Randal A. Koene:
Short answer: No. That is not needed.

Longer answer: Well, it would be highly preferable, but is not strictly speaking necessary. The most basic form of WBE / mind uploading that is often discussed involves freezing a brain, slicing it up, examining the slices under a microscope, and reconstructing the neurons, synapses and most of the major components that would be deemed functionally imperative.

To do such a reconstruction, what you need is some knowledge of how a biological neuron, synapse, etc. works (basically, it's I/O function). Eventhough a comprehensive survey of the components and their response functions has not yet been conducted, it is quite feasible, and most details of that are known for at least the most prominent types of neurons, synapses, etc.

So, to create a WBE, you don't actually need to know how mental operations are achieved, how consciousness works, or any such high-level knowledge. The slice-scan-reconstruct procedure would be analogous to opening up an electronic integrated circuit, scanning the silica, metal and other paths deposited there, and simulating their function from their morphology in software.

I'll be the first to admit that even that is not ``simple'' by any measure. Cataloguing response functions and interactions of neurobiological components alone may require an effort at a scale similar to that applied to the human genome project. And it is clearly sub-optimal, since a true verification that a WBE is successful and error-correction during the reconstruction process would both require a deeper understanding of the neuronal circuitry underlying mental function.

And yet, my answer to your question is clearly: No, you do not require a complete understanding of the human mind and brain to replicate it.

1. The area of how we upload the whole brain.

2. The new piece of housing that the uploaded mind goes into.

Randal A. Koene:
Most definitely, yes.

Tony Nolan:
What do we mean by emulation? To what extent do we have to stay with the original model?

Randal A. Koene:
The word emulation is used here specifically (instead of simulation for instance) to indicate the desire to achieved as close a functional match as possible. This of course does not preclude modifications, it merely states that the minimum requirement is the ability to emulate the functions of an individual human brain to the extent that the mind is alterede as little as possible in the transfer. How that emulation is achieved is not specified.

Ducktor:
To clarify another thing here; it is a *transfer* of mind, keeping the individuality as intact as possible. It`s not *creation* of a new mind.

Randal A. Koene:
Quite correct. Okay, I think this should really go into the FAQ. So I`m CCing it there.
Cheers, Randal

Randal A. Koene:
And of course it is obvious that any number of different methods and modifications will be applied at some time. Whole brain emulation in its purest form is used as the gold standard here, the default if you will. This default standard is the goal presented in the under the original banner of mind uploading.
(Sloppy analogon: the standard = photographically perfect painting, experimental modifications = cubism, or whatever. :)
Just in case the question "why" pops up next: As Eugene already mentioned, this brain is the one we *know* 100% certain works, so the reasonable scientific thing to do when you want to assure a perfect transfer of personal identity - the stated goal - is to copy that brain.
Thus the standard.
Feasibility, of course, guarantees that many partial stages, such as neuronal prostheses will be developed first (as CYMM points out).

> The nice thing about electronics & software is we understand them well
> enough. The Achilles heel of cyborgification-via-prothetics is the neural
> interface.

I have nothing against cyborgification whatsoever. Been there, thought that. The difficulties are "simply" technical.

You have to insert something which dissipates heat, with many bionert channels, plus provide an aperture to supply power and do I/O into a mobile tethered baloon the consistency of porridge, clothed into several membranes. (Get your hands upon a fresh *unfixed* pig brain, and try handling it at room temperature, make a little incision and peel off a flap of materia dura and insert a sliver of glass (or a silicon die, if you have one at hand) attached to a few leads or a bit of glass fiber, and let float the whole contraption in saline of suitable density, with the connects sitting outside . Then try sloshing it gently around. Imagine the constant irriation provided by the umbilical rubbing your mater dura and inside of the cranium. Etc.

I used to be an armchair technology designer too. I grew better, though.

As long as above technical issues (long term noninfecting implantable skin button, hole through cranium with (optical, I guess) power supply and I/O, power dissipation within biological tissues, long term bionertcy issues plus need for a major perceived as unneeded (unless piercing gets an awful lot more widespread and invasive) surgery will not go away, you will have zero progress in brain interfaces. The threshold is very high. No such threshold exists with handling frozen/fixed critters, trying to scan them and put them into the computer.

I'm really tired of telling this to people, but apparently one cannot repeat it often enough. Sigh.

Okay, here goes.

1) I am alive, because I perceive that I live, I can sense my surroundings, I can act on my surroundings, and I have a sense of myse and my place in the world.

2) I am aware of the possibility of death (the absence of life) becaus I recognize that others have stopped interacting with their surroundings, displaying any signs we normally associate with living things (movement, brain activity, etc. all those things associated wit #1).

example: John Doe is shot in the head during a robbery. They bury his body, and eventually it decomposes and the parts are taken up by other living things and spread across the earth. We have no means to make hi alive again. He is dead.

3) One is either alive or dead at any point in time, not both.

4) There exist states in which I can not determine whether I am alive dead, but because of #3 I must be one or the other.

example: various stages of sleep, anesthesia, coma, are not clearly alive or dead. By my definition of #1 (alive) above, these states fai to exhibit the full range of behaviors one would expect in an alive state, but there is definitely brain activity, so if one is alive if o displays *any* property associated with alive, then it is alive. In these cases it seems to be a subjective assessment whether the state i more "alive" or "dead", but because we cannot really measure or prove something is in either of these states, we are left with a subjective assessment of what these states are.

5) A perfect copy of a thing that is alive, will result in a new thing which is alive.

5b) An imperfect copy of a thing that is alive, will most likely be alive too, but it may behave differently then the original.

6) The substance that allows me to live is constantly changing, parts my body and brain may come and go, but "I" stay the same. My personal identity is preserverd.

7) Consciousness, is an emergent property of complex cognitive systems which cannot be directly measured, but the behavioral consequences of it's presence can be. The presence or absence of behavior resulting from consciousness are not necessarilly needed for us to consider a thing alive. Conversely, the absence of behavioral indications of consciousness do not necessarilly point to something being dead. The lack of behaviora measures of consciousness may be the result of a poor technique for measuring it.

MU examples and interpretations, given my assumptions

Teleportation

A living thing is copied, and in the process the original substance making up that individual is destroyed (the molecules are disgarded). presume something along the lines of scanning position of molecules, recording information, transmitting to new location, and building a copy.

From the copies point of view, it has moved through the teleport machi and survived, but this is an illusion. It is a perfect copy handed al the originals memories, thoughts, and a fresh substrate which will end it with an identical consciousness. #1, #5

From the original's point of view, it can no longer sense it's surroundings, interact, etc. If we take a closer look at the state of the mind of the individual during the process, as the scanner slowly wafer cuts their brain, the remaining slices continue to produce consciousness and the original feels their memories slip away, and the identity change as they think and watch. Eventually their senses fail body goes limp for lack of efferent signals, and then lower brain stem structures controlling breathing, heart rate etc. stop and the person quickly dies. #2

Teleportation (w/o destruction of original)

Same as above, but a non-destructive technique is used to scan.

From the copies point of view, same effect as above. #1, #5.

From the originals point of view, no sweat, nothing happened. It's ju like an Xray, or maybe an MRI scan. #1, #5

Teleportation (w/o original: fabrication)

In this case, there is no living original to copy. Rather, we generat a new individual based on mixing previous scans of persons transported or by creating the instructions for a new individual. We load it into the teleport and produce a new individual on the other end who has nev existed.

It would appear this person is alive. #1

Now compare this with the previous teleportation cases. If we ignore what's on the "from" end of the teleport signal, what is generated is methodically identical to the previous cases. If we accept that a "ne individual is alive and has his own unique life, separate from everyon else, we should also conclude, the same for the copies above.

Anesthesia

Patient is subjected to general anesthesia, with mixture of Nitrous Oxide, Ether, etc. for open heart surgery.

All behavioral indications of consciousness have stopped during the procedure. We can not determine whether the individual is conscious or not. In some cases patients are able to remember things that occured during the surgery, suggesting there are times when behavior resulting from consciousness are present. But we can't tell for certain in general. #4, #7

Sleep (deep sleep)

During deep sleep, breathing becomes regular, brain activity is reduce and person (generally) stops interacting with environment. As in the case of general anesthesia, there is anecdotal evidence that a person can respond in this state; they can be awaken by shaking them, they ma awake at random, they may hear a loud noise, or someone speak their name, the lights turned on, a sharp pain, etc., but we can not always make behavioral measurements that would suggest an alive state. #1, #4

Sleep (REM)

During REM sleep, breathing is varied, eyes move, brain activity is similar to waking state. Persons often recall having dreams, and can awakened by those things mentioned above for the case of deep sleep. T person is alive. #1

Cronics (freezing human body and brain)

A person walks into Cryonics Inc, and asks to be frozen. They administer to her a lethal cocktail, then proceed to quickly drain her fluids (this is typical yes?), and pack her in ice. Many years later, they repair crystal damage, and revive her.

From the person's perspective, they were given a lethal injection and die. They have died because the lethal injection killed them. They show no signs of life and must be considered dead. The freezing of the body/brain is irrelevant. #2

When the person is revived, that individual is alive. And we may consider this to be the same individual. From that revived person's point of view, they will have been handed all the previous person's memories, body, and substrate to generate an identical copy of that previous person's consciousness. We must consider it a copy, because the original died many years ago. In fact, the new version will rememb the lethal injection. It will not sense the passage of time, because i there was nothing alive all those years prior.

Uploading (FSS)

Mind uploading, is the creation of a simulation of the human mind in electronic circuits (or other methods such as light switches, quantum computers, etc.). A person is frozen, sliced and scanned, and a neuron by neuron model is created electronically. That electronic model is hoped to behave just like the original (although it will not be a perfect copy).

If frozen first, the original person has died, similar to the case of destructive teleportation, or cryonics. There is no observeable behavior indicating an "alive" state in the original once frozen. #2

The new version represented electronically, is hopefully an good approximation of the original, and will behave almost identically. #5b

Uploading (In place replacement)

Nanomachines are created which will be injected into the cranium. Whil in deep sleep, the nanomachines circulate throughout the brain, and replace existing neurons with electronic equivalents (this should be imagined much like the process of petrification, in which wood is gradually replaced with sand and bits of stone). This process occurs over many years.

In this case, the person is still living and interacting with their environment as if nothing was happening, and they are clearly alive. #

Split Brain

Some years ago, in some severe cases of Epilepsy, doctors sometimes performed surgery to cut the corpus collosum (connective neurons betwe left and right hemispheres).

Split brain patients appear to function and behave normally after this dramatic surgery, but anecdotal reports, and careful testing, reveal that there are two conscious entities inside the body after this procedure. Because each hemisphere controls the opposite half of the body, and only senses that half. Presenting things to one hemisphere (through it's half of the visual field), is only perceived by that hemisphere in interviews, and testing.

In this case we have to accept that there are 2 people here, taken fro parts of the original person prior to the surgery. No death appears to have occured here. Rather, the personal identity of the original person, as changed from one singular person, to two similar persons. #

Split Brain (reversed)

If it were possible to reverse a split brain operation, the corpus collosum could be replaced, and a previous split-brain individual woul be back together as one person.

They would have an identical identity to that before the drastic surgery, but there would not appear to be a death in this case either. There are behavioral indications of consciousness and life before, during and after the procedure. #1

Merger

In merger, two (or more) living things are brought together in one substance. This could occur either in the MU state of in the non-MU (biological) state or across MU and non-MU enties. Two brains are adjoined and connections allowing activity to pass freely from one bra to another are allowed. This may be done gradually, adding more connections over time, until a single new mind is formed.

Here the brain is gradually acclimated to the presence of a different mind/consciousness. This is similar to the reversed split brain operation above, but these minds were never part of a whole larger mind. Since there is no cessation of behavior associated with "alive" we can say neither individual had died, but two individuals have becom one. #1

The above is pretty close to my complete collection of assumptions, an test cases upon which I have argued the points I have about consciousness, life, death, and uploading. I'm sure you will all find points to disagree with here, so rip it apart. ;)

I think I may have a new angle on this survival of personal identity business. Thinking about this whole future-impacts-present thing gave me an "aha" experience about something concerning asynchrony that I was contemplating for quite a while. It always seemed to me that the asynchrony of processes in the brain might have something to do with perceived continuity of self-awareness (and personal identity) in a manner quite distinct from notions of quantal time units and so forth.

How can we have a notion of perceived continuity of self-awareness (other than the old "quanta too small too perceive" argument)?

Continuity and the sense of survival of personal identity in normal life can be connected to a perceived certainty in the present that our personal identity will exist in the future. This would imply a reduction of uncertainty (from the max. uncertainty of 1.0) about the state of the future. That in turn would imply a transmission of information from the future to the present. Hence, I discard that ``certainty'' as hogwash. :)

What other possibility are we left with? Well, instead of dealing with binaries, we can deal with a fuzzy sense of continuity (or same-ness). Let's say that we experience a ``certainty'' that we will be mostly the same (same personal identity) in the future. While we cannot have information about the state of the future, we can have information about the processes that affect our state now and therefore in some way predict our state in the future. A good degree of survival of personal identity (in terms of sameness) can be assured, if we know that at any time only a tiny fraction of ourselves can be changing, that the system is on the whole fairly static.

That knowledge would imply that the state of our personal identity, i.e. the state of our minds/brains cannot change abruptly and synchronously in all its components from the present to the immediate future. We know then that if our mind (and personal identity) is to change from a state A to a state B over a given duration of time, this will be achieved through a series of asynchronous processes that at all times leave 99.9% of our present state intact.

On the lowest level, this would imply that a perception of continuity, i.e. a certainty that our personal identity survives from moment to moment, is linked to the asynchrony of events such as action potentials and chemical memory processes in our brain.

This asynchrony (which imparts a continuous fluidity from the perspective of the whole... even in a quantal world... well sorta'... we are talking about perceptions afterall) is maintained in gradual uploading.

Note:
This debate was continued into some detail. See archived messages starting at http://www.egroups.com/message/murg/435.

How does one prepare for this change? It goes without saying that preparation, in as it applies to this particular issue, doesn't consist of physical preparation (like staying in shape) since you won't have or need the old body anymore. Mental preparation is necessary however. Bottom line, you need to accept what you have volunteered to do and you need to have thought it through in detail. You will appear different to the people who know you (unless the robotic body is a nearly perfect replica of your own which is a possibility that I find altogether boring). You will have different physical abilities and limitations yourself. You may be faster and more agile, but weaker in strength, or vs./va. Most likely the robotic replacement body will surpass your original body in most aspects. It will be a thrill to be so physically enabled, but mental discipline will be necessary to avoid hurting yourself.

The next point to be made is to think about the society around you at the time of you mind upload. Will it occur near the beginning or the end of the "mind uploading revolution". I believe there will be a dramatic shift in human society which is why I call it a revolution. It is doubtful that uploaded and nonuploaded minds will be able to relate closely. They will both be human, but the uploaded minds will be on a fast track to accelerated evolution and growth. "Leftover" humans will probably seem pretty dull by comparison. Whether there is a short or long period of transition from the first upload to a society of primarily cybernetic humans affects how you should prepare, and since that can't be known until after it has occurred, it is difficult to offer advice. However, theoretically, here is how I believe one should prepare for each scenario.

Assume that mind uploading will not be a gradual societal change, but rather a sudden spiked alteration of society's definition. In such a case, the entire revolution will probably be over fairly quickly. From the moment of the first widely accepted upload to the moment of the last may only last a couple of years or a few decades at most. No revolution in history has ever lasted for long periods of time. By its very definition a revolution is sudden and soon-passing, with nothing being the same afterwards.

How do you prepare for your upload? If you are one of the first, be prepared to pay a lot! It will get cheaper as time goes on, but as with most "cool" things throughout human history, the rich get it first and the rest get it later. Many people find this idea appalling. It doesn't bother me (despite my well-seated middle-class status) and I won't debate it further here. Aside from the financial cost, be prepared for a lot of people not to accept you. The nonacceptance may range from general apathy to terrorized fear to the odd possibility of denial. Many religious people may look an uploaded person squarely in the robotic eye and pronounce that person dead and soulless. Nothing more than a glorified toaster sits in front of them insisting on its consciousness and aliveness. Imagine trying to mentally prepare yourself to have your very consciousness denied right to your face by a religious pundent?

If your are not the first, then preparation is not something you need to worry about at all. Not only will uploading be accepted, but since it will be occurring en-mass, there will doubtlessly be well-organized forms of preparation and training that may be required before a legal uploading procedure can occur. Yes, you can always buy an uploading kit off the back of a truck somewhere, but assuming you don't go that route, then legal uploading will probably require a training course. I don't know what such a course would consist of, but I do know that it solves the problem of preparation. You simply don't need to worry about it.

What if the revolution is gradual? I find this possibility unlikely in the scenario of a fast uploading procedure, but it might be more likely if the uploading process itself is gradual, by way of cybernetic implants and brain augmentation. Since I find this method of uploading to be more realistic than fast uploading (just my opinion), it is quite conceivable that the revolution itself will be more gradual as well. This raises many interesting points. Uploading may be something that can be done so quietly that other people don't notice it happening to you. Minor modifications to your brain which all consist of physical changes internal to the skull that leave no phyiscal mark and slowly turn your brain into the 21st century equivalent of silicon over a period of months or years may not be noticed at all by people around you (although you may set off the metal detector at the airport). Preparation in this scenario is the opposite that of the previous scenario. Rather than preparing for shock and unacceptance, you must prepare to deceive most of the people around you. You will live a life of deceit as you pretend to be normal to the people who would fear the truth. Since uploading is gradual and the revolution is gradual in this scenario, and since uploading can be done clandestinely, it will heighten the ability for fear to take over people's minds. It may be well justified to hide your ongoing uploading procedure if those who would oppose you pose a serious threat to your safety. Again, if your uploading procedure occurs near the end of the revolution (and this revolution is quieter than the previous scenario's revolution), then people will have gradually come to accept mind uploading. Many of them will be uploaded already anyway. Preparation, as in the previous scenario, is less of a concern in this situation.

What about physical preparation? Depending on the method of mind uploading, your original body could be totally unaffected or may have to be utterly destroyed. What can you do? Basically everything you should be doing already. Keep your body healthy. I will offer a little bit of elaboration however. Today, people don't tend to care much whether they slowly deteriorate their brain and their body. People smoke because the effects are long-term and the punishment is way down the road. You don't live long enough to care about the risks of smoking because you'll be most the way through your life by the time smoking gets you. Your life will be so close to being over that it wasn't worth worrying about in the first place. There are not one, but two very good reasons to adopt a long-term attitude toward your health starting today.

The first reason is that mind uploading provides you with a dramatically extended lifespan. Taking the attitude that some physical ailment can't get you until you are seventy is the wrong attitude when you may live for thousands of years. But why care about the health of your lungs when you will soon be uploaded? Fair enough, but consider your brain's health. Your uploaded mind will only be a good as the mind it is uploaded from. This means you should focus on mental health and physical health of the brain. So, no drugs that have a serious affect on the brain, which means most illicit drugs. I must admit however, that I drink as much as the next mid-twenties person. Oh well. Good advice, none-the-less. What else? Well, in the in interest of brain health, we should be pouring money into research such as Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, Schizophrenia, Depression, and a million other brain diseases. Not only will such research ensure the health of our brains long enough to get to the uploading revolution, but it will also accelerate brain research in general and thus bring the day of feasible mind-uploading closer to the present.

The second reason you should really really care about your health is that it will do you no good to die the year before mind uploading becomes possible. Basically, what we need to do is live as long as we possibly can, so that we'll still be around when mind uploading becomes available. People who are pretty old stand practically no chance of making it. People who are very young (I would say ten or younger) stand a pretty good chance of making it. The rest of us (baby-boomers and gen-Xers) are in a gray area where we might survive long enough and we might not. You must stay alive, period. This obviously requires more than just maintaining mental and brain heath. While smoking may not have long-term detrimental affects on the brain, it sure will cut your life short (statistically speaking). Same goes for your heart. There may be little connection between a heart attack and the health of your brain, but one certainly causes the death of the other. I eat plenty of red meat, don't get me wrong, but I do think about my longevity. I don't live on sirloin steaks is my point. Also, it has been proven that as old-age sets in, a brain and mind that are kept busy and stimulated will remain more adaptive and healthy. Old people who keep themselves mentally stimulated are much more mentally healthy than those who don't. So throughout your life and especially as you get older, don't let lethargy set in. Keep yourself occupied. Find things you are excited about and embrace them. Maintaining your vitality will be absolutely essential to make it to the day when mind uploading will be available.

Randal A. Koene:
You are probably right that many efforts go further than necessary. But that is far from saying that the most simplistic model is adequate. The more I look at it, the more it is apparent that a single neuron, with its dendritic tree and synaptic sites is quite a computational beast. You're not just looking at a single operational unit there. The dendritic tree allows for quite a number of interesting interactions between responses at various sites, both forward and backward. Abstractions are possible, but I would be very surprised if a single biological neuron could be reliably abstracted into a single abstract neural network node in the A.I. sense. The chemical factories with their frequency-tuned inhibitory or excitatory exchanges and balances, acting on different time-frames, at each synaptic receptor site, and in `compartments' of the dendrites and the neuron are so specialized for their tasks that it is obvious that they perform non-trivial work in the local information processing tasks. Thus you would have to use an abstract neural network to model the behaviour of a single biological neuron. At that point, the effort to do the computations in the neural network probably start to outweigh the efforts of a slightly more complex, but tailor-made (hence efficient) computational model of the neuron.

I personally don't believe that every minor electrical fluctuation and arbitrary positioning of components needs to be emulated in precise detail. But the specialized functions of types of receptors, their number, their average locations, and interaction functions should probably be represented by some functions to be included in a model. It is also quite important that the time-component be included, i.e. that event timing is significant. Traditional neural networks tend to convert everything to batches and represent response frequencies as an amplitude. That is now known to be insufficient - you really need event timing, since single responses (too few to compute a rate representation from) interact during mental processes. The book "Spikes: Exploring the Neural Code" by Fred Rieke et al. was dedicated to the purpose of waking up the neuroscience community to this previously much-overlooked fact.

In my opinion, the minimal implementation of a neuron that can achieve a reliable emulation of the significant components of the information processing in a biological neuron is a specialized spiking neuron, with a number of intrinsic functions, both for the response and modulatory functions, combined with connectivity components that implement a number of specialized functions for their transfer functions, local modulations at different time-scales, interaction with neighbouring connection sites, and interaction with the neuron's soma. That's pretty much what I listed in the early draft I posted to minduploading.org. The exact number of simultaneous functions is something I don't know yet, and it probably varies per neuron.

The functions themselves can be reasonable representations of more detailed operations that are either modeled from their observed responses or from known kinetics. There will have to be probabilistic components. Perhaps some of the functions can be safely simplified to a degree that makes them more pallatable to digital computers, but possibly they will have to be refined with more details instead. It is quite possible that many simultaneous nonlinear dynamic (perhaps discontinuous) functions need to be solved during the emulation of a single neuron. It is very useful to find efficient ways to do this with the goal of emulating the temporal occurrance of relevant information processing events with sufficient precision to satisfy the needs expressed in the above-mentioned book and elsewhere. One such efficient way is the event-predictive emulation I've been working on, and which I mentioned in the draft. As a result I was less interesting in counting neurons, than I was in counting the number of prediction computations per neuron, and the number of instructions per prediction, to come up with the computational demands for a software implementation.

Bruce S. O. Adams:
Perhaps the Qualitative Reasoning Neuron is the way to go. I'm currently hedging my bets on simple artificial neural network models. I'd be interested in any evidence or suggestions for experiment which would rule out either extreme.

Randal A. Koene:
I'd say the simple extreme has already been ruled out by neuroscientific evidence - although it is still probably possible to represent a single biological neuron by a network of artificial ones. More work needs to be done to reign in the needs for complexity, especially hard core information theoretic investigations, the only way to determine the actual significance that particular features of the biological functions can have.

Bruce S. O. Adams:
Your model differs from mine. Perhaps you could provide a comparison in terms of number of neurons and the memory and processing required to simulate each?

Randal A. Koene:
You should get a pretty good idea of those by reading the draft again as I improve it. I'll post to MURG again when I upload a new version of the draft.

Bruce S. O. Adams:
I got the impression you were aiming for more accurate modelling than I was. I also note on your page you are using floating point arithmetic which even in these modern times of superscaler processors still costs us a lot in terms of performance.

Randal A. Koene:
You're right. There are definitely many efficiency gains as the code is optimized, including decisions regarding the matching of computational operations to the performance of the chosen hardware.

Bruce S. O. Adams:
I see most of these as essential research tools rather than as the kind of abstractions we can scale up to cover an entire brain. Hence my continuance with the 'old hat' of more simplistic neural networks of proven capability but massively scaled in terms of size and complexity.

Randal A. Koene:
I've tried to explain my point of view above. I don't think that an emulation that more faithfully achieves the computational power inherent in biological neurons is beyond current feasibilities at all. Demonstrating feasibility is in fact the point of my draft-in-progress.

Bruce S. O. Adams:
Can you cite something which points to their insufficiency at doing the job?

Randal A. Koene:
I hope I did, starting with the book by Fred Rieke et al. There is a lot more, but that requires some digging, which I will do if you need me to.

Cheers, Randal