From: Mark Walker (tap@cgocable.net)
Date: Sun Jul 29 2001 - 07:28:24 MDT
----- Original Message -----
From: Ben Goertzel <ben@webmind.com>
.
>
> Who are the associated mavericks in neural enhancement? Who believes that
> superhumanly-intelligent modified brains are a few years off if all goes
> well? I don't know any such people, but perhaps I just move in the wrong
> circles...
>
I can certainly think of political reasons why this is not discussed, viz.,
the politics of genetically enhanced human intelligence is way more "touchy"
than with computer superintelligence. The frog embryo experiment described
below has been performed:
"For our purposes what is of interest is that there are a number of homeobox
genes that that control the growth of various brain regions.[9] For example,
if you want to make a larger brain in a frog embryo simply insert some RNA
from the gene X-Otx2 and voilą-you have a frog embryo with a larger brain,
specifically, the mid and forebrain mass is increased.[10] A similar gene is
found in humans. Homeobox genes also come in various forms of generality.
Otx2 is obviously very general in its scope; in contrast, for example, Emx1
controls the growth of the isocortex (one of the two regions of the
neocortex). Thus, if we believe that intelligence and philosophical wisdom
might be aided by tweaking one area of the brain or another there may be
just the right homeobox gene for this task. "
Mark
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