The lymphatic system is found to connect to the Central Nervous System

Fulltext: https://www.dropbox.com/s/2mmdmty3nxfe5u8/2015-louveau.pdf / http://sci-hub.org/downloads/e18c/louveau2015.pdf

there quite a lot we still don't know about the brain and uploading might be harder than previously believed.

It's worth remembering the functions of the lymphatic system, and that important discoveries tend to be made first.

After reading the paper, NeuroscientistNews, HN & Reddit comments, it sounds as if for the most part the new tube wouldn't be directly affecting the brain as the flow is brain->lymph-tube, unless something has gone wrong, possibly being a new cause of various mental disorders as the flow reverses and causes problems.

So it sounds as if an upload which ignored the new tube would work just fine as a normal healthy human mind - in the worst (best?) case, the uploads might not be able to reproduce observed rates of schizophrenia or autism.

I remember reading a book many years ago which talked about the "hormonal bath" in the body being actually part of cognition, such that thinking of the brain/CNS as the functional unit is wrong (it's necessary but not sufficient).

This ties in with the philosophical position of Externalism (I'm very much into the Process Externalism of Riccardo Manzotti). The "thinking unit" is really the whole body - and actually finally the whole world (not in the Panpsychist sense, quite, but rather in the sense of any individual instance of cognition being the peak of a pyramid that has roots that go all the way through the whole).

I'm as intrigued and hopeful about the possibility of uploading, etc., as the next nerd, but this sort of stuff has always led me to be cautious about the prospects of it.

There may also a lot more to be discovered about the brain and body too, in the area of some connection between the fascia and the immune system (cf. the anecdotal connection between things like yoga and "internal" martial arts and health).

The fact that we still get surprised by new elements of the brain suggests that there quite a lot we still don't know about the brain

Indeed, and more big surprises are bound to surface.

and uploading might be harder than previously believed

I'm sure uploading will be hard, but the discovery you mention (which looks like some extra plumbing infrastructure for the wetware at this point) does not seem to fight the idea that the cognitive processes can be abstracted and extracted from the wetware.

As far as I know there isn't any direct reason why this would make uploading harder; it's a non-computational element. But the fact that it took so long to discover it does mean we should expect to have missed more things.

(sings)

The lymph node is connected to the... central nervous system! The central nervous system is connected to the... brain lobes! The brain lobes are connected to the... Descartian ghost! Doing the consciousness dance!

Just a frivolous comment, but I'm reminded of this classic SF story.

BTW, the "Robert von Engen" in the story is clearly John von Neumann, Engen's book “Logical Control: The Computer vs. Brain” is Neumann's “The Computer and the Brain”, and Engen's paper “Memory Registers: Stimulation Criteria” takes its title from two sections of Neumann's book. I don't know how many other real-world correspondences there are. In the real world, unlike the story, Neumann's book was published posthumously.