As I was working on setting up the "in the news" function of SII, I came across a nice science news service, at www.scicentral.com (there's also a link to it now on our resources page). You can set up a topics profile and they'll email you summaries of weekly devlopments in various fields. There are many sites out there like this, and some of you may already know about SciCentral - but it's one of the most comprehensive I've seen, so thought I'd point it out.

The idea of our "in the news" items is to interpret some of the current science news items in a way that suggests connections to your worldview-building process. (Along the lines of the Feynman passage I sent out awhile ago on the radioactive phosphorous content of a rat's brain.) For now I'll send these out periodically as part of our e-mail list. If you come across anything of interest, feel free to post it to the list with the subject "in the news" so that all these items can be archived under that category. Here's one to start things off...

What gives us our identity? Transferring the information content of our brains:

In considering what our knowledge of the universe tells us about our place in it, certainly an understanding of consciousness, and how the processes of the universe were able to produce consciousness, plays a central role. Discussions about the nature of consciousness have been going on for a long time. But the dramatic advances in computational power that we are in the midst of will soon confront us with these questions in a much more pressing and concrete way.

For example, we all have a sense that our identities are somehow more than just the sum total of all the information stored in our brains (our memories and experiences). But it's hard to articulate exactly what we mean by that. And as long as it is impractical to actually separate the "data content" of someone's brain from that unique, physical person, it's not clear how we would figure out what we mean by it.

Now it seems likely that within the next 20 years, the number of connections in a computer will be able to match the number in a human brain. This means that it might be possible to actually transfer the complete information content of a person's brain and "map" it onto a computer. Of course, we recognize that this wouldn't actually "be" that person. It would be something like what goes on when we transfer the information content of an image. For example, a 50 by 50 pixel image on a (black and white) computer screen is made up of 50 x 50 = 2,500 dots, each of which can either be dark or lit up. So we could store the information needed to reproduce the picture as a string of 2500 digits, using a "0" to mean that spot should be dark, and "1" to mean that spot is bright. Obviously the string of 0s and 1s is not exactly the same thing as the picture. But there is a very real sense in which that string of numbers contains all the information that is in the actual picture (as evidenced by the fact that pictures can be sent as a string of 0s and 1s through the internet or from a satellite or whatever). To say that a computer will have as many connections as the human brain is analogous to saying we have a computer that can store the 2500 digits necessary to encode the information content of the picture.

Whether or not we ever actually do such a mapping of a person's brain onto a computer, thinking of it as a model is helpful in focusing our ideas about consciousness and identity.

A more in-depth look at the intriguing possibilities in this area is available in "Live Forever: Uploading the Human Brain" By Raymond Kurzweil
http://www.psychologytoday.com/features3.html

Todd