it experience suffering possibility

 

We Contain Multitudes

We are patterns, processes, interconnected life forms sharing a space. That our minds have thoughts in each moment, that our brains exist longer than the rest of us, gives rise to the illusion of consistency. In reality, throughout our entire lives, we are in a constant state of becoming.


Cell Life Times

Adult humans have about 37 trillion cells (37,000,000,000,000). Each has its own life span ranging from a few hours to our entire lifetimes. Red blood cells live for about four months. White blood cells average more than a year. Skin cells die in about 18 days. Colon cells live less than five days. Some brain cells live an entire lifetime.

The number, arrangement, life, and state of our cells undergo constant change. They are never the same from moment to moment. For the middle aged like me, most of my body is less than ten years old, although in total cell's average about a 16 year lifespan.

Our brains are standout exception to this aging. Most brain cells live as long as we do. A few die, a few arrive to fill in, but most are with us through our entire lives. This persistence in our brains existence is part of the reason we perceive ourselves as being more consistent than we are.


Body Biomes

We are more than just human cells, our genetic makeup is only a tiny fraction of the total genes that exist inside our bodies. There are many bacteria that live inside us, on us, with us.

In this sense we humans are more like biomes or ecologies than individuals. In a 200-pound adult, 5 pounds of us are not truly us. For every human gene in our body, there are 360 microbial genes. This includes viruses, micro-phages, and other tiny organisms.

There are about a two thousand trillion bacteria (2,000,000,000,000,000) in our bodies. Our human cells are outnumbered by twenty to one by bacteria. Human cells tend to have more weight and size, but lose the numbers and diversity game.

Bacteria and yeast colonies live through most of the body. Coexisting in symbiotic relationships with us from our bellybuttons to our eyebrows, from our blood vessels to our ear canals. Bacteria are so vital to our survival that we would soon die without them.

More than 500 species of our co-life-forms are living at any one time in an adult intestine.
Our friendly passengers produce molecules that help us harness energy and extract building blocks from food, act as a first line of immune defense, and provide communication pathways between our cells.


Inside Cells

Even though an individual cell may exist for a period of time, The contents of cells are also constantly changing. All cells are in constant motion within.

Inside each cell has a ongoing flurry of activity as it builds, transports, uses, then recycles proteins. There are about 100,000 different kinds of proteins necessary for each human cell to function. Each protein exists for about one to two days.

Molecules go in and out of cells constantly. Large complex molecules containing energy, raw materials, signals for behavior and more; pass in, move through, and leave cells regularly. Smaller molecules like oxygen, water, and carbon dioxide move in, out, and about cells freely.

Very well, then I contradict myself,
I am large, I contain multitudes.

We Are Multitudes

We have a over five hundred (500) times the number of cells in our bodies as there are stars in the milky way galaxy.

It is our shared illusion to perceive ourselves as humans rather than ecosystems with a human framework. Not sensing the cells, the proteins, or bacteria allows us to ignore their fundamental part of our existence.

We think ourselves a single thing, but we are much more than that.

At each moment we are something. In the next moment we have changed all over. As time passes what we are is completely different.

In the Beginning was the Word

What are Words?

Words are symbols to communicate with.  We have character symbols that represent the words we can write and read.  Vibrations in the air represent words too.  The words are not in the character symbols or vibrations in the air. 

Transforming senses into symbols

Words are ideas in our brains.  Words exist in our minds.  We can only physically sense the words when we imprint them or move the air.  Words must exist inside us before we can use them.

We experience the worlds with our senses.  Sight, smell, and sound inform our experience; our knowledge of the world.  These experiences are captured in our brains.  Networks of neurons capture what we sense.  Neurons do not capture the reality outside of us. 

Our minds store metaphors of reality.  Our brains have patterns that reflect our experience of reality.  Neurons capture a symbol of what we experienced.  The smell of a rose is not what we have in our brains.  A symbol that helps us recall the smell does exist.  When a similar symbol comes to us again, we know what it is through our experience. 

Learning the smell of roses

A child develops experience before words.  We lay down symbols of reality as soon as our senses and brains become engaged.  Only when enough experience of reality has shaped our brains with information, can we start to abstract that experience into words.

Words are how we share our experience.  Words are our shared model of reality.  We learn our words from each other.  Our brains learn to assign the words to what we have sensed.  

Meaning in Mind

Words are symbols held in our brains.  Our pattern of neurons hold these symbols of writing separate from the experience they represent.  The words “the rose smell” are stored in our brains.  “The rose smell" is stored both as remembered sensation and as a set of words associated with the sensation.  Words seem to have an existence of their own.  The words are not the remembered smell. Words are references of smell abstracted into other networks of neurons.

Creating meaning from links

These stored sense memories and their associations as words are models of the world made into physical reality.  The model of reality existing in our brains is a physical thing of matter and energy.  Words are written into our brains. 

Many kinds of living beings have sense memory.  Stored experience of reality as it is sensed is an old trick of life forms.  The storage of what is experienced as a symbol to be used later has a significant competitive advantage.  Symbols stored in physical reality and recalled for later use give primitive mind to even the lowest of creatures.

Meaning begins when symbols are linked with experience.  The very meaning of meaning is that some symbol is held to be similar to another.  These associations of stored symbols in our brain define the world to us.

Symbols give our minds existence.  Without a model of reality, thought can not exist.  Thoughts are models of reality moving from form to form in time.  Our brains sequence through models of reality, symbolic representations of experience, when we think. 

One can then say the word was the beginning of the human mind.  The human mind transformed by development of symbols.  Brains sharing symbols of experience was the start of culture.   We consider ourselves superior to other life forms because we share our internal metaphors of reality with each other.

Sharing symbols helps us all understand more reality.  Metaphors of reality not yet experienced directly can prepare us to deal with them when we do.  Words provide us with a tool to transcend beyond our own bodies to a larger time and space.  Our senses are extended by the words we associate with them.

Often words are used with multiple meanings.  One symbol can be associated to different sensed realities.  Take the word Kind for instance.  Kind is linked with “things that are similar”.  Kind is also linked with “friendly, generous or empathy”.  These different meanings are stored separately in our brains and only linked by how communicate them.  The spoken or written use of the word Kind is the same. The meaning, the association, the link to our sense experience with the word Kind is different.

Symbolic Limits

The average human knows less than 20,000 words.  English contains about 600,000 words if you include root words and derivatives.  This means most of us know about 3% of the words existing in our own culture.

Some words get used more than others.  Some parts of reality are experienced by few of us, often in one special practice or another.  Plumbers have their own words for their trade.  Physicists have special words rarely used by others.  Preachers have a vocabulary of their own.  Unique sensory experience provides each of our minds with its own set of metaphors for engaging reality with.

Words are links to stored sensations.

There are many words we each know.  There are many more we do not yet know.  Of all the possible sensory experiences of reality, we are limited to only those we are exposed too.  Even by extending our experience using the words of others, we are still limited to the total set of experiences that all minds have. Our limits in time and space place a limit on the vocabulary we can ever develop.

Discovering new means of sensing the world expands our vocabulary.  Sensing electricity transformed our experience of reality.  Close observation of the planets allowed us to sense gravity differently.  The microscope opened a new set of sensory data to us.  Each of these new experiences caused a change in words. Some words were transformed and others created to help us give meaning to the novel experience.

Are there an infinite number of sensory experiences?  If so then there are infinite numbers of words. 

There are certainly more experiences and words to call them than we can all ever imagine.

Are Corporations, Embryos and Aliens Persons?

What is a person?  Our debate defining ‘person’ is emotionally charged and rarely logical.  Words like ‘baby’, ‘corporation’, ‘human’, and ‘person’ are used interchangeably.  We all may have an opinion, but there is no common agreement on what is a person.

Is he a person?

Historically women and slaves have not been considered persons, even in my own country.  Others wish to consider animals as persons and wish to grant them moral and legal rights.  Science mixes it up with tradition, religion, and law to give us a mind-numbing view of what a ‘person’ is.

When we have an opinion and seek facts to prove it, we are not being honest with truth.  Only when we seek facts first and keep an open mind can we seek truth.  Let’s examine some facts then consider what we mean when we say ‘person’.

Person

There is no legal definition of person agreed upon by states or nations. 

In most societies today adult humans are usually considered persons.

If you look-up dictionary definitions of human and person they are circular.  A human is a person and person is a human.

Frederick Douglass was not a
person until he bought it.

To many a ‘person’ can include non-human entities such as animals, artificial intelligence, or extraterrestrial life.

There are even legal definitions that include entities such as corporations, nations, or even estates in probate as ‘persons’.  In some legal definitions those with extreme mental impairment or lack of brain function have been declassified as ‘persons”.

Religious fundamentalists want to push the definition of person to the moment of conception.

Meanwhile science is struggling to find a clear definition of what constitutes a human. 

Some lawyers and politicians maintain that corporations are legally persons.

Legal Definitions

Initially, only white males over 21 years old who owned property were considered persons in the United States.  Individual states were allowed to determine how much property they must own to achieve personhood.  All others, including the young, poor, women, slaves, and indentured servants were legally considered less than people.

Are corporations persons?

There has been a long struggle across the world to expand the definition of what it is to be a person. In the United States, slaves became persons with the passing of the 13^th Amendment. Women became persons with suffrage. 

Today, children are not considered full persons before the law, only partial persons.  Their rights are limited and controlled until they reach 18 or even 21 years of age.  Voting, driving, and even the freedom to be alone are controlled for children by law.

In 1819 Dartmouth College was granted an initial form of person status as a corporation with Dartmouth v. Woodward.  Later rulings have expanded the definition of corporations giving them many of the legal rights as persons. 

In our most recent election for President one candidate even declared “corporations are people, my friend.”  He meant that corporations are a means for people to enact their powers as persons.

Corporations are widely considered to be owned as property by people and therefore are an extension of the persons who own them.  With multi-national and stock owned companies, the line between what constitutes a person is legally blurred.

Embryo

Conception occurs at the meeting of sperm and egg.  After cells begin dividing they are known medically as an embryo.  At conception a single cell has human genetic material.  If no replication errors occur, there is a potential that an embryo cell will develop into an adult human being.

Is an embryo a person?

Mississippi is attempting to define embryos as a persons.  The legislation says that:

“The right to life begins at conception. All human beings, at every stage of development, are unique, created in God’s image and shall have equal rights as persons under the law.”

Arkansas, Iowa, and Oklahoma have similar legislation in process.  

Recent attempts to define embryos as persons have run against In Vitro fertilization technology.  Couples who have difficulty reproducing may use In Vitro fertilization to generate 15 (or more) embryos. Two or three of those embryos are then implanted into a woman’s womb.  The remaining embryos are kept in storage or destroyed.  Defining an embryo as a person classifies this technology as murder.

Others are claiming that a distinction can be made between In Vitro and sex-based fertilization, by denying person-hood to what they call ‘pseudo-embryos’.

Stem cells are cells that can become any other cell.  Stem cells can theoretically be used to clone a human being.  Embryos created using cloning technology could also be granted person status.  Many nations are actively working on an international ban for cloning humans.

Another consideration about embryos as having life is an often unconsidered moral dilemma.  If a In Vitro fertilization clinic is burning and you only have time to save the technicians inside or the embryos in the freezer, which would you choose?  The most popular choice by far is the technicians, yet thousands of embryos would cease to exist.

Fetus

At nine weeks, the embryo is redefined to be a fetus.  Human-like features only begin to appear after this point of development.  In the first trimester all mammals appear similar.  There are no uniquely human characteristics that can be observed until the second trimester begins.

Is a fetus a person?

The Catholic Church has legally argued for fetuses to be considered persons.  Lawyers representing the Catholic Church have also argued the opposite case that fetuses not to be considered persons. 

Often the debate about a fetus being a person struggles around the issue of when human thought starts.

Brain waves do not start until the 30^th week of pregnancy. Brain waves are not a sign of humanity, rather of animal-like brain function.  Cats, mice, elephants and human fetuses are highly similar in brain function at this time.

Some have been pursuing a definition of a person that starts at independent viability, when a body can live outside of its mother.  These advocates claim that the fetus is a part of the mother until it separated from her body.

Some technologies have been developed that can substitute for a womb, however prior to nine months of development, death outside the womb without these tools is almost certain.  Fetuses are generally not able to live outside the mother until birth.

Most agree babies are persons

Baby

Medically, upon leaving the womb a fetus is redefined to be a baby.

It is scientifically inaccurate to use the word ‘baby’ when referring to an embryo or fetus.  While this may be emotionally satisfying or appeal to our paternal or maternal instincts, it is not a factual scientific or correct legal definition.  

Religion and Spirit

Some religions, like Sunni Islam and fundamentalist Christians, claim that souls are attached to bodies at conception and are therefore persons.

Jewish law defines the legal status of a person at birth, claiming that a fetus is not yet a person until the umbilical cord is cut.

Sunni Islam maintains
persons start at conception

There is no scientific evidence that a soul is attached to a developing human at any point in the development process, embryo, fetus or baby.  Only religious claims based upon faith use this terminology, not the law or science.

Attempts to use the religious doctrine of some to make law for everyone are the equivalent of trying to establish religious law.  In the United States this is expressly forbidden by the constitution which states: 

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”.  

A Fourteenth Amendment was passed to say that rule is also applied to individual states.  

Since not all religions or even sects within a religion agree on person-hood, no one church can say what a person is for all persons, only their own.

The US Supreme Court has made it clear that until objective evidence can show a soul is attached to a body, declaring an embryo as a person will remain a matter of religious opinion and not law.

Animals

Are dolphins persons?

Some view animals as persons.  They advocate vegetarian diets and rights for animals.  Some even go as far as advocating non-violence on animals.  While it may seem extreme, their moral and logical arguments are worth considering in our quest for a definition of what is a person.

Gary Francione thinks we should go so far as to enact animal welfare laws.

Desiring protection for a special subset of non-human species, they wish to see rights defined for animals like chimpanzees, elephants, dolphins and even some birds.  They claim that if we would not do it to a human, we should not do it to these animals either.

If we were to make a genetic modification to an animal, like we do with engineered plants today, that allowed them to speak with us even in a limited way; would we start to see them as persons? 

Science

The debate in science about defining person is not from over by a long shot.  Several definitions have been tried and each has failed in its turn.

Birds use tools, have language, and act morally

At one time, persons were those who used tools.  Evidence that birds, primates, and other species built and used tools took this definition away.

For many years language was seen as the division between person and animal.  Slowly dolphins, chimpanzees, crows, and even ants were seen to have language.  Language alone can not be used a definition for what is a person

Morality is often used as a way to separate humans as persons from other animals.  This definition is under serious threat as sharing, fairness, and even intentional self-sacrifice is documented in animals.

If we could create a clone from a Neanderthal or Cro-Magnon would we consider them a person?

If we meet an alien life form that can think, communicate, and has morality would we give it rights as a person?

How much of a brain can be taken away before stop considering a human body to be a person?  If the brain mostly dies and the body is kept alive by machines, are they still a person?

Conclusions

We do not share a common definition of what a person is. 

Science provides no clear definition.  Religious views vary.  The law adds entities that disturb us.  New technologies will push the boundaries even further.

For any one of us to claim they have the one and only answer is only opinion.  There are no clear facts defining person-hood. 

Attempts, largely by religious fundamentalists, to enshrine their opinions into law, will fail.

Perhaps we should simply admit we are not sure?  Perhaps we should allow ourselves to be more open to others views?

We single persons do not have the right to pick for all other persons what a person is and what a person is not.

Extending compassion and understanding seems like minimal steps for persons to share.

What do YOU know?

There are a lot of things we could know. Our brains are very small. Can we know it all? Can we even get close? Should we ever stop trying?

Colossal Knowledge

The latest guess is there are about 9,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (twenty-one zeros) stars in the universe.  Our brains contain about 100,000,000,000 (eleven zeros) individual memory cells.  We can not even dedicate one brain cell to each trillion stars.  The amount of information in the universe overwhelms even our ability to understand it.

In a grain of sand, there are roughly 10,000,000,000,000,000 (sixteen zeros) atoms.  Our brains do not even have the capacity know about all the atoms in a single grain of sand.  

Lucky then for us there appear to be patterns in the universe.  More accurately, our brains think they observe patterns in the vastness. 

Assuming the patterns repeat, we make mental models that help us clutch at the unknowable.

Thinking all stars are similar we can put our minds around the idea of how stellar processes work.

Judging all atoms by patterns, we consider we have understanding about grains of sand.

We humans have horded knowledge using our patterns.  Each of us knows a little.  Our brains each holding pieces of knowledge about the universe.  Combing the knowledge in all our brains together, we know much more.  Even the total sum of human knowledge no way approaches all that could be known.  It may never.

Knowledge and Fiction

We can never know a thing itself.  We can only sense it remotely.  I do not know what it is to be a baseball.  I am not a baseball, nor will I ever be one. I can never really know the baseball.  Making assumptions based on patterns, I understand enough things about the baseball to make it useful in my existence.

Truth, what actually is, exists externally to our minds.  Patterns in our brains allow us to have beliefs about what truth is.  Our beliefs, when true, are knowledge.

We learn many patterns, some we know to be false, while others fit the facts.  We combine fact and false together to make stories.  I know many facts about Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader.  The Star Wars universe does not exist in reality.  These characters are fiction patterns in my brain.

Sometimes our beliefs are factual and we have knowledge.  Sometimes our beliefs are not accurate and fiction.  Truth and facts are not always the same.  I, and I bet you too, often confuse the two in our daily thoughts. 

Mixing truth and fact, our mental patterns help us cope with our lives.  The external reality sometimes shows me that patterns I believe are false. 

Understanding that I often have non-factional beliefs, I have created a pattern in my brain that constantly forces me to question my knowledge.  Doubt allows new information to become knowledge.  Lack of doubt keeps new knowledge away.  Humility before the universe is how the we come to know it.

People who have dogmatic beliefs are often unable to transcend their false patterns.  Limiting their minds to new facts, they exist in worlds of fiction.

Learning

From birth, our families and the world around us start forming patterns of belief in our brains.  By the time we hit grade school, many structures of thought have already formed.

As we progress from grade school through higher education we learn more.  Some of us stop at high school and begin our lives as adults.  We stop learning general things and begin to specialize.

College focuses our gathering of knowledge in specific directions.  We absorb input from books and teachers that takes us in direction of career or interest.  Adding to our storehouse of knowledge, our mental patterns become more complex.

Those who go on to higher degrees specialize further, narrowing their focus and traveling farther to the edge of human knowledge. 

Some few of us, will attempt to push the boundaries of human knowledge, earning doctorates or P.H.D.s (know by many as “Piled Higher and Deeper”).

Countless numbers of humans stop learning beyond the basics as they go about our adult lives.  On average we Americans read a hundred books in our life times.  While a few read thousands of books, almost 25% of us read none after high school.  The books we do read are largely fiction and do not add to our patterns of knowledge.

Reading books, of course, is not the only way of learning, but the data suggest, most of us are content to remain with limited knowledge about the universe we live in.

Personally, I have trouble imagining a life, where each day does not push the boundary of patterns of knowledge.  I hope you continue to push the boundaries of yours.

Meme Wars (Part 7)

A war for mind share is going on around us.  Ideas struggle for territory in our brains.  In the last part of Meme Wars we consider how on science and commerce are effected by battles between memes for minds.

Meme Wars: Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3  - Part 4 - Part 5 – Part 6 – Part 7

Market Memes

Commercial memes spread through advertising
everywhere on the planet

Business uses branding to create demand for their products.  Branding is a type of meme associated with a product or service.  Images, words, and feelings are generated in the brain by the meme that meet needs, create desires, or inspire lust.  Advertising is the art of creating thoughts in human minds.  Advertising, when effective, generates and propagate memes, that reproducing in people’s minds.

Adapting to new meme reproduction methods, advertising has begun to shift meme creation and reproduction strategies to internet, social media, and other information technologies.

This revolution in meme reproduction has disturbed centralized broadcast replication.  Print media is struggling for access to mind share with web pages.  YouTube is capturing eyeballs once controlled by network television. 

Advertisers have long known that younger minds are more receptive to new memes.  Humans now spend three billion hours each week playing video games.  These gamers are largely younger minds.  In order to circulate their memes, business must learn means of reproduction inside these media.

Even in the poorest of societies, pervasive
commercial memes are hard to ignore

Immunity Avoidance

Global consumer business has boomed by being successful and spreading memes.  The poorest countries in the world know what Coca Cola is.  Nike’s meme of “Just Do It” is in most of the planets brains. 

Entertainment media uses meme’s sexuality to grab our attention so that businesses can place their ideas in our brains and associate them with the other attractions.  Sporting events that grab us emotionally are used in similar manners to allow more receptive brains to get meme’s about automobiles.  Demand is thrust upon us unaware.

Commercial memes are intentionally crafted and delivered to avoid our mental immune systems.  There economic success depends upon meme-crafter's ability to do circumvent our minds immunity.

Opinion Makers

On a more strategic level, owners of businesses try to convince get us to act in their best interest by creating memes that distract us.  Pointing to people and branding them as lazy, leeches on society, and “takers”, memes can cause us to act in ways that are not beneficial to us.  Driving down expectations for compassion while driving up anger and fear, these memes warp our view of reality.

Non-compassionate meme generator

Shell Oil has tried to cast itself as caring and for good, while destroying thousands of livelihoods.  Wal-Mart convinces that lower prices are most important for consumers while Main Street dies and wages plummet.  Goldman Sachs did severe damage to the world economy in the 2007 financial collapse yet advertises on public television for how they build small business.

News networks and online media build and circulate memes that tear at the fabric of society.  Belittling their opponents with personal attacks, bad memes about government, economy and society are allowed access to unwary minds. 

Appealing to frustrations and remapping it onto their own desires, meme crafters shift public opinion.  Calling public servants useless, they devalue our ability to help each other.  Politics devolves to personal attacks, civil debate disappears, and solution finding becomes nonexistent as memes wage war in peoples minds.

We have yet to build meme immunity systems that will allow us to keep such bad ideas out of our minds.  Until we do, bad ideas will reproduce and cause havoc.

Religion and Science

A meme war between science and religion is being waged in brains.  Religious memes have a huge “head start” on scientific ones. 

Science and religion engage in a meme war

Around the planet, religion is taught to us when we are very young.  Science is kept from developing minds until much later.  Religious stories enter our brains while they are still forming.  Most western society’s children know of Noah, Adam and Eve, and Christmas before they know of numbers, letters, or discovery methods.

Most religious people acknowledge that other faiths have “bad ideas”.  Immunity memes against other religious beliefs are placed in children’s minds early on, thus barriers for science memes are also set high.

Some memes are more complex and complicated than others.  Complex memes require more time and space in minds to reproduce than simple ones.  Entrenched complex memes are much more successful at holding onto minds.  

The new information technology is allowing education to be individually tailored.  Home schooling, especially for religious people, surges in western cultures.  This permits minds to form without common concepts.  Science memes that were delivered in public schools not long ago are allowed to die out.

Science tends more toward facts and religion tends more toward faith.  In the meme war between them, science will continue to press that advantage.  Will it be enough to overcome early indoctrination by religion into young minds?  Perhaps science needs to shift it's memes to the battlefield of younger minds?

Conclusions

There is a war of ideas struggling to control our brains and thereby our actions.

By examining previous meme wars, we can learn more about those ideological struggles in our own time.

Ideas replicate in human minds in ways similar to biological systems.  New technologies alter how meme’s reproduce.  Our current communication technology is accelerating and focusing meme reproduction. 

Meme wars may never end.

Good ideas (facts) do not always win over bad ideas (myths).  Memes are engaged in an ongoing struggle for supremacy.

Memes can develop immunity to other ideas.  Some memes can stop the entry of other memes into brains.

There are too many ideas for any brain to handle, so we specialize and move toward familiarity memes. We also are trending toward simpler, easier to mentally digest memes and trending away from complex, subtle ones.

Business, religion, governments, and media create memes intentionally.  We are usually unaware of their existence.  They can and do cause us to act against our own interests

Conflicts of ideas occur in our brains regularly.  We need to become aware of these conflicts and build our own immune systems. 

We can build better minds by expending effort to allow complex memes to enter our brains.  Resisting the simple, we must learn to think more deeply to avoid bad memes.

Crafting memes is a relatively new idea itself.  Like DNA, words and pictures are the tools that we can use to build memes.  Technology is providing us with powerful ways to reproduce memes.  

In this new revolutions, each of us as individuals can and should engage in the meme wars.

Meme Wars: Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3  - Part 4 - Part 5 – Part 6 – Part 7

Please subscribe to this blog, so I can put more of my memes in your head!

Wham BAM Thank You, Man!

We now have the technology to make a digital model of the human brain. We need but to will it to happen. If we do not, someone else will. Sooner than you may think. Scientists have devised a practical plan to do accomplish this amazing feat. We must fund them.

From humble beginnings in 1987, scientists began to model the human genome. They wanted to make map of the entire sequence of genes that make a human being. With government funding starting in 1990, the project was expected to take 15 years. They accomplished the project in 2003 with international assistance from scientists in the Europe and Asia.

Calling the project Brain Activity Map (BAM) the scientists propose to step-by-step build models of the human brain using software. They would start with a simple worm brain and work up through increasingly complex creatures until they can model a human brain. Brain mapping is sometimes also know by the term “connectome”.

The Science

Imaging techniques would be used to see what is happening with individual molecules in the brain's cells. This imaging technology already exists. Computer manufactures believe they can continue their decades long exponential growth in machine processing power using Moore's Law. This means the hardware to run the imaged brain models will be available before the brain model is completed.

Existing technology to image the brain at the molecular level

The well understood C. Elegans

The plan involves five major stages. Each stage attempts a more complex brain. The plan allows five years for each stage in order to image and model larger and larger brains. Several “brain observatories” would be constructed to allow for competition between research teams.

The first phase would start with C.Elegans, a simple worm that has already been under study for decades. The worm has 302 neurons with about 7,000 connections between them.

The humble Fruit Fly

Scaling up from the worm brain model, the scientists would then attempt a Fruit Fly (Drosophila) next. The Fruit brain has about 135,000 neurons. Current computer hardware is capable of this feat already, the scientists need only do the imaging to make the model.

Depending upon what is learned with the first two phases, the third phase would attempt either the common home aquarium zebrafish brain, a section of the human brain called the hippocampus or perhaps both. Both of these brains have just under a million neurons to image, model, and put into software.

The fourth stage would be to model the entire brain of an awake mouse. This would provide a brain model that could be tested in real time against live beings. Then the project would go on to the fifth stage to map and model an entire, working human brain. The 25 year estimate to finish this entire project is very conservative.  If structured smartly, competition could work for like it did for the human genome project and results could be achieved even sooner.

Costs

The plan calls for a mix of private and public funding in the order of about $300 million a year. Over the proposed 20 years of of the project it would cost about $6 billion to accomplish. This is on the same scale as was the Human Genome project. Even if the real costs double, it will be cheap at the price.

A billion dollars seems like a lot. To understand the scale of this investment, consider that just to build a single aircraft carrier costs almost $27 billion. We have 11 of these ships. The Transportation Security Administration has a budget of $8 billion annually. The Hubble Space Telescope costs $10 billion over its lifetime.

Putting in the Golden Spike

The Payoff

The human genome project has had staggering economic benefits. The under $4 billion invested over 13 years on research returned $796 billion in economic activity. The genome investment generated 310,000 jobs. It also launched a revolution in the bio-sciences that will be felt for generations to come.

The return on investment for mapping the human brain could be much, much greater. There is no accurate way to predict just how many jobs or how much new economic activity this project could generate. Even if the Brain Activity Mapping project were to only break-even in financial terms, the benefits to our knowledge, medicine, and computers will be far reaching.

A man, a plan, a canal: Panama.

Knowledge of how the brain works will have many impacts we know about and more we can only guess at. Understanding how mental illness works. Scientists believe that they can model the effects of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, schizophrenia and autism in the brain leading to better treatments and perhaps even cures.

Advances in artificial intelligence could boost our information processing capabilities. Understanding how consciousness emerges from the brain would allow to understand what we humans are even better. We may even be able to build our own new kinds of minds.



Just Do It

As when we decided to put a man on the moon, connect the Pacific Atlantic oceans by rail, and build the interstate system; this project must be done. The benefits to our country and mankind are too great to turn away from.

Already the European Union is funding similar research in Switzerland. We should not give up on this research like we did with the Superconducting Super Collider.  We should lead the world, not follow it into this new frontier.

We should ensure our children and grandchildren benefit. It is a small investment. We should fund this now.

Age of the Brain Tools

In the near future our brain tools (computing machines) will be smarter than we are. These brain tools may not be able to have free will or think like we do. The brain tools capability to do mental type tasks will be huge. Computers, or something like them, will be embedded into everything we use. They will be smart, highly connected and everywhere. Of course, this assumes that we as a species survive into that future. In this post we will examine the basic directions of our calculating machines and try to see what some of the outcomes may be.

Moore's Law

Computing Power Is Increasing

Intel co-founder Gordon Moore described a trend in brain tool power that has held true for over 40 years. He described a trend that components were getting smaller each year. (Click on the images to expand them.)

More Computers than People

The number of computer processors units (CPU) being sold is also increasing. Even a very conservative estimate based on the growth rate of CPUs sold over the last 20 years suggests there will be more computing machines than people soon. If this trend continues, we will be awash in brain tool power with dozens or even hundreds of machines per person.

Bandwidth Usage Exploding

First with modems, later with cable, and more recently with wireless, the global demand for bandwidth connecting these brain tools is growing exponentially. Even if this growth were to begin to level off, our brain tools will have an enormous ability to communicate by the middle of the century.

Multiplying the Human Brain

One abstract measure of the ability of our brain tools to calculate is in millions of instructions per second (MIPS). MIPS are a method of comparing brain power. Current brain tools have about the same capability of processing as a lizard.

If Gordon Moore's trend continues at the same pace, in my life time a single brain tool will have the ability to process at the level of a human brain. 

Within my children's lifetime a single brain tool will have the ability to process as much as all the human brains on the planet.

What Will We Become?

Even if these estimates are exaggerated, the world of 2100 will be radically different than today. If we think in terms the age of the earth, thousands or even millions of years, this is a sudden and drastic change in information, computation, and communication power on Earth.

Imagine having a machine that has the ability to process as much information as every human mind alive today does today.  All at once, in one little box.  In your home. In your car.  At your job.  On the street lamp.  In the police car.  In the criminals hand.  In the tank.  Everywhere.

DARPA pack mule with a lizard brain.

The potential power of these processing machines overwhelms my ability to conceive what will be possible. Even if the tool is limited to just pushing information around, its power will be awesome. As this kind of power becomes wide spread, it will be a boon and a threat to us humans.

Our grandchildren will live in a reality so different from my grandparents that it will be unrecognizable. The ability to make smarter decisions will certainly be present. The amount of information available to us to do what we do will be much greater. As the machines become more capable, they will deliver the information we need more readily. Even if artificial intelligence is never obtained, the shear power of the calculators and communicators that these brain tools become will make us transcend what we humans are today.

The connected-ness of the world is increasing so rapidly as if to make the old barriers of time and place which kept us apart almost irrelevant. This blog alone is read in 20+ countries by many people I would have had no contact with 50 years ago. Our ability to speak with each other and understand each other in real time across the planet will make the Tower of Babel seem like a the dreams of a child.

Decisions At Hand

I do not know if it will be a better world, but hope it to be so. We are at a key point in human history where we have the opportunity to solve many intractable problems by applying our new brain tools. We are also at great peril of losing our freedom to the domination of information. We could rely on these machines as a crutch and even lose our ability to think for ourselves.

"I'm afraid I can't let you do that, Dave."

As we move forward into this new age of the mechanical minds, we need to take care as to how we use them. If we just 'let it happen' the world could turn into a dystopia or utopia. The decisions we make in the next decade or so will essentially change what it means to live a human life all across the planet.

While we debate issues about this year's economy, gun control, gay marriage, and immigration; the world of the brain tool is fundamentally transforming us. We hardly discuss the ramifications of these brain tools to our freedom, power, social borders, or economy. We are just letting it happen.

We need to take a step back and consider the longer term issue of what kind of world do we want to build with these tools. We need to give debates about our brain tools a higher priority in our political sphere. What kind of world do you want these brain tools to usher in?

• What limits to information should we have?
• What information should be free?
• Are access to brain tools a  human right?
• Should nation state boundaries keep information limited?
• Should brain tools fight our wars?
• What information can others have about us? Government?  Business? Church?
• Should we automate our government with brain tools?
• Should anyone have private control over large data sets?
• What information should be kept private?
• How do we protect our children from information they are not ready for?
• How do we keep dangerous ideas from bad people?

I hope you will consider questions like these. I hope you will vote with these issues in mind. I hope our media will help us focus finding answers to them. If we do not, we are rolling the dice with the whole world's future.