Daily Archives: April 7, 2017

One of the many images produced by the Human Conectome Project, but can such science ever lead to brain uploading?

IF you could, would you want to live forever even if it meant existing in a virtual world?

That is the desperate goal of Australian man Philip Rhoades, the founder of a body-freezing cryonics lab and a brain preserving company called the Neural Archives Foundation.

The latter consists of scientifically preserved brains stored all over the country including those of his recently deceased parents waiting for the day when their contents might be uploaded to a computer.

Of course the science underpinning such an ambitious idea is dubious to say the least, but Mr Rhoades believes its just a matter of time until technology is advanced enough to achieve his dream.

At 65, he understands time is of the essence and so hes turned to a well-known figure of tech innovation for help: Elon Musk.

The billionaire founder of Tesla and SpaceX recently announced a new venture called Neural Lace to develop a way to connect the human brain with a computer. Mr Rhoades believes the tech titan is somebody who can push the controversial field forward.

In a bizarre open letter the former biomedical researcher spruiked his credentials and volunteered his brain to be uploaded and sent to Mars, allowing him to explore the universe.

Musk has bold plans to take humans to Mars and is planning to launch a mission to the red planet in conjunction with NASA in the coming decade.

Mr Rhoades believes it would make more sense to send virtual people.

I am convinced that I need to become a virtual person (via mind uploading) sooner rather than later, he writes in his letter to Musk.

It sounds delusional and many would argue that it is but Mr Rhoades is convinced the science of transferring our brains to computers has not been proven to be impossible.

I dont care if your average Facebook user thinks its all crazy ... people in the business are spending serious money on this, he told news.com.au.

Philip Rhoades knows that most people think hes crazy. Picture: Jim Trifyllis.Source:News Limited

Russian internet millionaire Dmitry Itskov is among them. He is pursuing brain uploading with the ultimate goal of being able to transfer someones personality into a completely new body.

Within the next 30 years, I am going to make sure that we can all live forever, he told the BBC last year.

All of the evidence seems to say in theory its possible its extremely difficult, but its possible.

Mr Rhoades said he knew there was virtually no chance of getting Mr Musks attention, so he published the letter on a site that promotes the convergence of technology and the human body.

Dr Elaine Mulcahy wearing wired up thinking cap connected to computer. The device records brain waves during a medical research test at Sydney University back in 2002.Source:News Limited

From a technological point of view I dont know that Neural Lace is the best solution ... but certainly that brain computer interface angle is the way to go to get the brain uploading stuff going, he said.

It sounds like science fiction but its not. Its just the normal march of scientific progress.

Currently, scientists are working on something called the Human Conectome Project which is mapping the connections and neural links in the brain to better understand how it functions.

Mr Rhoades is hopeful such research will give us a better understanding of how things like memories are stored and that one day well be able to be decode them.

There is another, more personal factor that drives his optimism.

Towards the end of his life, Mr Rhoades father who died in May last year suffered from a neural degenerative disease. His son is desperate to avoid a similar fate.

If we accelerate this, I might be able to skip the freezing step and get uploaded directly, he said.

Tech billionaire and innovator Elon Musk. Picture: Karim SahibSource:AFP

Read more from the original source:

Elon Musk: Australian man pens desperate letter to download his brain - NEWS.com.au

The videos are an infamous genre unto themselves: "Mother Punches Her Daughter Dead in the Face for Having Sex in the House!" "Dad Whups Daughter for Dressing Like Beyonce." "Son Left In Bloody Mess as Father Forces Him to 'Fight.'" Their images stream from Facebook timelines and across YouTube channels, alternately horrifying and arresting: burly fathers, angry mothers, lips curled, curses flying, hands wrapped around electrical chords, tree branches, belts, slashing down on legs, arms, buttocks and flesh as children cry and plead and scream out in agony.

Tens of millions have clicked "play," becoming voyeurs of this new form of child punishment what some observers call "digi-discipline."

Rather than sticking to the time-honored tradition of physically disciplining their children behind closed doors, parents, many of them black, buoyed by the instant gratification and viral fame that social media provides, are increasingly uploading videos of the corporal punishment they mete out on their kids, sparking intense debate on the usefulness of this particular form of public shaming.

The videos' comments threads reveal where most viewers stand on the issue: the digital whoops, hollers and high-fives rival those heard at championship boxing matches, with a majority of commenters encouraging the beatings and applauding the parents. "Whup that trick," one commenter wrote. "Beat that THOT wannabe's ass," said another, using the slur du jour for "slut." Yet another chimed in with "Good job .. now this is a father i salute him because if my daughter was doing this id whoop her ass too."

The running theme: It's OK to beat children, and, if the millions of views each video garners tell the story, it's acceptable to post tapings of the beatings on social media for feedback and "likes."

Tameka Harris-James, an Atlanta-based licensed clinical social worker whose practice includes working with victims of family trauma, said "digi-discipline" has become a new "community experience" that lays bare generations of trauma corporal punishment has wreaked on African-Americans. Viewers, perhaps triggered by their own abuse, repeat the cycle of abuse by hitting their children or applauding those who publicly do so, rather than acquiring the language and skills they need to deal with their own trauma.

"When you have a group of people coming from the same population and circumstances who live by the same social rules and norms that say it's OK to beat children, you don't talk about problems or go to therapy and get the help you need from those kinds of cathartic outlets," Harris-James said. "Instead, you watch these videos and collectively join in and bond over the pain."

Corporal punishment is universally accepted by a large swath of American parents; a 2014 study by Child Trends, a research organization that uses data to help shape public policy on children, reveals that 65 percent of women and 76 percent of men agree or strongly agree that it is sometimes necessary to give a child a "good hard spanking." But when broken down by race, black parents particularly black mothers are far more likely to agree that kids need beatings: 81 percent of black mothers, compared with 62 percent each of Hispanic and white mothers, advocate hard spanking, while 80 percent of black fathers felt the same, compared to 76 percent and 73 percent of white and Hispanic fathers respectively.

Among blacks, commiserating over corporal punishment is nothing new; before social media, parents would recount in conversations at the hair salon, barbershop, church, family gatherings or more intimate phone conversations the beatings they handed out for childhood infractions. Anti-corporal punishment advocate Stacey Patton, author of Spare the Kids: Why Whupping Children Won't Save Black America, said in the past, "It would be, 'girl, I tore her butt up for leaving this house without asking.'" Today, she said, digital technology, social media and video-sharing sites "allow that conversation to become much more public and widespread. It makes parents feel more powerful."

Patton notes that in a society where black people have limited political, economic and social power, one place they can both exercise authority and strike back at stereotypes that portray black parents as irresponsible and unloving is taking "control" of their kids. Beating children and posting it on social media, then, is just as much about performing respectability as it is punishing wrongdoing. "Rather than striking back at oppressive systems that justify beating and shaming your kids, you beat and shame your kids. You can say, 'I'm a responsible parent. I don't let my kids run wild.'"

In some cases, those parents are rewarded when their videos go viral. LaToya Graham was crowned "mom of the year" after being captured on tape smacking her son upside his head, yelling at him and chasing him down the street for participating in a Baltimore protest over the police killing of Freddie Gray. The video, filmed by a local TV news station, shot past 8 million views on YouTube after it aired on television and Baltimore Police Commissioner Anthony Batts shouted out Graham, saying he wished "there were more parents out there who took charge of their kids." Within weeks, Graham enjoyed a media whirlwind of praise, appearing on several popular news and talk shows, getting job offers from BET, Under Armour and a local hospital, and even receiving a phone call and a $15,000 check from Oprah.

Social media amplified the significance and reward of Graham's actions, which led to an uptick in digi-discipline videos, said Patton. "Her success gave validation to other parents that this was OK," she said.

But not everyone gets rewarded for such public discipline. In the case of Virginia father Tavis Sellers, boxing his son on Facebook Live as punishment for leaving class earned the dad a domestic assault and battery charge after his video went viral. In it, Sellers orders his son to put on boxing gloves and fight him; the father bests the son, tossing jabs that make the boy's nose bleed. As he continues to beat him, Sellers chides the boy, telling both him and the viewing audience that when he "cuts up in school, this is what [he] has to deal with when [he] comes home." By the video's end, the boy's white t-shirt is covered with blood; his father demands he look in the camera and apologize to his teacher.

Sellers was arrested a few days later.

Patton, whose outspoken advocacy teaches positive, non-violent disciplinary practices to parents of color, has even called police to report parents who've uploaded videos of themselves beating their children, and encouraged her more than 44,000 Facebook followers to do the same. "People say, 'That's [expletive] up. Another black man in jail, another black child in foster care you need to mind your business.' I'm like, 'This person put their business in the fiber optic streets and it's our job as human beings to protect this kid.'"

Parents, she adds, need to spend less time posting digi-punishment videos and more time actually learning how to parent their children. "What they're beating their kids over bad report cards, cutting class, sexual behavior is all developmental stuff. Sit down and have a conversation with them about healthy sexual choices. All that time they spent charging their phones, setting up the cameras, explaining why they're about to beat the mess out of their kids, filming the abuse, uploading it on YouTube, captioning it and tagging their friends, they could have Googled 'How to talk to my daughter about sex.'"

Still, some parents find great value in digi-punishment as a deterrent for their children and a lesson for mothers and fathers parenting in the digital age. "I would do it all over again," says author ReShonda Tate Billingsley, who set off a storm of controversy in 2012 when she punished her daughter for posting an Instagram photo of herself holding up a bottle of Vodka and saying she wished she could drink it. Billingsley countered with a photo of her own: a picture of her crying daughter holding a sign that read, "Since I want to take pics holding liquor, I am obviously NOT ready for social media and will be taking a hiatus until I learn what is and isn't appropriate to post. Bye-Bye." The photo, which she posted on her Facebook page, was shared more than 10,000 times hours after it went public.

"It resonated with her and to this day, she still thinks about that. They live on social media and that's always in the back of her mind," says Billingsley, adding that the picture inspired parents to pay attention to what their children post on social media. Still, the mom of three believes that beating children on camera goes "way too far." These days, parents, she said, "are doing it for likes and shares."

Patton plans to lobby for legislation that would make it a crime to post videos and pictures of children getting beaten and adds that she believes the only reason it hasn't been introduced and passed already is because the videos predominately feature black children. "This is a country that's become numb to the destruction of black bodies. Whether it's Toya Graham beating her son, or Tamir Rice being shot by cops, it's OK we've become accustomed to watching it. If these were white children in these degrading videos, something would have been done a long time ago."

Harris-James thinks a bit differently about this.

"Parents will continue to beat their children and there should be consequences for that," she says quietly. "But if we shut it down, it takes our attention off of it and we forget about those children. At least now, the videos stimulate dialogue and conversation and action because it's in your face."

Denene Millner is a New York Times best-selling author and a parenting expert, whose latest book is My Brown Baby: On the Joys and Challenges Of Raising African American Children.

Read the rest here:

The perils and false rewards of parenting in the era of 'digi-discipline' - Minnesota Public Radio News

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