(February 7, 2025 at 10:16 am)John 6IX Breezy Wrote: It may appear to be absurdly detailed work, but the brain already has the ability to do it. If you sever the optic nerve of a frog, it'll find a way to reconnect all those millions of fine axons and restore vision.
No, it really doesn't. The regeneration of optic nerves in living amphibians is similar to patching a fiber optic line back together. It's messy and difficult, but in the end it's just a data transmission line. And even then the patch is imperfect. Kermit typically comes out of that experiment with a squint. The brain is a whole lot more complicated and you're going to have to repair it in a dead body. Not happening. To extend the analogy, it's like finding a data center and then setting off thermonuclear armageddon. The data center is a crater, the city it was in is ash, and the repair men are radioactive zombies. You won't be resurrecting ChatGPT from this rubble.
Quote:Moreover, you've heard how your body replaces most of your cells every seven years.
You've heard how corpses don't do that?
Quote:So I'm not entirely sure hyperfocusing on restoring every single original cell is even necessary
The plasticity of the human brain might allow you to get away with losing some small number of brain cells without significant loss, but we aren't talking a small number here. The entire brain and the supporting body are a nasty mass of decaying tissue.
Quote:maybe the answer is simply to replace them wholesale with spare cells. When you've lost blood we don't mop up every blood cell and put it back in, we just give you a new batch.
Sounds like pouring salt water into my keyboard to make my computer run faster. One of the notable features of corpses is their lack of spare cells. And even if you had any you still don't have a body to produce an environment (nutrients, oxygen, waste removal) where they'd do anything other than die alongside their brethren. And even if you did have a functioning body, the new cells wouldn't be forming the same connections that the old ones had. So no, that won't work.
Quote:As a digression, what then are your thoughts on abiogenesis? Is it somehow easier for life to emerge by itself from scratch from the environment than it is for it to re-emerge in a cell with all the necessary components already there?
From scratch. I doubt that the latter would even count as abiogenesis. Cells are good at devouring foreign material and would be a lousy place to try and form novel life. So much easier to climb a ladder when there's nobody above you constantly dropping bricks on your head and jumping on your fingers.
