i think biologists say that a plant is only dead when every cell is dead. i don't know how much of that tree in Utah is alive vs. dead, i just thought it was a cool link. i actually jumped there from a stub on a giant clonal fungus in Washington state, i think.



in the second half of #620, that's exactly what i was trying to say and didn't do a great job of it.



i will definately respond to this post later. i worked a 12-hour day today - throw on the 3 hours' travel time, and i'm beat. i'm surprised i had the umph for what i've written so far (and what follows). it's another train of thought, so it's easier to stick with the brain for this post.



that can be answered fairly easily in humans.



the lowest part, the medulla, coordinates most of our 'basic activity' - the most basic. the medulla manages autonomic functions, such as heart beat, body temperature, and various reflexes. farther up is the pons, which is mainly a sensory relay. the cerebellum, the thing on the right, deals with motor coordination, but neurologists don't all agree in what ways. there's lots of evidence to say it helps with timing movements, and another large body that says it's a sort of autopilot for movements you take without thinking, like walking.

the "midbrain" and a few other organelles make up what's called the limbic system. this is the part of the brain for which it seems, to me at least, we know the least about. it's clearly involved with emotion and instinct, but it doesn't work in a vacuum. from an evolutionary point of view, a significant minority think it's the 'second step' in brain evolution in animals. fear, disgust, urgency, sexual desire -- all coorespond to electrical storms moving through different parts of the limbic system.

but it's that annoying cerebral cortex, the grey matter, that makes things hard to understand. the grey matter is the largest part of the brain both visually and by volume, but most of it isn't cell nuclei. most of it are dendrites and axons, neuron connections. it'd be wrong to say that most of it isn't involved in thinking. the clearest evidence is that most of it is involved in sensory processing, and that "thinking" in lay terms involves a great deal of sensory information.

so why is so much of our brain tied up in connections and sensory processing? that's a much more interesting question, speaking in neurological-philosophical terms. your flying bug? there needn't much more than a single connection between the eyes and the wings to avoid an object in one's path. but the bug doesn't identify the object, not with the same sense pathways at least, and not in the same sense of what an identification means for a human. a bug doesn't name the object, and it doesn't come to a critical moment where it decides to avoid or not to avoid the object. that's why our brains have so much more connectivity - because there are so many more processing iterations between stimulus and behavior.

so, to answer the question in the longest way possible, i'd say we could get by doing about as much as your flying bug if we had about half our brain mass (just a ball park estimate). the medulla and cerebellum wouldn't change much at all. the limbic system would probably be a bit smaller, and the cerebral cortex would also be smaller (in volume), but mostly because of a reduction in connectivity, not simply a raw reduction of neurons.



well i don't want to see you dead, but i have to say i think you'd lose that bet. i think what i might point out is that you're lumping brain functions together based on experience, whereas if you actually study how a brain works, you'd see that most of our experiences involve lots of layers of processing. let's just look at vision. insect eyes are different than mammal eyes. compound eyes have horrible image resolution, but are great for seeing a wide angle and detecting movement quickly. so an insects brain is wired to look for general cues that might lead them to what they want - there's green over there, go that way for food.

human vision has much more resolution (though our eyes are actually kind of poor, but i'll get back to that). we have specialized areas of our visual cortex for detecting color, shape, contrast, movement, and a few others. those initial processes are re-compiled in some especial ways - for example we're hard wired to detect faces. what's amazing is that most of what stengths in vision we have aren't a factor of our eyes, but our brains. if you took a snapshot of what the eye detects in a split second, it'd look horrible, sort of like a camera man took a snap shot while running towards the subject. our brains make up for this the same way as NASA does for blurry images of space - by 'averaging' several successive shots for a clearer end product, and so fast we can't usually detect it. it accomplishes this by having the eye move its focus very, very quickly, very frequently, in very small amounts (it can't be detected without a measurement instrument).

so the point is, not all vision is created/evolved equally. this part of a neuropsych class usually comes with lots of fun, and usually familiar, optical illusions. i don't feel like looking up any more images, but here's one you can do at home. have you ever found your blind spot? everyone's got one; it's where the optical nerve enters your retina, breaking the uniformity of light receptor cells. you can't normally see it until you make yourself see it, so here's what you do.

first, look dead forward and find a spot on a relatively distant object or surface that you can focus on - just something to keep your eye trained in more or less the same spot. i usually look for something on the wall.

second, cover one eye with your hand (it's much easier than closing one eye, trust me).

third, hold your thumb up and out at arm's length, to cover the spot you're focusing on. then, slowly move it away (opposite the direction of your covered eye). try to keep it on the same level as the spot you're focusing on. at about 20 degrees, if you're moving your thumb slowly enough, it'll disappear.

it takes a little patience; i think some people who say they can't find it are just not realizing that they're experiencing it.

"disappear" isn't exactly a good description, but it's the best one there is. not everyone can manage to do this, so i'll explain how i experience it. it's like my thumb just isn't there. it doesn't seem like there's something covering it, and it almost seems like i can see the background through it. that perception, the continuation of the background, is common, something your brain does. it sees a pattern in the background and 'fills in' where the eye can't see. i dunno, if you do find the blind spot, maybe you won't find it as cool as i do. but i think it's a really trippy little experience, maybe just because it's so far from the normal types of sensation available (it's not vision, it's non-vision).

anyway, just a random Mr. Wizard moment  anyone else remember that guy?

i know you don't want this here but it is relevant.


according to the bible the home of the spirit is the heart not the brain. what if the spirit is where the actual intelligence is. this would make the brain nothing more than a computer controlling the body and connecting the spirit to the world.


OK you can attack me for bringing it up

maybe you missed the point but, i don't see anything wrong with bringing this up because it's not disrespectful to other points of view. but you'd probably be better able to answer your question than i am - what if intelligence comes from the spirit which is in the heart? what significance do you attach to that possibility?

where does a computer get its intelligence. the motherboard or the person using it. the hard drive is just storage.


so if the spirit is the user of the body. that would make the brain the motherboard and the hard drive.


the motherboard controls the auto response of the computer. whether it is the monitor or the sound board. the program tells the motherboard how to handle my input. such as chatting or playing a game. but all the computer really does is math.

I would take that bet! not withstanding that your post is very interesting and i'm not saying any facts brought forward are wrong. I look at it this way, if that tiny pinpoint sized brain of an insect can do all that it does, and you managed to create a micro computer the same size to simulate it exactly, well then you can multiply that capacity by a thousand times if you like to allow for all that extra stuff you mention and still have a micro computer no bigger than a pinhead!

Just imagine that tiny insect brain being increased exponencially in sieze and maintaining the same density and complexity on the way to be the size of a human brain?

Usually motherboards need a little bit of a 'processor' to work.

I would compare the motherboard to being the central nervous system.
The processor ram and virtual memory combine to create thought.
The Hard drive is memory.

The spirit is not an appendage of a biological component. But it is obviously linked and interacts with your conciousness which is in your brain.

fair enough, i should have read the bet more carefully. you may indeed be right about a dedicated processor chip - i was still thinking more in terms of 'biological circuitry'. with regard to the computer version of a brain, i think that's a tough bet because 1) we can't, not now at least, built a fly brain chip the size of a fly brain, 2) we don't clearly understand enough of any brain's functioning to simulate anything but end results (the full details of a brain's computational process still aren't fully worked out) and 3) computers and brains don't work the same way. with better understanding of how the brain works, i think we could make a computer program that simulated all the same process. but with current, or even near-future, computer technology, i think such a mechanical brain would be much bigger than a natural one. i'm not saying this because i think it argues against your point, just to keep the convo going.

the trouble is right now we'd need to use binary computation to simulate processes that don't occur in binary--at least, to simulate a brain perfectly. to re-create the same effects a brain produces might be better achieved by different means altogether. same as with DNA and computers, anaologies between brains and computers only work up to a point.

You have pretty much nailed the whole topic of interest!

Now it is indeed interesting to concieve of constructing a mechanical insect such as the bee seen in the movie 'Richie Rich' or the cocroach seen in 'the 6th element' (what a freaking brilliant movie that was).

I'm not so sure the technology is currently beyond our grasp tho? I'm wondering if it is possible to construct a conventional computer so tiny using an electron microscope that you could indeed create a functioning bee? To simulate exactly a natural bee's behaviour with independant software i believe is still beyond our grasp tho.

Are there 'spy insects' in existance today?? i would think it quite likely?

i am beginning to think you both are mistaken power source for operating.

the brain is powered by chemicals. but the cells communicate with electric.

the computer is powered by electric. but the different parts communicate with electric.

We are not mistaking anything, we know there are differences between biological systems and computers.

I think too little is known about the brain to really say anything for certian. When I was thnking about it today, I noticed something about the Brain/Size theroy.

I think it can only apply to similar animals. You see, a fly's and and an Elephant's brains might not be even comparable even in ther terms of organization and functionality. Dytopic brought up a good point with his Eye examples. The needs of the organisms would dictate how its brain would function. For example, most insects can't hear, so that section of the brain wouldn't even exist in an insect.

The organisms are so dissimilar in anaotmy, etc, it would stand that their neurological systems would be totally different. The insect brain is just a simple set of ganglia (two Relay points, essentially). To compare it to a computer, were essentially talking about a set of repeaters (or hubs) that are linked together with some basic programming.

I think for this thoery to work, it would require a comparison between similar species. That would remove as many variables as possible. The theory ought to run like this: The Size/Weight ratio between two similarly sized species would allows us to determine which species may be more intelligent. By comparing similar sized organims from a similar class (or even as narrow as genus), I think you'd have a more accurate comparison and proper application of the theory. Hence extreme differences in body size, brain organization, organism ability, and senses would ne negated, allowing for a better comparison.

The brain is power by chemicals, that is true. The cells do not communicate with "electric". Nerve cells communicate via neurotransmitters, more chemicals. The electrical pulses simply occur across 1 cell from dendrite to axon(or do I have that in reverse? Sorry sleep medicine kicking in). Essentially it works like this:

1-Nerve cell recieve a stimulus (a chemical)
2-The chemical binds to receptors in the nerve cell
3-This causes a process (I'll look it up if you all want) that essentially causes that section of the nerve (the dendrite) to reverse polarity across its membrane.
4-The reversal of polarity kicks off several voltage gated ion channels in the vicinity.
5-This causes more of the membrane to flip polarity.
6- Repeat 4 and 5 until the polarity flip hits the end of the axon
7- The reversal of polarity causes vesilces containing neurotransmitter to release the transmitter into the synapse, stimulating the next cell.
9- Ion pumps kick in resetting the nerve cell to original polarity)

Hope that helps!

I doubt that very much. Try to think along the lines as if you are the person trying to build the software and hardware to replicate an insect, then come back and have another look at your above statement.



That is a fair remark. I was also thinking of it in terms of the percentage of recources each animal diverts to its brain. So an animal that has a larger brain for it's size, means that it's evolutionary path has led it to put more value on intelligence.

not exactly, or rather not exclusively. brain cells communicate in a number of ways. neurons outside of the brain mostly communicate with "electricity" (though an action potential occuring through ion channels is very different than an electrical current properly speaking). but neurons in the brain also communicate with neurtransmitters, and there are literally dozens of them, and their effects vary. it's not that serotonin has X effect, it's that serotonin has X effect on Y cell, but A effect on B cell.



well, you make a decent point. there are a lot of things we could theoretically do, but economics is pain. so if you include in part of "we could do it" convincing people that it's worth doing, then your bet is a bit more shaky. but then again, there are some kooks out there, so who knows.



well, you could stick close to home. you could compare modern humans to whatever's the most similar - genetically, the chimp would be the closest living creature. with niether asserting nor refuting evolution and creationism, there are many species of extinct hominins that anatomically and genetically (as best we can tell from limited samples) more similar to us than any of the living great apes. but i digress.



so then how would you account for differences in intelligence? not just between people, but between species? is it fundamental differences in the spirit itself, is it how user friendly the hardware is, both, neither? just curious.

Oh you must mean kooks like the CIA or KGB,, They have the recources, and the need!



Now i am reminded of a previous thread where near death experiences were covered.

The near death experience in question was somone who remembered looking down on themselves in the operating theatre.

The questions i raised were as follows;

How does a spirit store memory to be uploaded to the brain when they come back to life? Or does the spirit remain connected somehow and transmits everything it sees directly into the unconscious mind to be remembered upon awakening?

Since people with alzimers and other brain problems forget things, I can only assume their spirit is not taking over the job of managing memories. Which begs the question as to weather or not we will remember our lives once we die and become a spirit?

Stories of people in the spirit realm seem to reflect that the person is pretty much the same person they are in life and therefore having the same level of intelligence in the spirit even though they do not have their brain with them!

if i am right(doubtful) then the spirit would have to have its own memory storage. like you do when you sit down in front of a computer.
if you want to know what your spirit looks like look in a mirrior.
my opionion a spirit is a being of light.


every thing on the planet is hard wired to be that which they are. except for man it seems. other wise we couldnt change what we are. ie a weakling couldn't become a body builder.

denyasis, i've really enjoyed some of your recent posts on colonizing planets. i haven't given myself time to sit down and articulate a whole lot, until tonight. in summary you've been asking some of the same questions and pointing out some of the same things i have on my own. i'm still not even sure how to start...

i guess i'll start with my most basic dichotomy: there's a huge difference in terms when applied to human settlements in the same star system vs. separate star systems. a "colony" (of Earth) on Mars wouldn't necessarily be self-sufficient, thought of as independant, or even necessarily be home to a large number of people.

a colony in another star system is by necessity more like the seed of a new human civilization. it cannot be dependant on the mother civilization except with FTL travel, considering the physical difficulties of which, i'll ignore. if not a huge population when founded, they'd at least need a pretty large genetic sample, to keep from too strong a bottleneck effect and increase the chances of genetic success on a new world without much support.

i'll return to getting exosolar colonization later; for now i want to keep on track with intrasolar colonization. i think given enough time for technological development, we could even terraform a planet like venus. but i don't think we will; i think it'll almost invariably be more economically viable to build habitation complexes in space. one planet can only hold so many people, and over a long enough period of time, even the Earth's environment will change sufficiently that we'll have some trouble living here in our current anatomical state.

i think the majority of people in the future will not live on a planet at all. planets and other celestial bodies will still be useful places to aquire resources. i can almost imagine something like Cowboy Bebop. well, maybe that plus Brave New World.

but i think the real challenge will be creating sustainable Earth-like conditions on a large space station. nature exists in a tight balance. there are myriad micro-organisms that play a vital role in an ecosystem, and we don't really know much about their breadth and inter-relationship with each other and the more human-scale organic environment. until we learn a lot more about that, we're going to have some trouble trying to adapt any environment to suit our needs. that isn't to say we can't live without doing it. plants can be supported and cultivated on totally artificial conditions, but it's energy-intensive, and some species aren't as well-suited for it. that, however, relies on seeds and seedlings from Earth: AFAIK we haven't been able to come up with a consistently effective method to sexually reproduce all plants: be we can clone just about any of them, it just takes the right hormones (plants are a wonderful kingdom in that respect). i'd still like to work out more of the details of this.

and this isn't to say i think people won't continue to live on Earth for a very long time; but i think in time, there will come a point when conditions are such that we're mostly living in (mostly) self-contained hab complexes. i think environmental change is the exclusive reason: i think in time, we might want to 'let go' of the Earth we know and let it evolve, for lack of a better word. i think if molecular biology really takes off, one of the things we're going to want is lots of specimen of new and interesting life, to expore the possibility of new and beneficial organic compounds. and that's going to require reducing our ecological 'footprint' on the planet, so to speak - that, and the inevitability that the environment will change for one reason or another (many times if we manage not to go extinct). in that sense, given enough time even Earth will become "just another planet."

and it's for that very same reason i think we'll eventually be interested in "organiforming" planets. i don't say terraform because i'm not necessarily talking about making them Earth-like. and this transitions nicely into the exosolar aspect of my thoughts.

the near-exclusive form of interaction between human stellar civilizations will be information (again, presuming no FTL), both scientific (especially molecular-biological/genetic by measure of volume) and cultural. but the time for this stage to mature would be millenia - as long as recorded history so far a few times over. for one, i'm recalling my previous descriptions of why i think it'd take a certain critical mass of conditions before colonies outside our home solar system became and economically and culturally viable option: i think population growth will be one of the major factors, which is why i envisions absoluately massive colony ships, capable of carrying billions to a new home, and thus allowing larger family sizes and less cramped living quarters for the home system - i'd imagine lots of great PR for this, and really in my first plot i'm imagining it accomplished by a private business. a lot of the reasons i imagined the massive colony ships i have relates to this kind of explanation.

my understanding of how life came to be on earth is admittedly based on evolution, and i'll get that out of the way; make of it what you will, and i'll do what i can not to offend. my understanding is that the first precursors to genes, and thus life, were simple organic compounds thought to be seeded into the planet, along with water, by comets. as it turns out, ISM isn't just dust and gases; there's also fairly complicated organic compounds more than rarity (speaking relatively of course - we're talking about a substance of such low density it's practically absolute vacuum for any sake above the quantum phsyical).

at any rate, it stands to reason that many planets, by these conditions, have been exposed to the same precursors. but that doesn't help us to understand very much at all about the likelihood of finding life elsewhere - and in that, i'm only referring to genetic. i don't think there's a priori reason to suspect that "life" couldn't exist in many other media, so to speak. electronic life is an obvious possibility to point out - artificially it doesn't seem too far off (by a secular philosophy anyway - others may of course have a more metaphysical definition of life, and i welcome their contributions).

i think wherever conditions occur that a qualitative jump in phsyics-level interaction goes from reaction to reiteration, you've got the potential for what could be considered life. by 'reaction to reiteration' i mean that i think, yes, life can be described in purely physical laws in the same way unliving phenomena can, but it's vastly more complex, which is why i called it a qualitiative jump (i.e., a change in the qualities of the phenomenon). i think that complexity is best summed up by the term reiteration - which is a mathematical (and computational) term. but when you get down to it, psychology is rapidly becoming biology, which has been mostly chemistry since the 60s, which is pretty much a distillation of physics in modern form, and phsyics when total and perfect is really just math. these sciences share what can be called consilience: the same basic sets of principals, but different levels, styles and forms of practical application and inquiry.

so any reiterative system could be described as living, but i'm sure there are other criteria that can and should apply. but it's my explanation for how i think life could exist in other places in totally different ways that our own, but at the same time there's reason for me to believe genetic life might not be too uncommon. but even within the bounds of life existing in the genetic medium we know on Earth, i think there's an incredible level of possibility beyond what we have observed on Earth.

do i think it'll be common? i haven't a clue. do i think we'd destroy it? not if we understood it to be alive, and then the only gaurantee is for however long it takes to completely analyze the creature and determine if we can use it in some way. past that, it's a matter of culture and ethics how long and if we'll place nice with next door's mother nature. unless of course the alien life presents and obvious, demonstrated threat; then all bets are off.

but intelligence as we know it is another question. and if nothing else, the lack of (all but our own) intelligable radio noise in the universe is pretty damn conspicuous.

Yes um i think dystopic is giving a little hint, just a 'little' hint to get the thread back on track! lol

ok i think we have established the two reasons to colonize.


1 to get rich.

2 because you don't like what is going on at home.


so the questions become


1 how can we become rich by moving to the moon?


2 is there anything going on here that you don't like enough to move away?



as for if we can colonize the moon. yes according to NASA all you need is water and or a shovel. there seems to be lots of water in the rocks you just have distill it out. as for where to live. the cheapist place is in a cave. natural, dug or built.

Ok i have a shovel in one hand and a bucket of water in the other.... how come i'm not on the moon yet?

did you buy a ticket to get there.


we have a special on tickets this month only 150 million each.

not in the least, i just haven't had time to follow up on some of the earlier posts. i had 12 hour days monday and tuesday.

I've always wondered about radically different forms of life, with silicon or nitrogen based "genetic" structures. However, while I'm not saying they don't exist, the odds of us finding them would be incredibly low, if only because we simply have no clue to how it could possibly work; we wouldn't know what to look for.



I'll take that a step further: I think that alien life would actually be very similar to Earth life.

You mentioned how it is likely that all planets are exposed to the same "precursors", from which DNA (or whatever came first; we aren't sure yet are we?) is made. Then, this DNA works its way up through to single celled organisms, then multi-celled, etc. However, while sci-fi stories tell us of all sorts of aliens, like great tentacle beasts or twenty headed insects, how practical are these designs? While on Earth we have millions upon millions of different species, as a whole, common themes are prevalent, because those themes work. I will cite the example of bilateral symmetry. Bilateral symmetry means a creature has two sides, which are mirror images of one another. Humans are bilaterally symmetrical (our left looks the same as our right). In fact, almost every species exhibits this trend (some exceptions being primitive organisms like starfish, which are radially symmetrical). Why is this? Because, a creature that has nearly identical halves requires only half the genetic information. Less genes, less potential screw ups in gene replication. The point of all this is that, while many forms of life are possible, we have to consider the competitive environment that goes hand in hand with evolution. Bilateral symmetry is such a huge advantage, and this is evidenced by life on Earth. The same can be said for other general forms, like quadrupedalism in large animals. So yeah, we might find violently purple feathered cows, but I think we will still see similarities in basic shape amongst alien life.



LOL!

Oh, in case you guys were wondering, I have been keeping track with the thread, I just didn't feel I had anything worthy to contribute.

That, and I've been playing a lot of Halo 3.

also, with regard to soul and memory, it sort of reminds me of something a friend of mine told me. her grandparents are mennonite. once she asked her grantmother, since they believe very few people go to heaven, if people in heaven were sad to lose their loved ones, and her grandmother replied that you don't remember anything in heaven. seems a little dower to me.