Reddit reviews Connectome: How the Brain's Wiring Makes Us Who We Are

Here's an image from Connectome that illustrates the pruning between age 2 and age 4.

That one is too hard to predict for me to bother trying.

I will note that it's possible that the post-rock band Tortoise was right that "millions now living will never die" (awesome album, btw). If we invest in the research required to make AI do good things for humanity rather than accidentally catastrophic things, one thing that superhuman AI (and thus a rapid acceleration of scientific progress) could produce is the capacity for radical life extension, and then later the capacity for whole brain emulation, which would enable people to make backups of themselves and live for millions of years. (As it turns out, the things we call "people" are particular computations that currently run in human wetware but don't need to be running on such a fragile substrate. Sebastian Seung's Connectome has a nice chapter on this.)

Cryonics does have a basis in science, you know, and I’ve had my own arrangements for cryonic suspension with the Alcor Foundation since 1990, funded by life insurance. Cryonicists want to develop “medical time travel” or an ambulance ride across time to try to benefit from the better medical capabilities of future societies.

Refer to:

1. General but outdated background information on the idea, mainly of historical interest now:

The Prospect of Immortality (1964), by Robert Ettinger:

http://www.cryonics.org/book1.html

2. “Cryopreservation of rat hippocampal slices by vitrification” (a peer-reviewed scientific paper):

http://www.21cm.com/pdfs/hippo_published.pdf

>Microscopic examination showed severe damage in frozen–thawed slices, but generally good to excellent ultrastructural and histological preservation after vitrification. Our results provide the first demonstration that both the viability and the structure of mature organized, complex neural networks can be well preserved by
vitrification. These results may assist neuropsychiatric drug evaluation and development and the transplantation of integrated brain regions to correct brain disease or injury.

3. Mike Darwin’s Chronosphere blog:

http://chronopause.com/

Mike goes back nearly to the beginnings of cryonics in the late 1960’s, and his blog offers a metaphorical gold mine of information, including references to a lot of scientific papers, about the field and its current but probably surmountable problems.

4. MIT neuroscientist Sebastian Seung defends cryonic suspension as a feasible scientific-medical experiment in his book Connectome, and I have it on good authority that he plans to speak at Alcor’s conference in Scottsdale, AZ, this October:

http://hebb.mit.edu/people/seung/

http://www.amazon.com/Connectome-How-Brains-Wiring-Makes/dp/0547508182

http://www.scribd.com/doc/100220308/Aschwin-de-Wolf-s-review-of-Connectome-by-Sebastian-Seung

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/New_Cryonet/message/2609

http://www.alcor.org/blog/?p=2492

http://www.amazon.ca/Connectome-How-Brains-Wiring-Makes/dp/0547508182 This was a great book for not only gaining a better understanding of what you're trying to figure more out about, but it also gives a great look into the operations of the brain. I highly recommend.

TL;DRs are fine, but I still encourage you to read the whole article.

For further reading see www.amazon.com/Connectome-How-Brains-Wiring-Makes/dp/0547508182/