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Comment by izzydata | Hacker News Reader

As in the neural pathways of the brain degrade to the point that no longer resembles human intelligence?

I don't think most people here are going to believe in a spark of consciousness that breaths life into the brain.

Neural pathways are just pathways. The electrical patterns that reside in the interactions between neurons are necessary for conscious experience. Once the patterns are gone, information is lost. It is like taking a snapshot of a table of moving billiard balls. You only have the position of the balls, but not the velocity, acceleration, etc. And those are necessary to recreate the motion. The "motion" in the case of the brain is what creates the person (as far as anyone currently knows). Having the dead neurons and their dead connections is not enough.

I don't think that's accurate from what we know currently -- there might be a minimum level of activity necessary to restart the system, but I think we know only upper bound of that (whatever they get with general anesthesia).

But a lot of motions can be removed and then restored.

Maybe if you take a snapshot of that billiard table, then recreate static picture of that and just bump all the balls randomly, they will settle on similar movement patterns the original system had.

That doesn't seem true? Short-term memory is encoded in transient electrical patterns, but long term memory definitely is not. You definitely don't lose your personhood if you suffer an interruption to short term memory, or else everyone who's ever had a seizure is already dead.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory#Long-term_memory

We actually have no idea how memory is encoded in any way - but that is irrelevant. When a person has a seizure, the electrical activity continues and is able to revert back to previous patterns through self correcting/preserving measures. My comment was referring to a completely dead brain with no activity whatsoever.

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