Forum: Author Hangout

complete against my daughter who then loses her change

*compete, chance*

IMO, if would be a good idea to let those locked threads die without further comment.

Hear hear!

As far as I can tell, they're completely off-topic because they have nothing to do with reading or writing SOL stories.

AJ

because they have nothing to do with reading or writing SOL stories

I was under the impression that "Hang-out" was exactly that. Where content creators for the site could hangout and shoot the proverbial shit, whilst they see how badly their latest submission is doing... Except that due to (and continued) trouble caused by politics, that subject was now verboten...

'Meet and interact with authors and discuss author issues'

I'm not sure how shooting the proverbial shit squares with that. I've sometimes asked questions unrelated to stories but I usually tag them with 'off-topic' so potential contributors are warned.

I'm toying with starting one asking what QEII died from, since the media seems to be swerving that topic. (Since the time of her death was known in advance, I presume medical morphine).

AJ

This is actually an interesting one. On Thursday morning (8th), all the (closed to public) military (UK) Facebook groups were saying the late Queen died on Wednesday night (7th) and the general statement was "If you are on leave, turn off your phone and unplug your landline now!" and "If you are on leave and you live in the pads quarters, you're fucked!". By lunchtime this had firmed up somewhat and now had the additional statement of "An official statement will be made at 1830 hrs (GMT)) along with the statements of "If you were going to go on leave...you can forget it..."

I even phoned up my parents and said the rumour has it that the Queen has died and it will be made official at 1830hrs tonight. This was about 11:30 am (GMT) on Thursday.

At bang on 18:30 (GMT) Thursday evening, it was made public that she had passed away that afternoon...

All Thursday morning, various closed groups were sharing memes along the lines of the unavailability of boot polish and other items needed for parade kit.

There is a requirement/need for certain people to get their proverbial shit together in the form of some serious organisation in the security services, police, military etc etc and there was a lot of comings and goings at Balmoral on Wednesday night, way more than usual.

The family needs to get together, form a united front, get their shit squared away and all that in readiness for the inevitable press scrutiny. So it makes sense to do that out of the public eye and once they are all singing from the same hymn sheet, they can turn round and inform the world that she had just died, now that they have had the previous 24 hrs or so to process the fact privately themselves.

Old age.

Nobody dies from old age, it's always one body part being the first to give way. Just like nobody dies from cancer, it's always something consequential like pneumonia.

AJ

A quango named Public Health England made a similar error when counting Covid deaths.

All deaths within a month of the deceased having a positive Covid test are recorded as a Covid death.

1) People do not die from Covid - it's because a consequential problem such as pneumonia becomes untreatable. If there was an effective treatment for pneumonia (and treatments have improved since the start of the pandemic), the patients wouldn't have died. Therefore they didn't die of Covid.
2) People run over by a bus within a month of having a positive Covid test are recorded as Covid deaths.

Similarly, if the failing body part were effectively treated or even replaced, the patient would not have 'died' from 'old age'. The problematic area is the core processor and memory. Cue metaphysical questions of whether a person's identity resides in the brain.

AJ

It's simply not rational to believe that people could live indefinitely if parts could only be treated and/or replaced indefinitely.

It's sure been the premise of a hell of a lot of science fiction if it's not rational. Including this gem by Larry Niven. Because guess what?

If you replace parts with those grown from your own clone, then you CAN live indefinitely. No alien tissue rejection, and no need for medications that current organ recipients need now. Heart failing at age 80? Here's your own heart that's 20. Liver going bad? Here's your own healthy one. Ah, your brain is wearing out? That's okay, we'll simply copy everything over into this brand new brain that's never been used, and you keep on going.

Now - whether they would WANT to live forever if that were the case is another subject entirely.

So, in this case, I'm going to go with the postulates of Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Robert Heinlein - just to name a few - and say you're completely wrong.

And what happens when the brain wears out?

I think yours has already, if you can't read that I actually covered that. :)

(The smiley face is because I think you know I'm kidding around with you, and not being intentionally mean. It's not like you're AJ or worse, the grinning dick.)

We have no real idea how the brain actually stores information, much less how to copy it from one brain to another.

There's certainly an immense difference between how a biological brain stores information and how a computer brain stores information. I have no idea how we'd go about converting between the two.

AJ

The biggest problem in acquiring that knowledge is that in the civilised world, the experiments necessary to test and confirm any hypothesis are illegal. That means any breakthrough will come from a rogue state like China or North Korea.

I think we know where to start. The process of storing information involves the formation of connections between neurons. When the connections degrade, for example with neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's, loss of memory occurs. And yet somehow the brain transfers memories from short-term storage to long-term storage, and it's been posited that stored memories have a fractal quality so when part of the brain is damaged, sometimes memories can be retrieved.

It must be a fascinating and challenging area in which to work.

AJ

It must be a fascinating and challenging area in which to work.

My wife deals with that all day at work. Director of Nursing at an Assisted Living facility, that's NOT full memory care. Although she has worked at those in the past as well. She has residents that can tell you exactly what they wore to the prom in 1952, who they dated, and everything else about their elementary and high school - and can't remember what they had for breakfast an hour ago. Brain functions ARE being studied, and we're gradually making progress.

By the way, this greatly annoys me. You're being quite reasonable on the topic, and DS is being the stick in the mud naysayer. Normally it's the other way around. Dammit, don't confuse me!

We have zero real, actionable information on how biological brains store information.

Incorrect. We know it's stored in neurons, with the hippocampus determining how and where it's stored. Do we fully understand the process? No. Is that real and actionable information? Yes.

Using MRI imaging of a person's brain processes when they're asked to think of something specific, scientists are starting to develop a lexicon with a view to reading a person's thoughts.

One day it might be possible to communicate with a person in a coma.

AJ

The "communication" is one way, from the researchers to the comma patient. And that communication is happening by voice with no technology.

[...]

In this case, all the fMRI is adding is confirmation of the fact that the comma patient is responding.

In my mind, that's a contradiction. If we know the coma patient is responding, and they can (and do) answer yes/no questions, communication is not one-way. The direction from the coma patient to the researchers/family uses the fMRI. Communication at the 'twenty questions' level is still communication.

If one were to combine the techniques in the first two articles with that in the third, would we be able to accurately tell what coma patients were visualizing? What emotions they were feeling? My suspicion is yes, but the research hasn't been done (to the best of my knowledge).

At this point, I have no idea if it's a first tiny step or not, and I'm not sure that anyone else does, either.

From the article:

On many occasions in the months that followed, we conversed with Scott in the scanner. He expressed himself, speaking to us through this magical connection we had made between his mind and our machine. Somehow, Scott came back to life. He was able to tell us that he knew who he was; he knew where he was; and he knew how much time had passed since his accident. And thankfully, he confirmed that he wasn't in any pain.

The questions we asked Scott over the next few months were chosen with two goals in mind. In part, we tried to help him as best we could, by asking questions that might improve his quality of life. We asked him whether he liked watching ice hockey on TV. Prior to his accident, Scott had been a hockey fan and his family and carers would tune his TV to a hockey game as often as they could. But more than a decade had passed since Scott's accident. Perhaps he no longer liked hockey? Perhaps he had watched so much hockey that he could not stand it any longer? If so, checking in to see what his current viewing preferences were might significantly improve his quality of life. Fortunately, Scott still enjoyed watching hockey, much as he had for many of the years prior to his accident.

and also

For example, after lecturing about patients in the grey zone, I had often heard comments such as "I doubt they have any sense of the passage of time", "they probably don't remember anything about their accident", or even "I doubt they have any awareness of the predicament they're in".

Scott told us otherwise. He answered all of those questions and more. When we asked him what year it was, he told us correctly that it was 2012, not 1999, the year of his accident – clearly he had a good sense of the passage of time. He knew that he was in a hospital and that his name was Scott – he had a good sense of who he was and where he was. Scott was also able to tell us the name of his primary caregiver. This was important to us and to our understanding of grey-zone science, because one question that had frequently come up was what patients in this situation could remember. Scott would not have known his caregiver prior to his accident, so his knowing her name was clear evidence that he was still able to lay down memories.

Very much two-way communication.

It could be confirmation bias, absolutely. However, it certainly appears from the article that they went to a decent length to avoid confirmation bias and verify that the information wasn't just guesswork. It would certainly be easy to device experiments to confirm that, given that there was absolutely at least a stimulus/response going on (the target fMRI state only occurring when requested).

On memories, this is one of those cases where I agree that we have too little information. It might be that people in comas are forming memories but not saving the 'key' to access the memory. Perhaps, while in the coma state, the key is present, but it goes away when conscious. We simply don't know.

It could be that the conversation was all short-term memory, too. It's possible to have a solid conversation with some (not all) Alzheimer's patients. They simply won't remember it half an hour later - but during the conversation, short-term memory is doing just fine.

That doesn't really correlate with this patient knowing their caregiver's name, though. That would be long-term memory.

They are basically at the point where under live MRI imaging of the brain, they can tell what general region of the brain is involved in thinking particular thoughts.

I think they're some way beyond that. By recording exactly which parts of the brain light up in association with subjects thinking about specific emotions and object, finding sufficient similarities between test subjects is enabling the development of a lexicon. Applied to coma patients the 'lexicon' can provide insights into what they're thinking about.

AJ

You mentioned it, I'm not buying it.

Again, the premise from multiple respected and highly intelligent science fiction authors, not something I've pulled out of my ass.

1. We have no real idea how the brain actually stores information, much less how to copy it from one brain to another. I see no reason to expect that will change anytime in the next century or two.

Um - yeah, we do. Neuron connections. Now, at this particular juncture in the space-time continuum, we don't have an actual completely accurate map and model of the procedure it uses, but that is something being researched and will probably be figured out within that century or two.

2. Where are you going to get a physically mature "blank" brain to copy it to? Starting with a brain that already has a personality and memories has enormous ethical problems.

What part of having a clone of you grown did you not quite grasp? Can we do that now? No - with the caveat that we're doing things in this realm already. I'm not talking about cloning cells and then implanting them in utero so a baby is born, like Dolly the sheep. I'm talking about cloning full sized body parts under laboratory conditions - including 'blank' copies of someone's brain. Can we do it now? No. Will we be able to in the future? Sure.

In my opinion, in the real world, the brain will remain an impossible to repair part for at least the next several centuries.

I guess it's a good thing you don't start a horse whip and buggy company and then sue all the car companies for restraint of trade. Not with a closed mind like that. Here, touch on the doll where the big, bad dose of creative thinking hurt and did mean things to you.

You know, I could see you standing on the beach, saying, "I told your brother, and I'm telling you, Orville Wright, that even if you CAN get that thing off the ground - which is impossible for centuries to come - that it'll never amount to anything useful in the world."

Those stories are not predictions of the future.

Really?

Computer generated avatars
Air dryers that you see in bathrooms all over the place
Computers that can pass the Turing Test
Astrogation
Atmospheric Braking
Implanted RFID chips and ear buds
Self driving cars and fully automatic taxis
Automated accounting systems
Self service hotels
Computer driven self travel websites
Automatic sensors to turn lights off if no one present
The Sports Utility Vehicle
Hands free controls
Using cold to slow down human bodily functions to help with certain injuries
Automated delivery drones
Household cleaning robots (Roomba, anyone?)
Waterbeds
Precision surgical waldos
The internet

Oh, and that's just from the Science Fiction of Robert Heinlein. Yes, he created ALL of those ideas.

Seems Dick Tracy watches were seen as fantastic and not a prediction of the future, either. Gee, maybe it's because someone read a story of something that WAS fiction and then turned it INTO reality. (I won't even tell you that they've already actually created the basis for the transporter from Star Trek - you'd probably just poo-poo it. But they have ...)

Are you going to start a candle factory now and file an injunction against all the light bulb makers?

Oh, and that's just from the Science Fiction of Robert Heinlein. Yes, he created ALL of those ideas.

I'm pretty sure he didn't create all of them, although he was very adept at taking concepts already in existence and expanding them. In fact, some of them already existed in real life at the start of the 20th century, before Heinlein was even born.

AJ

Google claims waterbeds were around long before Heinlein was born, used mainly by the medical profession.

AJ

Google claims waterbeds were around long before Heinlein was born, used mainly by the medical profession.

While they existed in different forms, Heinlein is credited with the actual invention, even if he didn't build them. That's also why the first patent application was denied for them, and only granted after revision.

Heinlein is credited with the actual invention

That's bizarre. How can you be credited with the invention of something that's been in use for hundreds of years?

AJ

That's bizarre. How can you be credited with the invention of something that's been in use for hundreds of years?

Same way they're always coming up with new patents for wheels. You've described something in great detail, so you get credited for it. If Anonymous Doctor did something in 1850 but never published anything so he could be credited for it, well, then when Samuel Kellogg comes along and takes that idea to make a cereal out of it - then Kellogg gets the credit.

I've always had a positive view of Robert Heinlein. I mostly like his stories and I respect the work he did with other SF authors. But I didn't realise he had a dark side :-(

In any case, 'creating' something already in existence does not count as a prediction of the future.

AJ

prediction

Given the number of respected Sci Fi authors whose stories include Faster Than Light travel with no time dilation effects (and that might include myself, excluding the 'respected' bit), it's surely a nailed-on dead-cert to be invented for real in the future ;-)

AJ

Those stories are not predictions of the future.

For every SciFi story that included a prediction of the future that turned out correct, there must be hundreds that got it wrong.

Even if you turn to the predictions of respected scientists (ie no handwavium), the success rate is not much better.

The UK used to have a TV series called 'Tomorrow's World' that presented scientific advances and predicted how they would affect our lives in the future. Not long ago there was a retroanalysis and virtually all the predictions turned out wrong :-(

AJ

Carl's list was a huge chunk of confirmation bias.

It sort of gels why a fictional Bob Heinlein plays such a major role in SC's 'True History' erotic fantasy ;-)

Michael Loucks seems a Heinlein fan too - his eponymous religious 'Good Medicine' protagonist recommends reading 'Stranger in a Strange Land' to some of the girls who come under his thrall.

AJ

Michael Loucks seems a Heinlein fan too - his eponymous religious 'Good Medicine' protagonist recommends reading 'Stranger in a Strange Land' to some of the girls who come under his thrall.

Indeed! And the protagonists in my other two series reference it as well. :-)

The Steve Adams and Michael Loucks characters are becoming so similar that if they ever met in real life, they'd scratch each other's eyes out ;-)

AJ

The Steve Adams and Michael Loucks characters are becoming so similar that if they ever met in real life, they'd scratch each other's eyes out ;-)

Interesting observation, but I don't see it. Unless you're referring to 'body count' they are very different in their philosophy, politics, and theology.

Carl's list was a huge chunk of confirmation bias.

Not my list. I just picked a few things.

I'd just make a guess that when you were young, you didn't read a like of science fiction. First serious book I read was '20,000 Leagues Under the Sea', while I was in kindergarten. All the Edgar Rice Burroughs science fiction, the Tom Swift books, Hardy Boy detective books - my parents were just happy that I liked to read, so they didn't have a problem taking me to the Used Book Store in Terre Haute to get more materials. (They didn't know what Gor was, so they were fine buying me the books because they thought they were science fiction. Probably shouldn't have been reading those in Junior High School.)

Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Kurt Vonnegut, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, and of course, Robert Heinlein, were some of my childhood companions. Now it's more like David Drake, John Ringo, David Weber, and Travis Taylor. I prefer hard science-fiction to fantasy.

I'm not denying I have confirmation bias. I'm an optimist about our future and life itself. I have to be - otherwise I'd have been dead 40 years ago, because the doctors that came up with the cure for my cancer wouldn't have been motivated to do so without a belief they could do something, rather than listening to all the nay-sayers that said it was impossible.

You know, I could see you standing on the beach, saying, "I told your brother, and I'm telling you, Orville Wright, that even if you CAN get that thing off the ground - which is impossible for centuries to come - that it'll never amount to anything useful in the world."

Today's Dilbert makes that reference! And it's on the same general topic!

Comic for 2022-09-18

😎

Today's Dilbert makes that reference! And it's on the same general topic!

Hadn't read it until seeing your link, but I truly appreciate and understand the sentiment.

It takes 20 years to produce a 20 year old brain even with cloning and then you have the ethical problems that come with the fact that the brain is not a blank slate.

Under CURRENT technology, yes. I'm so glad we live in a world where new technology is created every day, instead of in your caveman world, Fred Flintstone.

Like nuclear fusion, which they have been telling us is 10 years away for at least the last 50 years?

What happened to flying cars?

Um - nuclear fusion has been around for a long time. Now, CONTROLLED nuclear fusion reactions are still experimental at this time, but it's being figured out.

As for flying cars ... here's 10 of them. We're getting there.

no amount of technological progress can solve the

problem with electric cars, either.

Yeah, I said it. The electric car is the next best thing - and always will be.

That gets into the "Caprica" prequel where first they created augmented virtually reality that connect directly to each person's neural cortex when they wore the game visor. Once they'd found how to insert data directly into the brain they worked on copying info from. The last step was to move from a digital avatar to a physical body augmented with tech that had the thoughts and memories of an original person inserted. From the original models, they made many copies.

preserving the life of the person whose brain was dying

That's why having a clone is important. Alien tissue rejection - as mentioned in THIS book. Also by Heinlein.

Transfer the patient's mind into the clone

That presumes the brain wasn't grown in a lab environment. I realize this is technology we don't have at this moment, but given the way research is going, I wouldn't be too surprised if we didn't have it in a few decades.

It's simply not rational to believe that people could live indefinitely if parts could only be treated and/or replaced indefinitely.

The brain is obviously the weak link with our current state of knowledge.

Other than that, various bits of the body wear out at different rates. Scientists reckon that with our current knowledge, humans who keep lifelong good care of their bodies should be viable to at least 120. Some parts could continue to function to at least 200.

Who knows what age we could live to if we could keep the brain in working order, bearing in mind the current progress in developing replacement organs?

AJ

A complication of factors incident to old age.

*I read too many death certificates

Seriously, her son/heir is in his 70s.

Note that the chump is now older than Elisabeth was when he started pressuring her to stand aside so he could have the top job.

What's up with the chump anyway? Can't remember things, violent mood swings, impaired dexterity. Dementia? Parkinson's? No doubt he'll keep his black-spidery claws hooked into the throne as long as he is able :-(

AJ

What's up with the chump anyway? Can't remember things, violent mood swings, impaired dexterity. Dementia? Parkinson's?

I'm sure His Majesty holds you in equal high regard; as do we all on SOL of course.

Jack G

I'm sure His Majesty holds you in equal high regard; as do we all on SOL of course.

Thank you.

I've never promised to go into exile in Switzerland if I was banned from using hounds to rip wild mammals apart.

And I've never promised to go into exile in France if the UK left the EU.

And I'm pretty sure I've never claimed sea levels rose 10 metres last century.

QEII had her limitations, but she knew wen to maintain a tactful silence in public.

AJ

If I had to place a wager on it, I would grudgingly place it on you being right, but I wouldn't be happy about having to place the wager in the first place.

That said, sometimes we do get enormous shifts in knowledge. There are a number of (highly theoretical) technologies which could develop in the next two decades that might completely shift the balance and allow orders-of-magnitude progress.

I wouldn't have thought we were at the point of being able to capture an enormous variety of artistic and photographic styles across thousands of subjects and generate images containing one's choice of model and style, based on natural language requests, in a few minutes on consumer hardware using under six gigabytes of storage for the model, but here we are. Yes, in one sense that's a (very, very cool) parlor trick, but it's also a really good reminder that sometimes things move really quickly.

Whenever anyone confidently guesses at the speed of progress, my natural instinct is to chuckle. We've all heard far too many confident statements that 'X will be solved in the next few years', only for X to take decades, for that to seem likely. Similarly, many of us have heard far too many confident proclamations that X will take decades or centuries, and then someone finds a different angle accomplishes X in only a few years.

The technological leaps we've made in the last eighty years are vast and (in many cases) hard to predict. I'm not in the least confident in guessing where we'll be eighty years from now. We may or may not solve memory, but I'd put fairly high odds on direct, high-bandwidth, highly functional interfaces with the brain becoming routine, personally.

There's some evidence out there that the rate of technological advancement is slowing down.

I think they're confusing scientific advancement and technological advancement.

Rather than transforming our lives through major scientific breakthrough, we seem to be stuck in an era of improving existing technology by small increments.

AJ

Sadly I have to agree with you.

I understand the much vaunted exponential increase in computer speed is rapidly coming to a halt.

AJ