably all the time, any decision we make is the result of what has gone before. So we may think that we are acting with freewill but in reality we are playing out the enevitable consequences of previous actions, experiences and DNA. Take belief. Belief is a very strong thing in most people and we always look for that which bolsters our belief but then some people change their belief. So I stop believing in God and become an atheist. An act of freewill or the enevitable consequence of a series of events that lead up to the decision? It is impossible to unpick, like the chaotic modelling of the weather we can not go back to the initial conditions and replay them. So for all practical purposes we have freewill because we are compelled to act as if we have freewill. No body wants to act the Diceman and subject their decisions to random chance, we all like to weigh up our options, even if the enevitable option is to throw caution to the wind and opt for blind chance. It is this "illusion" of freewill which allows us to function. Whether the decisions we make are preordained or not is immaterial.

In reply to cb294:


Agreed. The difference is we drive semiconductors to saturation to allow us to eliminate (to odds of one in quadrillion per clock per transister or more) both analog effects (e.g. each transitor has a different switching voltage) and noise. This lets us make sane design rules and build towers of abstraction, rendering large designs tractable.

Biology has embraced the madness instead

There's a seminal paper on doing the later with silicon - http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.50.9691&rep=rep1&t...

The billion dolar question is can we get a semiconductor machine to achieve consciousness without embracing an analog methodology as with nature and that paper.

Back to what started this - when the author lifted the design from the chip it was evolved in, and cloned it into an "identical chip" it wouldn't work...

In reply to Duncan Bourne:

I think I read in New Scientist something along the lines of, the brain has already decided what a person is going to do, a split second before the person experiences deciding to whatever it is.

In reply to wintertree:

Thanks, just had a brief look, but that looks extremely interesting!

Incidentally, our brains are also shaped iteratively by activity and feedback during development, just watch a baby learn that the hand is actually attached, then a few weeks later, that it control the hand, etc...., except the enhancement and pruning of connections works on system slightly bigger than a 10x10 matrix!

CB

In reply to cb294:

Even more fascinating I found was reading something by Eccles back in the 80s (Understanding the Brain?) was the way the brain within the embryo almost seemed to be exploring the developing physical body that it was to eventually control, identifying and mapping itself to it, almost like an organism taking over another. At least that's how it seemed to my simple mind

In reply to wercat:

Yes that is interesting. Initially many more connections are made or even nerve processes grown, and only those leading to productive signals are retained, the rest is pruned. This is functionally important, as defective pruning can e.g. lead to seizures.

CB

In reply to cb294:

And that raises the question of to what extent consciousness is an attribute of an intelligence within a body that can feel and that has sensations feeding back to the brain that are the result of mental activity - eg stomach ache and sweating caused by anxiety or fingers and toes tingling in anticipation of climbing

In reply to Timmd:

This is actually reasonably trivial , and simply reflects the fact that decisions can be made at many levels of our brain, from simple reflexes to learned reflexes (e.g. when driving a car) that do not need constant, conscious processing, to abstract mathematical proofs to week long deliberations what grade TPS may really be....

An experimenter may ask their proband to perform a decision task that involves low level decision making that does not necessarily require full conscious attention, e.g. clicking on squares popping up on a screen but ignoring triangles. Such a decision will be made by a processing centre reasonably close to the optical input (unlike, say, deciding whether two images of the same person show the same emotional state, which needs higher level processing).

What happens in such circumstances is that it takes some time for information to filter up through several layers from the low level centre making the decision to the high level areas where we become aware of having made the decision.

In contrast, the connection to the motor centre executing the decision is more direct, and can hence be detected a few ms earlier. It would not be possible to drive a car or play table tennis otherwise.

The phenomenon is therefore not necessarily connected with free will.

CB

In reply to wercat:

You can remain conscious also when your body gets completely disconnected from your brain by neurodegeneration or breaking your neck, so consciousness is a brain function rather than distributed over the entire body.

CB

In reply to cb294:

yes, that doesn't surprise me. I was moving perhaps more how consciousness evolves within the brain. Once established it would have past (and future as a mirror of past experience) information and the "intermodulation" products of these to form new and continuing mental states. But would consciousness like that easily arise without knowledge of "possessing" or being in, controlling and being subject to sensations from the physical body?

When our children were babies I used to wonder if each child becoming a self-aware conscious being was an evolution in itself.

In reply to wintertree:


I'm not sure you can read much into that experiment with regard to whether consciousness can be copied.

My reading of the paper is he didn't actually try it on another chip, he surmised it wouldn't work but he only had one chip. He tried copying the design to another region of the chip and found it behaved slightly differently. I think there's a more straightforward reason for the circuit needing 'unconnected' resources to function and I would speculate the circuit might well work on the same location on another chip even though it doesn't work on a different location on the same chip.

In reply to cb294:


So is it your view that recent reports of stem cell treatment being successful clinically to treat knee damage may be valid, experimental, overstated or simply fraud?

In reply to Simon4:

Which reports? It is not exactly my field, but I do work at a stem cell / regenerative medicine institute, with some bone and cartilage groups next door.

To my best knowledge I am not aware of anyone, anywhere successfully developing a stem cell based therapy that is used in humans, according to an approved protocol to treat cartilage damage. All reports on cartilage repair that I am aware of have been either based on stem cell work in a dish, or on small mammal models.

AFAIK, no one has even shown that endogenous joint cartilage cells proliferate in the adult, or can be induced to do so. Funnily enough, cartilage cells from the nose can apparently be cultivated and made to secrete new collagen matrix.

Even worse, isotope labelling studies show that knee cartilage essentially never turns over: You live with what is deposited during your youth, confirming the claim I have made repeatedly on here that eating chondroitin sulfate supplements just gives you expensive and smelly farts.

Bone is an entirely different story, where stem cell isolation, conditioning, and reimplantation is now clinical routine, e.g. for fixing joint prostheses.

I also don´t think that there is a lot of fraud going on, obviously dodgy clinics in Mexico, Dubai or Hong Kong aside. In most cases, any small experimental progress correctly reported in a scientific publication will have been blown out of all proportion in the general press coverage.

CB

In reply to cb294:

Thanks, that was rather what I suspected might be the case. Might send you a pm if that is agreeable.

In reply to Mountain Spirit:

Back to stem cells.....

Could someone have some fat cells removed and deprogramned into stem cells?.....

Would it them be possible for those stem cells to be programmed into becoming brain cells?

Sav

In reply to Mountain Spirit:


Sounds great but who wants an extra abdominal brain?

In reply to Simon4:

Sure,

CB

In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:

unless the circuit evolution was influenced by components subject to a production spread in characteristics?
Perhaps the actual components might need to "grown" subject to natural selection for each to match those used in each position in the evolved circuit?

In reply to Mountain Spirit:

Yes you can make stem cells from fat cells
(at least a specific type called induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells in short).

Yes you can make these cells differentiate into neurons
(easy actually, this is what cultured embryonic stem cells and iPS cells voluntarily do if you take away the factors that keep them in their stem cell state in the dish).

No you cannot make a brain from that lump of cells
(there is some progress in making organoids, bits of tissue that, to an extent, self-organize like the real organ would. Gut organoids work nicely and are extremely useful, e.g. for testing drugs against diseases such as cystic fibrosis, but brain and retina organoids are more tricky. No idea whether this has been tried with cell derived from fat tissue, but there should be no principal difficulty).

CB

In reply to Dave Garnett:

Dinosaurs?

CB

In reply to Dave Garnett:
Not an extra brain but a possible treatment for Dyspraxia.

In reply to cb294:

I think I have a lot of fat cells around for abs due to my bodyform which makes me put on weight easily.

If put into a brain would the iPS become new neurons?

Sav

In reply to wercat:


Maybe. It depends on how many speed grades the chips are sorted into and how tight the process tolerance is and how sensitive the evolved circuit is.

The bigger factor than process skew is that he wasn't using the FPGA CAD tools to process the bitstream, just writing 'random' values in the control memory. The routing is based on multiplexers and even if a multiplexer is not used to route a wire the configuration of the bits that control it can affect the capacitive load on wires connected to its inputs - which if you are building timing circuits out of wire delays (like this evolved circuit must have done since it didn't have a clock) would mean that the state of mutliplexers not involved in routing wires could affect the delays on routed wires and hence functionality. The switched capacitive load effect would explain the evolved circuit doing different things in different parts of the chip and resources which didn't seem to be being used affecting the function.

In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:


Neat theory. Not possible in the FPGA used if I understand you correctly, It was an ancient FPGA that was closer to a PLD; it didn't have global routing nets with multiple tristatable drivers or programmable switch matrixes. Signal flow was only between adjacent elements.

It was perhaps building isolated ring buffers that functioned as local oscillators, with these power hungry thermal monsters interacting with adjacent logic via the power and ground busses.

The design probably works in the analogue domain which means transistors are working close to their most sensitive regions, the total opposite of digital logic. This naturally gives the design a critical sensitivity to the exact parts used, but one that isn't hard to reoptimise.

I could be wrong; it's a shame this was written of as a "not useful" design methadolgy at the time and that people haven't aggressively followed it up.

It's well known in biology that having multiple different interaction routes with different topologies and speeds has major implications for the computational potential of a system, yet most synthetic brain stuff is naively carrying on with just the neuronal signalling component. Real brains have diffusive chemicals being released and shifting set points, and perhaps thermal effects in the FPGA were similar, or coupling via the power grids. Of course, build a system with all that and it'll be damned hard to understand, just like the brain...

In reply to Mountain Spirit:
I wouldn't worry about what the Greek Orthodox Church says. Any mystical and all seeing being (if they existed) would arguably have thought to think ahead and have it written down what they intended for stem cells.

I'm personally much happier since I stopped being a Catholic, I can't think of many more effective ways of making people gloomily guilty.

Why are there no booming voices accompanying flashes of lighting and dramatic partings of seas like are alleged to have happened 2000 years ago? I think we've been had.

In reply to wintertree:


More than a theory. I led the team that designed that FPGA, it was my boss gave one of the engineering samples to Adrian for his experiment. Never thought I'd be discussing the routing multiplexers on a 20 year old FPGA on a climbing website

In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:


Neat-O. That's me told. Their paper only shows nearest neighbour connections and no use of more global routing so that would be largely location invariant? Or did they limit to nearest neighbour routing with global nets? If the later I'm more convinced by your argument.

If you're still with Xilinx tell them to make some modern devices with the same inability to be cooked by a bad bitstream. I got the impression that this was the last generation of device suitable for this sort of research? (Edit: totally unreasonable I know but I do wonder where research would be now if this approach had been followed up with new generations of chips designed to use thermal diffusion and other effects with different topologies and timescales on top of analogue signaling. A near impossible design environment for making a useful firmware for mass use but a fantastic one for researching towards machine intelligence and far more interesting than a million CPU neural network emulator).

In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:

this website never fails to surprise!

In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:


And that on a thread that initially was about the opinions of the Greek Orthodox church on stem cell therapies!

CB

In reply to cb294:


I was about to make a similar comment!

From the OP I thought this would be a standard anti-religion rant thread, but it's evolved through fascinating territory to become the most interesting thread I've seen here in ages.

I kept wanting to contribute, but every comment or musing on ethics, brain development or consciousness that I could have made soon appeared lower down, better put than I would have.

In reply to Timmd:

Good for you not being a Catholic anymore.
I totally agree with you on everything.

I stopped being Greek Orthodox a long time ago....

The church supports the Nazi-style parties in Greece and Cyprus.

In reply to wintertree:


The chip had local routing to neighbour cells, 'magic' wires which did dtrange things within 4x4 cell blocks, length 4 wires starting on 4 cell boundaries, length 16 wires and a few global wires for clocks. The routing was implemented with multiplexers built from trees of pass transistors, only one of the inputs would make it all the way to the multiplexer output but all the inputs would see some capacitance from the transistors and nodes within the multiplexer and the capacitance would vary according to the control memory of the mux. So a routing mux state could vary the capacitance seen by a net it did not select. The CAD tools understood this and tried to select values for unused muxes to minimise the load but the evolved circuit bypassed the tools.



I'm not with Xilinx any more. I think the total global market for FPGAs for analogue/evolved circuits over the last 20 years has been that one unit, and we gave it away, so it could be a hard sell to management.

Seems like using FPGAs for neural networks is getting quite a hot topic now Amazon has put Xilinx FPGA boards as an option on its cloud. All digital though, just implementing arithmetic efficiently.

Hi All, my first post on here.

I'm a novice climber, literally being going to my local wall since Christmas but have a vested interest in topics like these. Briefly, I have kidney disease and have been basically looking for ways to improve my well being, prognosis and climbing ability. I did a quick search on here for "kidney" and up popped this thread.

Unsurprisingly I'm in favour of stem cell research. The thought of being able to have a a new kidney of my own "installed" without fear of rejection is very encouraging. I've looked into it a little and as stated by another poster above there are clinics in Far Eastern countries that offer this treatment. Subsequently I also read of a poor lady who tried it and lost her life as a result. It obviously has promise but we're miles away from it.

Anyway, I'm finding the climbing a fantastic challenge both mentally and physically. It's fun too.

Anyway more searching for me to do as I look for anyone with guidance on how I can increase my endurance and strength without putting my health at too much risk. (For example high protein diets are a no no with kidney disease)

In reply to Noo Noo:
Your post is very interesting.

Strength endurance: Traversing. It is also a great way to improve footwork, and technique increase contact strength and finger strength.

Strength: lots of indoor bouldering - boulder mileage.

In reply to wintertree:


Your premise is that there is free-will. There is no scientific evidence at all that confirms we have a so-called "free-will" (and lots to question the premise). My belief is that it's a very dogged, persistent illusion.

For all practical (emphasis on practical) purposes a chaotic system is not deterministic. In some sense the course is not fixed , because we could not ever (practically or even theoretically) predict that course, because the prediction engine must live next to what it is predicting, and because of that, it needs to be more complicated to take into account its own effects, which requires further complexity... In other words to compute the universe for all time (which is required to predict just a part of it due to the coupling between things), you could not fit that computer into that universe. Here are some envelope calculations that suggest just how far it might be off: http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/8895/how-many-bits-are-needed-to...
Unless there was a parallel universe that was not in any way coupled to this one (which as far as we know, is not possible) - we could not determine the future course for all time, which is another way of saying that we are not deterministic

In reply to SenzuBean:

The fact a system can't predict itself is orthogonal to the question of whether the system is deterministic.

It's self evident that a hypothetical pre-determined system cannot know it's future path, as this would imply a need for infinite storage - assuming an open universe. Doesn't mean it's not predetermined.

I've been surprised at the number of folks on here who consider free will to be irrelevant and/or illusory.

You say "no scientific evidence" but to date science can not explain how a computing machine experiences things and is aware that it experiences things - self awareness is not yet explainable scientifically. Until it is, free will is not an issue with a scientific basis.

If we consider free will illusory and accept predestination that has many implications. It hardly makes the punishment aspect of criminal justice seem fair!

In reply to wintertree:


I was going off of a definition something like: 3.
the principle in classical mechanics that the values of dynamic variables of a system and of the forces acting on the system at a given time, completely determine the values of the variables at any later time

If we cannot completely determine the values of this system at a later time, even given the initial conditions - then in this sense, it's not deterministic.


That's true - but if by my (admittedly crazy, but intriguing) logic above makes any kind of sense, then maybe our little ideas about simple deterministic systems do not hold true for vastly more complex ones. It would not be the first time that we found things change at the boundary of infinity.

Secondly, it should be noted that you and many folks (me included until now) have been using a binary definition of deterministic - either something is deterministic, or it's not. History shows often that binary choices on closer examination never are. If this little heuristic is applicable in this case (which it might be - who knows) - then the truth would lay in the fertile middle ground. Who knows what the meaning of "half-deterministic" is if such a concept could be true. It hurts my brain to think about it.


Recent studies (as far as I'm aware) have found that much of what we "decide" has already been decided in our brains before we're aware of it. Our awareness lags significantly behind the real decisions, which leads me to believe that our decisions are largely mechanistic. Human rationality is mostly used to rationalise existing beliefs (this much we can all agree on). Somehow we're quite happy to let this apply to other people - but we are totally reluctant to consider that maybe we have a priveleged position to see how it applies to other people, but we are unable to see more than glimpses of how it could be true for ourselves.
Even this paragraph - I can quite happily agree that an arbitrary human is having decisions occur in their brain before they're aware of it - sucks for that guy. But then I consider my own actions to be 'mechanistic in a sense' and I'm abhorred. Very paradoxical.


Yes I agree. But I don't necessarily accept that things are so binary. It could be possible that we have some amount of free will and everything is some amount of deterministic.

In reply to SenzuBean:


It is predetermined. You can't argue with that? This is separate to the practically of accessing and predicting that predetermination.


It's well recognised that it's almost impossible to predict a large and yet classically predetermined system, that's the gist of chaos theory, just ask the weatherman.



Yes, the brain evolved long before conscious self awareness came along - small furry rodents still make decisions after all. These new studies don't add much to my world view - the conscious self aware component of my being can review and overturn decisions reached by lower parts of my brain. Breathing is a classic example - autonomic but overridable on will.

What's really interesting is that much of the decision making process for automated decisions is not readily available to the conscious self aware part of entity. They're not fully meshed at all levels. People make unconscious decisions all the time without knowing the reasons why.

I don't think it's binary because I think quantum noise factors in to things. Although the resurgence of pilot wave theory might mean even quantum mechanics is predetermined...

In reply to wintertree:

Well, that's another complex feedback loop for the system, isn't it.

Your freewill is influenced by events outside your body/control. If something is going to cause you pain (whatever that something is or however it is derived) then your 'freewill' is influenced not to do it. Even freewill in a classical sense is not totally free and has implications.

In reply to wintertree:


Just because we don't yet know how we experience things doesn't mean we should assume it can't be done by a physical machine based on a neural network paradigm. There is also a lot of evidence that the brain is a physical machine which implements a neural network.

We don't know how far we can go with the neural network model, we are still making steady progress both in understanding the human/animal brain and in artificial intelligence. The appropriate ongoing assumption from the point of view of making testable hypotheses for experiments is that the brain is just a machine. It isn't helpful to declare consciousness is impossible for a mechanistic model and invoke 'get outs' like spirits or unspecified quantum mechanical effects until we get a lot further down the path of exploring what can be done without them.

In reply to Mountain Spirit:

Cheers.

I guess I'm being a little impatient in wanting immediate improvements. I guess it happens when you get a little older, and you stop doing some of the physical stuff that you did when you were younger, perhaps move onto other things or some may stop completely and then BOOM, you start climbing. I'm using my body in a way that I haven't previously and yet the mind remembers your strength etc. when I was younger.

I don't know how much my kidney problems affect performance. I'm at stage 4 by the way with about 19-20% kidney function left but logically it must do to a degree. So to me that's some motivation to get better, stronger and a more economical climber. I'm even looking at my weight right now.

Back to stem cells though. So far the so called treatment that is available for it just doesn't feel right at all. I have IgA Nephropathy which is basically where following an infection of some description the white blood cells have collected and damaged my kidneys (a very layman's description). As a result blood pressure rises and causes more damage. The damage is actual scarring of the minute blood vessels and kidney material. The so called treatment basically injects stem cells with the view of repairing the damaged areas. To me that doesn't feel right. There's people on here that know more than me but aren't Stem cells just basic building blocks? How does adding more "bits" rectify scar tissue? Building a whole new one seems logical but damage repair I'm not convinced of unless it's a bit like gap filling.

In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:


Indeed, but until such a reductionist machine is also demonstrated to have a self awareness and an ability to experience, it would be equally unwise to assume it can be done by such a machine.

Such a machine doesn't have to be built - what is the program for a universal Turing machine to experience feelings and self awareness? This is an equivelant problem that removes the complexities of large neural networks, and one that is also unanswered to data.


It's not just a spiking neural network however. There are chemically diffusive modulators and sub-cellular computational potential. It's entirely possible that each individual neuron is also Turing complete. That could have any level of relevance from zero to massive on the neural network hosted on the cells.



I'm in two minds on this. Building bigger - and massively more connected - neural networks is definitely one promising way forwards. I anticipate that it won't work, but I'd be happy to be proved wrong,

But if such a machine develops a consciousness and self awareness, it won't necessarily explain them. We'll just be left asking what it all means about two classes of consciousness instead of one.

"The hard problem of consciousness" is rooted in metaphysics, but there is no definitive refutation of its existence; lots of polarised expert opinion.

There is nothing mystical about speculating on quantum components - the light sleeting down on our eyes is full of quantum noise, macroscopic quantum effects are used in plant chlorophyll, it looks like some birds may make use of entangled quantum states in their vision. What else may be going on?

Rather, I would say the assumption you appear to hold, that the network activity hosted on a biological neural network is independent of the sub cellular behaviours, flies in the face of biological understanding where the evolution works very differently to human design where information processing crosses functional boundaries all the time. The effects of this may be small but small effects sometimes are very important. Again, building machines as people are doing may refute all this.

In reply to wintertree:

I disagree but my argument about the appropriate assumption is based on the scientific/engineering method rather than whether the reductionist position is more likely to be correct.

If you assume that something can't be done then you have no reason to try and do it. Assuming that it can be done is the correct approach in this case because it leads to a path of experimentation and development which is creating useful artifacts and could either confirm the hypothesis that it can be done or provide data about why it can't be done.

In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:


As long as experimeterd do their best, their motivation doesn't matter, let alone the feelings of a punter on the sidelines.

Some of the most importance results in Physics have come from negative results.

We both have our hunches, and what science there is can't settle it, and what had been built to date can't settle it. Hunches are one of the human things these created machines have yet to express...

I've no doubt that at some point a created machine could reach conscious self awareness, but I don't think it will be just a neural network patterned after a brain.

Perhaps we'll know in a decade.

In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:
in this case there might be useful artefacts along the way but there are profound ethical considerations concerned with attempting the goal of creating something self-aware, the first expressions of which were made by the likes of Mary Shelley.

It worries me (generally, not necessarily in this instance) when there are such discussions without being concerned about the ethics of creating what would probably constitute a life form, in the sense that emergent effects, entities or processes would be present which would necessarily involve an identity which might effectively know of its own existence, the possibility of it ending and thus might be subject to death.


To be clear, I have no such fears where it is clear that self-awareness or any of its elements (eg emotion) is simply an illusory output of simulation

In reply to Noo Noo:

Hi

What I want from stem cells is for them to repair the damaged neurons in my brain that are responsible for my Dyspraxia.

In reply to Mountain Spirit:


Do they think that repairs like this are actually feasible?

gives me greater hope if they are.

In reply to wintertree:


>If we consider free will illusory and accept predestination that has many implications. It hardly makes the punishment aspect of criminal justice seem fair!

Freewill is a tricky thing to test.
However re. punishment of criminals - I take the view that if a crime is a pre-determind consequence of cause and effect physics then surely equally so is punishment. Thus fairness doesn't enter into it as the decision to punish someone is the enevitable consequence of the previous series of events. One might as well say that it isn't fair that a falling apple gave Newton a whopping bruise on his head.
As for freewill being illusory it is impossible to disentangle our actions from the decision to make them. I am not going to sit around thinking I am predetermind to be a great musician so I all I have to do is wait. If I don't practice I will be crap, if I don't go out and play to people then I will be unknown. Thus the predetermind nature of an end action is so tied up with the preceeding actions that to all practical purposes it is better to assume freewill than to try and second guess future consequences

In reply to Noo Noo:

Yes they do

Just stumbled onto this.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-39092312

In reply to Noo Noo:

Awesome

In reply to Noo Noo:

I think Sheffield University I'd at the forefront of stem cell research.

In reply to Mountain Spirit:

Another one, just in today. Not directly linked to Stem cells but they must be involved I would think.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-39108026

In reply to Noo Noo:

Super cool as beans

That is what I like to read!