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by aeternum 2116 days ago
Is there much evidence for this RAM-type hypothesis? Many animals hibernate but still have their personality and memories intact, similarly we sleep and can undergo long periods of unconsciousness without us or others perceiving a significant change.

Even drastic measures like electrical shocks or chemicals (up to a point) tend to have temporary rather than permanent effects. That evidence seems to imply that most of what we consider as 'us' is the more permanent physical neuron connections rather than the transient chemical/electrical states.
1 comments
sdenton4 2116 days ago
It's /all/ transient chemical states on a sufficiently long timescale. And the 'critical' timescale varies across different physical systems. (Also, you get severe brain damage after a few minutes without oxygen - that seems pretty damn transient to me.)
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aeternum 2115 days ago
Right, but we generally understand the mechanism there. Without oxygen, ATP pumps within animal cells cannot functionj. They can no longer maintain the right ion gradients across cell membranes and are destroyed due to osmotic pressure.

It's a challenge for reading the neurons connectivity for sure, but I don't think it is evidence that there is more to 'us' than our physical neuron connectivity graph.

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sdenton4 2115 days ago
Well, you've still got the graph of neuron connections, but there are also weights on those connections. (In artifical neural networks, the graph is the architecture, and the weights are pretty much everything...) Per the article:

"Ion channel proteins change shape in response to the electric field across the membrane, opening or closing pores; at the synapse shape-changing proteins respond to electrical changes to trigger the bursting open of synaptic vesicles to release the neurotransmitters, which themselves bind to protein receptors to transmit their signal, and complicated sequences of protein shape changes underlie the signalling networks that strengthen and weaken synaptic responses to make memory, remodelling the connections between neurons."

Can the weight of a connection be surmised after oxygen deprivation? Or are the chemical changes that happen under oxygen deprivation irreversible (from an information theoretic viewpoint)?

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