The genetic code does not, and cannot, specify the nature and position of every capillary in the body or every neuron in the brain. What it can do is describe the underlying fractal pattern which creates them.

Does NOT Approve!

Isn't this presumptuous? Riker didn't get split into good/evil, just confident/whiny.

UNC_Samurai: The genetic code does not, and cannot, specify the nature and position of every capillary in the body or every neuron in the brain. What it can do is describe the underlying fractal pattern which creates them.

And until we start storing it, we will have none to study.

I've got a small family to study, weaving shared sequences to discover what's causing those children's diseases. The cousins would really help narrow down a large chunk from the paternal grandmother, but the cousins' dad is a lawyer who's afraid what will happen if we let his DNA go in a vault. So I get to tell the family we aren't sure which sequence is the disease carrier.

Big Man On Campus: Isn't this presumptuous? Riker didn't get split into good/evil, just confident/whiny.

Riker's personality wasn't split in two. The transporter created an exact duplicate of Riker as a whole and then two Riker's took different paths in life. Kirk's personality was split in to two half which is why he had to merge the two back together to survive and the two Rikers could go their separate ways unharmed.

The "Evil" Kirk and Spock were much cooler. Even as a kid I knew that was true.

I think it is the sashes and facial hair. Heavy makeup.


Keith Richards stamp of approval. Why is it to be truly badass you have to put on eyeliner, wear a blouse and wear sashes and handkerchiefs?

That always disturbed me. Can a soul be reconstituted?

My god that post was so full of grammatical errors I'm embarrassed to have posted it.

ExperianScaresCthulhu: That always disturbed me. Can a soul be reconstituted?

Why do you insist that the human genetic code is "sacred" or "taboo"? It is a chemical process and nothing more. For that matter we are chemical processes and nothing more. If you deny yourself a useful tool simply because it reminds you uncomfortably of your mortality, you have uselessly and pointlessly crippled yourself.

I wonder if the right wing will determine that the hard drive holding them now has a soul?

It's surprisingly hard to anticipate what stupid, uninformed, emotionally screwed up people will do next.

tothekor: Big Man On Campus: Isn't this presumptuous? Riker didn't get split into good/evil, just confident/whiny.

Riker's personality wasn't split in two. The transporter created an exact duplicate of Riker as a whole and then two Riker's took different paths in life. Kirk's personality was split in to two half which is why he had to merge the two back together to survive and the two Rikers could go their separate ways unharmed.

The transporter always creates duplicates, though. Whatever goes in is not the same as what comes out. Xeroxes remain Xeroxes. The original Riker died the first time he used one of those things. Kind of like the original John Crichton died the first time some alien split him into multiples, or the first time the SG-1 team went through a wormhole. The originals are dead. Only copies remain.

I don't remember the TNG episode you two are referencing, was it during the good years or the suck years? It sounds like an interesting experiment, though, and I'm glad it was dealt with. We usually only get to see the one path a clone takes, on these type of shows.

So, two Rikers can go their separate way, but the harm was done in 'killing' the person they were copied from in the first place.

/off topic: why are the people in primer referred to as clones by fans, when they are not?
//do transporter copies have rights, or are they the fetuses eligible for abortion of the ST universe?
///will AI clones of brains have rights? should they?

I don't have a good side. Will I just get two evil duplicates?

I feel sure that this information won't find it's way into the hands of insurance companies.

UNC_Samurai: ExperianScaresCthulhu: That always disturbed me. Can a soul be reconstituted?

Why do you insist that the human genetic code is "sacred" or "taboo"? It is a chemical process and nothing more. For that matter we are chemical processes and nothing more. If you deny yourself a useful tool simply because it reminds you uncomfortably of your mortality, you have uselessly and pointlessly crippled yourself.

Do you believe you make your own decisions? Or is it just all a chemical process already underway with a predetermined outcome? Is the concept of responsibility for one's actions simply an artificial construct, just one predetermined thing among many?

Sounds like a new job field opening up; writing software and interpreting results for MDs, because for at least the first few years, doctors have no capacity to think, they just regurgitate the info they memorize for boards. I've seen mds waste valuable seminar time with leading researchers by asking stupid questions every high school bio student knows the answer to...

and i've heard med students biatching that the shouldn't have to know how genes work... sad state of the med ed industry.

Brew78: Do you believe you make your own decisions? Or is it just all a chemical process already underway with a predetermined outcome? Is the concept of responsibility for one's actions simply an artificial construct, just one predetermined thing among many?

predetermined? funny. probabilistic: more likely.

Evil Twin Skippy: Assuming that what determines whether a drug will work or not is influenced by genetics...

In some cases it has a significant impact. Link (new window) In other cases a genetic variation is the difference between "this drug cures/controls the disease" and "this drug kills you".

As for where this technology and practice will go, someone needs to figure out how to better store this data. The data that comes off of a sequencer is huge and getting larger. And right now people are mostly looking for known genetic markers. Once people start sequencing and storing a person's entire genome with the idea of referencing it later we're not going to know where to put it all (at a reasonable price that doesn't significantly affect the price of the testing.).

/sysadmin for a genetics lab
//hates dealing with their storage issues

hitlersbrain: I wonder if the right wing will determine that the hard drive holding them now has a soul?

It's surprisingly hard to anticipate what stupid, uninformed, emotionally screwed up people will do next.

Except it's not a dumb question at all. It's not stupid to contemplate, though it does require information, and there will be a hell of a lot of emotion wrapped up in it until we 'Think Like a Dinosaur' ;) What's another story which dealt with it..... I can think of two, god I can't remember the names. One is a very old series... one is a newer series, written by a Brit.

The first series deals with what happens when the souls of every formerly living person in the universe decide they want to live again, and start invading the bodies of the living through a gate. This was a hard science fiction series. One of the cultures in this series was made up of people who had their brains copied. The copied brains formed a collective cultural Oversoul who still retained their individual quirks and personalities, so you could always talk to Grandpa if you wanted to. In the series, as far as I read, this collective was always treated as wise and happy and helpful.

I don't remember if the series dealt with the original (organic?) souls having a confrontation with the AI copies who now represent them. The series, as far as I read, treated the copied brains as if they had reached a better place and had sidestepped the formless hell every other non-copied brain/soul meets upon death through the act of copying themselves into their cultures Mainframe. I guess I'd have to read further to see if it were dealt with, but I don't even remember the series name :(

Another series I don't remember the name of by the british writer, more hard science fiction, it was a murder mystery wrapped up in a quasi-religious search for the true identity of an oversoul called the Watcher. The murder mystery dealt with what happens when people have their brains and personalities copied without their consent, and the copies are placed in environments where they are killed over and over and over again in a virtual reality video game for sexual kinks? In this series, AI copies were treated as persons in their own right, and actually had legal rights in this society. With exceptions. What happens when the original 'you' not only doesn't recognize that 'you' are also a person with feelings, thoughts, personality, desires, and wishes, but only sees you as a copy which can be turned off and turned on when the 'original' feels like it? is it truly no harm no foul?

Who else................................ is Severian still himself, when he's the Outsider?

camelclub: Too bad the Transporter didn't have a "Restore" setting. So when you got sick or killed, they could just run you through the transporter on a restore setting to an earlier you.

This is actually a very, very bad idea. (new window)

/Hope you weren't planning on getting much sleep tonight.

camelclub: Too bad the Transporter didn't have a "Restore" setting. So when you got sick or killed, they could just run you through the transporter on a restore setting to an earlier you.

From what I remember, someone explained years later that copies are cleaned out (is this in the same Riker split storyline?) I never saw the episode which dealt with it, or read the article which dealt with it. That's just what I heard. I can't imagine that someone wouldn't keep an option for 'restore', unless there are very specific and airtight cultural taboos for it in the Federation Universe which prevent it.

----------------------

ThatGuyOverThere: Brew78: Do you believe you make your own decisions? Or is it just all a chemical process already underway with a predetermined outcome? Is the concept of responsibility for one's actions simply an artificial construct, just one predetermined thing among many?

predetermined? funny. probabilistic: more likely.

I believe all choices are mapped out, but it's up to you to choose which path you'll follow on the map. All paths lead to death, which route are you going to take to get to it?


--------------

UNC_Samurai: ExperianScaresCthulhu: That always disturbed me. Can a soul be reconstituted?

Why do you insist that the human genetic code is "sacred" or "taboo"? It is a chemical process and nothing more. For that matter we are chemical processes and nothing more. If you deny yourself a useful tool simply because it reminds you uncomfortably of your mortality, you have uselessly and pointlessly crippled yourself.

I insisted upon no such thing. I do insist upon thinking really long and hard about the consequences, and about the responsibilities which come with creating AI, and creating AI copies of organic beings. Perhaps considering something 'sacred' or 'taboo' allows us to keep what remains of our humanity -- whatever that may be defined as -- intact. We should not be creating AI recklessly, and that which we create should not be treated as mindless when we have in fact given it a mind. If that makes sense.

Chemical process or not, we have a responsibility to treat that chemical process with respect. It is the privilege and the DUTY of conscience beings to do so.

ThatGuyOverThere: Brew78: Do you believe you make your own decisions? Or is it just all a chemical process already underway with a predetermined outcome? Is the concept of responsibility for one's actions simply an artificial construct, just one predetermined thing among many?

predetermined? funny. probabilistic: more likely.

Well.. no, predetermined. The math involved is probably beyond modern computers, but if everything is pure physics and chain reacions and all laws of conservation of mass and energy are upheld, then if the full set of all current conditions are known, one could predict the future with 100% accuracy.

I mean, this is a LOT of information and I don't know if we'll ever be able to even start to tackle it, but the concept is hard to refute. If you feel that events are only probable, then there's a non-physical force at play.

String theory? Quantum physics? A non-physical pilot in our meat-robot bodies? Beats the hell out of me, I'm no scientist and an amateur philosopher at best.

Invisible Dynamite Monkey: //hates dealing with their storage issues

They prob won't be storing the raw, just the final sequence. "A" is a lot easier to store "A-97, T-2, -C0.7, G-0.3" and the full graph of each base. or whatever this gen is doing.

ExperianScaresCthulhu: That always disturbed me. Can a soul be reconstituted?

Well, for a soul to be reconstituted it would have to exist in the first place...

camelclub: Too bad the Transporter didn't have a "Restore" setting. So when you got sick or killed, they could just run you through the transporter on a restore setting to an earlier you.

I'm pretty sure I already saw that episode on STTNG.

/pretty sure SG1 had a similar episode when Teal'c got stuck in the Stargate

Give me a call when they can re-create me with today's experiential learning and my 20 year old body.

hailin:
I'm imagining a future that is a mixture of Gattica and Minority Report and it scares the hell out of me.

By that time, the only people who are scared will be the religious cults who have UNC's 'sacred' and 'taboo' proscriptions against being immersed fully in such a society ;) Invisible Dynamite Monkey: Once people start sequencing and storing a person's entire genome with the idea of referencing it later we're not going to know where to put it all (at a reasonable price that doesn't significantly affect the price of the testing.).

So storage will be the death of innovation and ground breaking research? The field needs a 'miniaturization' revolution, like in the past where folks were trying to solve new problems with old solutions (bigger = more room)? What kind of 'thinking outside the box' have you seen in the field when it comes to storage?

barefoot: ExperianScaresCthulhu: That always disturbed me. Can a soul be reconstituted?

Well, for a soul to be reconstituted it would have to exist in the first place...

Fine. Substitute 'conscience' for soul. You are the you sitting where you sit typing what you typed.
Someone pushes you through a transporter, and forgets to clean out the data afterwards.
There are now two of you sitting where you sit typing away.

Which one of you is the 'you' who sat and typed your original response?

ExperianScaresCthulhu: That always disturbed me. Can a soul be reconstituted?

No it can't because it isn't constituted in the first place.

ExperianScaresCthulhu: I insisted upon no such thing. I do insist upon thinking really long and hard about the consequences, and about the responsibilities which come with creating AI, and creating AI copies of organic beings. Perhaps considering something 'sacred' or 'taboo' allows us to keep what remains of our humanity -- whatever that may be defined as -- intact. We should not be creating AI recklessly, and that which we create should not be treated as mindless when we have in fact given it a mind. If that makes sense.

We hold life to be sacred, but we also know the foundation of life consists in a stream of codes not so different from the successive frames of a watchvid. Why then cannot we cut one code short here, and start another there? Is life so fragile that it can withstand no tampering? Does the sacred brook no improvement?

Brew78: I mean, this is a LOT of information and I don't know if we'll ever be able to even start to tackle it, but the concept is hard to refute. If you feel that events are only probable, then there's a non-physical force at play.

Yeah, dumb blind probability. This is the way I see it, atoms are always in flux, the amino acids they make are always a bit wobbly, the proteins they build are also always in flux. We know this. There is no debate. The question is what percentage of the time these proteins are in one conformation as opposed to others. It has been shown that, say, serotonin receptors that should be normally "off" can be turned "on" even in the presence of no serotonin. A lot of molecular biology depends on what else happens to be around. If there happens to be co-factor hanging around the receptor, eg PIP2, then the receptor can show spontaneous activity even without serotonin. Likewise, if the receptor binds serotonin, but can't hook up with a PIP2, you'll get a truncated serotonin signal, if any. And this is just at the cell membrane level; not accounting for the intracellular cascades and all the other things that can go wrong there that happen downstream of serotonin receptor activation (not accounting for 5ht3R, that's just a misfit in the serotonin story)

Really, this all goes back to "okay, you know the genetic sequence, now what?" Which is something researchers have been fighting with for 40 years or so. Even if you can figure out what went wrong, finding out how to fix it is an entirely more complicated matter. I mean, we still don't actually know how tylenol works... And you think an entire genome full of uninterpretable data is going to be a good thing? I think it's going to make a mess and lead to the aforementioned stratification of society, but that's just me being my usual paranoid self.

ExperianScaresCthulhu: The first series deals with what happens when the souls of every formerly living person in the universe decide they want to live again, and start invading the bodies of the living through a gate.

I think you're confusing DNA with the human mind. The DNA is just a shallow copy of raw data that the complex machinery of animal biology uses to create things. We still don't understand much about the machinery. Almost nothing really.

It's why the 'ovum is a human' argument is invalid. It has the potential to be human... after about a trillion insanely complex processes take place but (obviously) it's not a human being any more than the food it uses as building blocks is human.

Also, if you can put the contents of the most intricate and complex thing biology has ever evolved on Earth, the human brain, into a machine why the hell would you want to put it back into a crappy container like the human body?

We can almost make full machine bodies now, much better than the rather terrible and disposable human body. It's the brain that's the tricky part. Even modern super-computers haven't even reached a single percent of what the human brain can do. With Moore's Law pretty much finished it's going to be a LONG time before we can make a computer anywhere near as amazing as the human brain.

ExperianScaresCthulhu: , or the first time the SG-1 team went through a wormhole.

A wormhole would be a bit different than a teleporter, though, so I have issue with this example. An einstein-rosen bridge is, I'm pretty sure, just connecting to points in space. You might as well say 'That person died the moment they walked down the hallway'.

ExperianScaresCthulhu: barefoot: ExperianScaresCthulhu: That always disturbed me. Can a soul be reconstituted?

Well, for a soul to be reconstituted it would have to exist in the first place...

Fine. Substitute 'conscience' for soul. You are the you sitting where you sit typing what you typed.
Someone pushes you through a transporter, and forgets to clean out the data afterwards.
There are now two of you sitting where you sit typing away.

Which one of you is the 'you' who sat and typed your original response?

Whichever one grabs teh keyboard first, unless they both get bored and take a walk outside to find the schmuck who pushed us through the transporter in the first place.

ThatGuyOverThere:
Yeah, dumb blind probability. This is the way I see it, atoms are always in flux, the amino acids they make are always a bit wobbly, the proteins they build are also always in flux. We know this. There is no debate. The question is what percentage of the time these proteins are in one conformation as opposed to others. It has been shown that, say, serotonin receptors that should be normally "off" can be turned "on" even in the presence of no serotonin. A lot of molecular biology depends on what else happens to be around. If there happens to be co-factor hanging around the receptor, eg PIP2, then the receptor can show spontaneous activity even without serotonin. Likewise, if the receptor binds serotonin, but can't hook up with a PIP2, you'll get a truncated serotonin signal, if any. And this is just at the cell membrane level; not accounting for the intracellular cascades and all the other things that can go wrong there that happen downstream of serotonin receptor activation (not accounting for 5ht3R, that's just a misfit in the serotonin story)

Really, this all goes back to "okay, you know the genetic sequence, now what?" Which is something researchers have been fighting with for 40 years or so. Even if you can figure out what went wrong, finding out how to fix it is an entirely more complicated matter. I mean, we still don't actually know how tylenol works... And you think an entire genome full of uninterpretable data is going to be a good thing? I think it's going to make a mess and lead to the aforementioned stratification of society, but that's just me being my usual paranoid self.

Ok, so by "atoms in flux" and other observed strangeness, you're taking quantum physics. Which is to say "stuff we don't really understand and are working towards figuring out if we ever even will". Its not just dumb chance, its physics that's outside our current scope and potentially outside our understanding of 3D physical reality. May as well take a class at Hogwart's :)

ExperianScaresCthulhu: The transporter always creates duplicates, though. Whatever goes in is not the same as what comes out. Xeroxes remain Xeroxes. The original Riker died the first time he used one of those things. Kind of like the original John Crichton died the first time some alien split him into multiples, or the first time the SG-1 team went through a wormhole. The originals are dead. Only copies remain.

Felgraf: A wormhole would be a bit different than a teleporter, though, so I have issue with this example. An einstein-rosen bridge is, I'm pretty sure, just connecting to points in space. You might as well say 'That person died the moment they walked down the hallway'.

Sometimes you just nod your head, let people rant, and think about soup. That's what I was doing.

Felgraf: ExperianScaresCthulhu: , or the first time the SG-1 team went through a wormhole.

A wormhole would be a bit different than a teleporter, though, so I have issue with this example. An einstein-rosen bridge is, I'm pretty sure, just connecting to points in space. You might as well say 'That person died the moment they walked down the hallway'.

I thought Sam explained in one episode that what happens isn't that they just walk from one place to another, but that their atoms are taken apart and put back together again on the other side?

Don't even get us started on the epigenome, or maternal mRNA (and RNAi?) effects on the embryo. Whoops! Down the rabbit hole!

As for the transporter... all sorts of things become possible. For example, why didn't the Cardassians simply create a secret transporter-duplicate of Captain Picard, which they could keep and interrogate indefinitely, after promptly returning the original to the Federation as a "gesture of goodwill"? Heck, you could make multiple copies of a prisoner, and try different interrogation/torture strategies, to see which one works best. If you accidentally kill one, oops, lesson learned, bring in another.

This'll be great news for the twenty people who still have/can affford medical coverage by the time this comes into general use.

ThatGuyOverThere: Invisible Dynamite Monkey: //hates dealing with their storage issues

They prob won't be storing the raw, just the final sequence. "A" is a lot easier to store "A-97, T-2, -C0.7, G-0.3" and the full graph of each base. or whatever this gen is doing.

I'm looking at sequencing runs after their last upgrade and we're storing a couple hundred Gig per 8 lane run. Also keep in mind that we need to store it twice since I need to keep a backup copy. That starts to get large very quickly.

ExperianScaresCthulhu:Invisible Dynamite Monkey: Once people start sequencing and storing a person's entire genome with the idea of referencing it later we're not going to know where to put it all (at a reasonable price that doesn't significantly affect the price of the testing.).

So storage will be the death of innovation and ground breaking research? The field needs a 'miniaturization' revolution, like in the past where folks were trying to solve new problems with old solutions (bigger = more room)? What kind of 'thinking outside the box' have you seen in the field when it comes to storage?

The problem isn't really something to be solved by storage technology IMHO. It's getting the scientists and scientific developers to stop thinking that working with files several hundred MB to even Gigs in size on a traditional filesystem is the way to keep doing things. But that means they need to be willing to re-architect their tools to access the data in these new ways instead of just expecting to give a file path.

This thread is sadly lacking in pics of mirror universe babes.

/also, Nerds!!!!!

No Such Agency: Don't even get us started on the epigenome, or maternal mRNA (and RNAi?) effects on the embryo. Whoops! Down the rabbit hole!

As for the transporter... all sorts of things become possible. For example, why didn't the Cardassians simply create a secret transporter-duplicate of Captain Picard, which they could keep and interrogate indefinitely, after promptly returning the original to the Federation as a "gesture of goodwill"? Heck, you could make multiple copies of a prisoner, and try different interrogation/torture strategies, to see which one works best. If you accidentally kill one, oops, lesson learned, bring in another.

Then they'd have to do the whole "I-see-four-lights" thing again. That just wastes electricity.

And Henrietta Lacks would like her tumor cells back.

Actually, the family DID try to sue for copyright for HeLa cells. A judge said no.

At this point, we'd like to sue for them to take them BACK. Filthy immortal cells get into everything.

I'm not sure what transporters and souls have to do with TFA, but I have to say: assuming we can manage proper privacy protections and data security, I like this. I have a family history of some bad shiat and Mr. Arigby's family has a different but also unappetizing list of problems--nothing as bad as Parkinson's or Tay-Sachs on either side, but Alzheimer's, suicidal depression, bad backs, hormonal disorders, circulatory disorders, and other fun stuff crops up. Given the importance of early detection and treatment in the case of pretty much every disorder ever (barring varicose veins, where they like larger veins because they're easier to stick needles into), I would like to have my children screened. Then, if it turns out they're at risk for the hormonal shiat but not the depression or vice versa, the doctor/medical lab/whatever could hand over a list of warning signs to watch out for. Given the rate of medical advancement, I wouldn't be surprised if at some point they came out with a preventative of some kind--e.g. instead of taking antidepressants after falling into a pit where you want to kill yourself, which will take years to claw your way back out of if you make it at all, you would take head-suicidal-depression-off-at-the-pass pills with your morning vitamins.

Of course, there are some people who'd be horrified at the idea of taking pills to prevent depression, but they're probably the same people who think it's bad to treat depression after it manifests, too. I've been there, I'm out of there because of my little yellow pills, and I'm genuinely unsure whether I'd rather see my kids suffer it, too, or have them run over by a train and killed so quickly they never feel a thing. I would wildly prefer a preventative to both of those things.

Then again, given my initially stated "if"--privacy and security--this is all moot, because I think we all know exactly how that'll turn out.

Though I have to admit, with my children's health and sanity at stake...