David Dalrymple On Project NEMALOAD

 Mind Uploading  

David Dalrymple has proposed that studying neuroscience in conjunction with computer science will lead to a new form of mathematics. He is now working on an effort to combine neuroscience, connectomics, and artificial intelligence to develop a working framework for mind uploading starting with the nematode worm, C. elegans. The project is called NEMALOAD.

Transhumanists are familiar with the concept of uploading: transferring a mind from a biological implementation to a digital one. To most people however, uploading still sounds like science fiction, but technical capabilities are rapidly catching up.

Given recent advances in optogenetics, optoelectronics, and computational modeling, it has become feasible to upload the simplest nervous system known to science, that of the nematode worm C. elegans.

That is the aim of David Dalrymple's NEMAOAD project.

In order to learn how one neuron affects another, we need to see what happens when the first neuron is activated. NEMALOAD is a project to integrate a number of recent technologies that should make this feasible, at least in C. elegans, and using this capability to replicate the information processing structure that governs the worm's behavior in a digital model.

The project also has an explicit publicity mission, with three high-level goals. First: to encourage mainstream thinkers to take uploading seriously, and begin discussions regarding the ethical and societal implications of human uploading in advance of its arrival. Second: to challenge dominant paradigms in neuroscience and inspire other projects to build upon this foundation. Finally: to educate science enthusiasts about the mathematical, physical, and biological ideas that underlie real-world uploading.

Dalrymple took his first class at UMBC in the fall of 2000 and graduated with B.S. degrees in Computer Science and Mathematics in the spring of 2005. During this time he also spoke at TED 11, took a summer at sea, and worked with Kurzweil Technologies to create the earliest prototypes of the KNFB Reader.

After working for a year as an independent consultant out of his parents' basement, they let him move to Cambridge, Massachusetts in June 2006 to begin graduate studies at the MITMedia Lab. (As far as any of the administrators knew, nobody as young as 14 had ever entered an MIT graduate program in the past.) 

In June 2008, David received his S.M. in Media Technology, with a thesis titled "Asynchronous Logic Automata," and began the Ph.D. program in Media Arts and Sciences as a member of the Mind Machine Project under Marvin Minsky. In the summer of 2010, David attended Singularity University at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, which inspired him to refocus from the world of computer architecture, programming language design, and artificial intelligence to the world of biophysics and neuroscience. On the advice of the faculty, in 2011, David left the Media Lab Ph.D. program at MIT for the Biophysics Ph.D. program at Harvard. In 2012, David went on leave from Harvard and signed a research grant agreement with the Thiel Foundation to pursue his research goals in an independent context.

In this talk from Humanity+ 2012 in San Fransisco, Dalrymple gives a brief overview of the project.




SOURCE  Adam Ford

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