Jeff’s brain was not an organoid, brains in many forms, “human” takes prayer devotion and caring
Ricard Solé @ricard_sole How complex can cognition be in brain organoids? Since they do not sense or act on their environments, they lack cognitive complexity or agency. Without the organism, the “spherical brain” (my drawing) is a fascinating window to evolution and disease but not to actual cognition. https://pic.x.com/6r4kshpocm
Replying to @ricard_sole
Jeff’s brain was not an organoid, brains in many forms, “human” takes prayer devotion and caring
My younger brother, Jeff, broke his neck at C2, so he was completely paralyzed and on a respirator. The hospital staff came to my Mother and I in the middle of the night and asked us to donate his organs – “because he was in a coma, and probably would never wake up” and “because if he did wake up, his quality of life would be so bad, or his brain might be wiped and he would live as a vegetable”. I knew he would not give up.
Visualizing and intent can be measured. That is the basis of many groups efforts to use external sensor arrays, lots of data, statistical methods, to convert “intention” and “actions in the brain” to useful control signals and patterns, and to find the correlates in the real world.
Jeff died after about a year and a half. My problem (voice interface) was he was on a ventilator. We did force the hospital to give him a “talking trache” but it was not easy to understand him. The cameras were low resolution, slow and not multispectral. Lots of problems almost 40 years ago now. I needed terabytes of data, and we had kilobytes and megabytes, no low noise amplifiers and ADCs.
It hurts to remember. About 10 years ago, I wrote three books about a young girl, Dana, who learns to mind merge, to sense others, using her own brain abilities. But it leads her to be at the birth of the first true intelligent system using electronic parts and memories. That was enabled by “array antennas” and by collaborative sessions where the minds and skills of many humans could be focused onto single topics. To do in a few hours, what otherwise takes years when the minds have to communicate by words and paper and phone.
Now I have only printed the first book. And am not promoting it. Only one person has read or heard all three books. But it was a distillation of what I faced when Jeff was hurt and still living. Dana and her sister learn to mind merge with people in hospitals who are in comas, who are unconscious, who are on traches and cannot speak for themselves. Dana and her sister learn to share images and words, then they teach others who go and help in hospitals (including Veterans hospitals). You might get the idea that I was putting my wishes, yearning and pain into the book, into stories and situations where Dana could actually do something about them. Indeed. There is nothing more frustrating and painful than have someone you grew up with and love be in a situation like that.
Now my life is quite unusual. I was raised devoutly Catholic and did not leave that until I learned that molesting young boys started in the seminaries. It was not just priests, but somewhat systemic and institutionalized. But my Mother was devout, we all prayed, pretty much constantly for the world, the people around us, for people who had died, and for people in trouble. And part of that, my Mother believed in “connection”. I did not take “mind merging” from movies and talking horses, but from years of growing up believing that all humans are connected, that prayer matters, that all humans (and animals and life) are worthy and loved, that God sees everything and cares about the tiniest things. That God knows why atoms and physic and chemistry work, and He can control it.And that all humans are intended to follow God’s plans and do the best they can for all humans and living things and what happens in the universe.
So Dana consults with government agencies to develop systems that can learn in massively parallel (asynchronous neural) networks and where all that information is stored and used, to learn how to optimize, and deliberately apply those methods to all things needed by humans and related species.
I do many things by intuition and feeling. When I store memories, I store the whole of my feelings and all related sensory data as well as possible. It works and lets me keep photographic memories of all things, but more it lets me use feelings in precise ways. After decades of studying mathematical statistics for all things, I know how it works and what it can do. Those “AIs” are a few cheap algorithms and some data, but they did not losslessly index the input data, did not standardize and verify and code the input – in concert with all humans. Something that is possible, and something that is critically necessary.
Now she did that in the first year of Covid (2020) and we did not print the book because people were not sharing things that passed from hand to hand. I work about 18 hours a day, 7 days a week, so I put it out of my mind. In 2021, about Oct 17 (which happens to be Jeff’s birthday) Shahina emailed me. She said she had gotten married that summer in August. But before three weeks, her new husband, Shamim, had broken his neck in a motor bike accident and was now completely paralyzed but breathing on his own (C4). Shahina was the sole caregiver. Her school and work were on hold. She was in debt and somewhat desperate. The institutions for paralyzed in Bangladesh are well meaning but follow the Indian practices so they are very “big man” oriented. I remember, but I do not want to right now.
Shamim eventually died in the summer of 2023, so Shahina is just over a year a widow, and taking care of her Mother. Shahina is going to school and trying to learn enough to get a job working on the Internet. Bangladesh lacks many things and has around 175 Million people now.
In 2023 when Shamim was alive, they had the annual floods. How Shahina managed to deal with her completely paralyzed husband I do not know. I did not hear from her for a month and basically all she said was “we had a flood and had to leave, we survived”.
Now my first cousin, Derrill, on my Mothers side, also broke his neck. His was C5 and had use of his hands but could not walk. He lived a few years. That was before Jeff. All the 22 first cousins were close.
Why does God (chance, karma, the universe) do things like that? It certainly has focused my mind and heart and feelings on “What is intelligence, what constitutes knowledge and memories, what is essential to have consciousness and human-ness? I am too tired just now to write much more. It makes me sick to bring up those memories, since I see them, I feel them, I experience them again.
I do not know what to do to help Shahina and her Mom any more. If she published that book she wrote she might benefit a bit. But publishing books is harsh business. She needs a real job and a future. But jobs in Bangladesh are hard, her house has no heat or cooling, it floods and leaks, it has mice and bugs. Women do have some dignity there, but not much say. I do not know, I can look at the whole country, its national and international situation in detail, but it is not my country, not my people and there are 8.025 Billion more people in the world. I have no clear answer, I feel old and tired. I have devoted my life (more than 50 years of it) to try to help all countries. But I do not know what to do. It makes me a bit angry, and a bit depressed and it mostly comes out as “tired, but keep going, there is nothing else to do”.
Is it possible to make robotic bodies or exoskeletons, remote control tools for brain controlled things that need to be done – yes. Can a human body be scanned to a rigged model and full physics simulations and controls use existing muscles and bodies as robots? Yes. Can humans live completely in virtual worlds – yes. Can a person who is paralyzed work on the Internet in most any country of the world – yes. Are there hundreds of millions displaced in their own countries or to other countries because of wars and armed conflicts in many dozens of countries now – yes. Is the UN and the world going to keep supporting dictators and country leaders and support them in “divine right of rulers, life and death for all citizens, do whatever you like” – yes. Are there billions talking on the Internet and almost no one checking and verifying the whole – yes. Are there billions of humans getting terrible useless “educations” now where they think they can live whole lifetimes on what they memorize in very high cost “colleges and universities” – yes.
I have tried to map out all human knowledge on the Internet, to understand and codify and make useful “all knowledge, all languages, all devices, all things”. Every day for 26 years. Is that enough to make any difference at all. Not really. I write a few things, and the people on my X timeline all are racing to show off their skills, share their ideas, pursue their goals and chase their dreams.
Filed as (Jeff’s brain was not an organoid, brains in many forms, “human” takes prayer devotion and caring)
On the spherical organoid, just make it out of inorganics or the newer meta-organics and use fields for the interface. It is possible and not that hard now. With 8.2 Billion human organoids already, I suggest you put a lot more effort into valuing and helping the living people now, help them live lives with dignity and purpose. Stop trying to sell products and invest in the future of the human and related species.
Richard Collins, The Internet Foundation
