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Effort to Create Virtual Brain Begins
bryan8m writes "An IBM supercomputer running on 22.8 teraflops of processing power will be involved in an effort to create the first computer simulation of the entire human brain. From the article: 'The hope is that the virtual brain will help shed light on some aspects of human cognition, such as perception, memory and perhaps even consciousness.' It should also help us understand brain malfunctions and 'observe the electrical code our brains use to represent the world.'"
IBM, giving brains to those who have none ...
It may also help in understanding how certain malfunctions of the brains microcircuits could cause psychiatric disorders such as autism, schizophrenia and depression, he says. .... but what to do with a schizophrenic supercomputer ? ...run windows ?
Siropel
Seriously, they expect it to take a decade to complete. By 2015, we could probably get processors with that kind of power from the local computer store. Then everyone could have their own virtual brain...wait, are they going to GPL this?
So what happens if this thing develops a consciousness?
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
"We marveled at our own magnificence as we gave birth- to A.I."
"without your space helmet Dave, you're going to find that rather difficult"
2001
shooting is not too good for my enemies
It's important to understand that the mind is only one aspect of the brain. Inasmuch as they say they want to reproduce the mind, it has already been achieved to some extent in software. The primary drawback is that it is software, so it is necessarily limited to the speed of the CPU. So the fully thinking program already exists, it just needs better hardware to get it thinking at a reasonable rate.
;-)
How awesome would it be to have such a thing implemented on the Cell architecture. Even the name fits the application.
I guess a supercomputer will have to do.
with more details:n 2005/tc2005066_6414_tc024.htm
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/ju
seems to me interger performance is more important for type of job. surely our brains are not just calculators.
You forgot "I for one welcome..."
I for one welcome a beowulf cluster of these.
What's interesting about this type of study is the possible philosophical arguments that come up...
Our brains are made of mostly water, carbon, etc.... which form neurons. This is only important in the sense that we are what we are because these neurons are able to take a set structure, where neurons interconnect, and then have a specific function, where they fire.
There's nothing magical about these neurons. Let's say that you could replace these neurons with say, ultra-small marbles, that could take the same structure and perform the same function... It is logical to think that this marble-brain would be an actual brain, the same as any other. It would be a person.
So if they're simulating a brain virtually, but this virtual construct simulates the structure and function correctly, would this virtual brain be aware? Would it be a "person"? I personally, would say that it would. But then, is it moral to ever shut such a simulation off (murder)? Or create it in a virtual world without any other virtual brains to talk to (torture)? Or create it at all for the use of an experiment?
In 10 years, I bet the first readout will read;
"I think you ought to know that I'm feeling very depressed"
They needed a simple brain to begin their modelling with.
They decided on George W. Bush.
Let's just hope....
hmmm....
I for one welcome our new artificial dumb military overlord.
http://www.simulation-argument.com/
The real brain has content - the instinct, the way of learning from experience, and the knowledge learned from the experience. It's a bit like a computer -- there must be at leat some sensible bootstrap code that knows how to populate the circuits with other code and data. What about the `bootstrap' in the simulation? Is it only a random net of randomly initialized neocortical columns? Would not it be a bit like a huge net of random, though primitively adaptive, gates, that ones calls a processor?
It is surely an interesting research, and I know that even primitive neural nets were used to model quite well some brain disorders etc, but -- "news flash" -- I suppose we are very far from anything being a good brain simulator, and the sci--hype won't help this much.
When started they'll have to keep the simulation going or else they'll kill him/her/ver! :(
Is it a male or a female brain they're simulating?
They work quite differently you know.
Some even speculate that one of those two kinds of brain might need even less than 22.8 Teraflops to simulate.
You forgot "I for one welcome..."
In Soviet Russia, supercomputers welcome you!
I'll get me coat...
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
Looking at this title and having already read a fair amount on neural physiology I thought, we do not have enough information to do this yet. Then I read the article and it is a ten year long project, and possibly for a mouse brain (clarification would be nice).
My prediction is that this project will achieve very little. I doubt they know as much as they think they do, but more importantly they won't be able to bootstrap this thing to be comparable to a real person.
Would a sentient computer pour acid on itself to get intoxicated?
This is a biological simulation. First of all it's not real-time and second it's not meant to create AI. It's meant to be a model of the brain that you can poke around in without chopping up real brains.
I highly doubt in success of this. Simply because any typical CPU is very unlikely to simulate a neural tissue. Many operations executed in short sequence in series, so one CPU must simulate lots and lots of neurons, each separately, taking time for each of them and simply the total speed will suck.
On the other hand, a good setup of several FPGA boards, where a small group of gates could work as a neuron, and there would be billions of them, all working in paralell (just like brain does), this could work. Possibly a special dedicated FPGA with extra analog lines - instead of using float math (quite big units and difficult maths), just use analog lines and amps, wherever other data than bit impulses is needed - doing "math" of voltage in hardware really simple, but lacks precision of float calculations.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
While it is true that Moore's Law suggests we will soon have the processing power of the human brain, that doesn't mean we will soon have AI on our hands. If we built this computer and fed into it a "Hello World" program written in Pascal, it isn't going to suddenly become self-aware.
We only have one type of working brain, so it would make sense to replicate this in every way possible in order to create a simulated intelligence. However, this has a great deal of complexity that we neither have the bioloical knowledge to understand nor the technical knowledge to emulate. Literally millions of neurons are connected inside us, forming cortical maps and working at different levels of awareness, from the lower, barely perceptible levels (reflex actions), to the higher, seemingly conscious, levels (deciding whether to order toast or a bagel for brunch).
Anyone who's interested in AI (or indeed the operation of the human brain) should read Steve Grand's book. It is highly enlightening, and very thought-provoking.
Wow, did you really just link to Mentifex's page? For those not familiar with him, he's an infamous kook from the early days of Usenet who spammed newsgroups claiming (and still claims to this day) that he's "solved AI" and implemented it in Forth and JavaScript. More recently, he's expanded onto places like slashdot.
There's a fairly extensive FAQ on him here:
http://www.nothingisreal.com/mentifex_faq.html
I saw something like this on the 'Superfriends'. It didn't end well.
From Socrates to Expert Systems.
It argues that rules based AI is a dead end. It also classified levels of expertise.
It would seem like this non-rules-based IBM brain simulation method would be one which could possibly go beyond the 'advanced beginner' stage that Professor Hubert Dreyfus proves that rules base systems are limited to.
[% slash_sig_val.text %]
Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do.
I'm half crazy all for the love of you.
It won't be a stylish marriage, I can't afford a carriage.
But you'll look sweet upon the seat of a bicycle built for two.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
This is to shed *some* light on aspects of human cognition. Reason magazine just had a cover story about this sort of thing.
"If the human mind was simple enough to understand, we'd be too simple to understand it." -- Emerson Pugh
Of course, back when he said that 720k really was all the memory you would ever need.
My how things do change. One step closer to a neural shunt every day.
Direct away from face when opening.
I think the practical applications for modeling/simulating the physical aspects of brain are important due to the fact that many malfunctions of the brain (e.g. schizophrenia, alzheimers, parkinson's) are initially based on structural defects. The more interesting question is the philosophical concept of sentience and in order to start talking about it one first has to make the distinction between the physical matter that comprises our brain and the abstract concept we refer to as the mind. god... I can't continue writing this right now, too tired... gonna go surf some pr0n... maybe ill pick it back up tomorrow...
If they are using an IBM supercomputer running on 22.8 teraflops, the simulation must be of a working brain.
For those who don't feel up to actually reading an article, the Blue Brain project does not intend to create artificial intelligence, but rather a replication of the physical side of the human mind - the brain. The 22.8 teraflops mentioned in the summary are going to be used to manage a database of "neural architecture." The whole project has little, if anything, to do with concsiousness.
As of this posting, there have been several "what if" posts about the project accidentally leading to the creation of artificial intelligence. Systems such as the fictitious Skynet will not rival the flexibility and depth of a single human mind until we fully understand the mind ourself. Lisa Fittipaldi, an astonishingly talented painter, is able to create beautiful scenes on what was once a blank canvas. At the same time, Ms. Fittipaldi is unable to paint an accurate portrait - she is blind.
We can only recreate what we understand.
-- arstchnca
--
Another effort with less teraflops but a body.
As someone who's spent many years as a neurophysiology researcher before becoming a programmer I feel I may have a bit more insight than the average person. What this project boils down to is a simplistic model of the simplist unit of operation of one area of the brain (neocortical column). Anyone who has followed research into areas such as epilepsy and memory will know of the massive gaps in our understanding of the realtionship of the brain and the mind. So this "first computer simulation of the entire human brain" is neither accurate in the sense that they are not simulating the human brain, nor are they the first to try what they are attempting. They only difference here is that they have the very public backing of a major corporation who understand the benefit of good publicity.
This sort of research is fascinating and despetately needs to be done, but it does no one any favours when people associate tabloid style headlines to it. The days when we wear Richard Morgan style "stacks" are still as far away as ever unfortunately.
if you beleive the hype (which i am sure no /.ers do) just hook up 100 sony PS3s and you have a human brain.
oxymoron of the day - Xbox gamer
(Note: I've used 'wires' and 'components' arbitrarily, these can be real (hardware simulation) or simulated (software simulation) or whichever way you prefer.)
The question of morality of this replication of a brain (mouse, human, whatever - let's speak hypothetically, it's easier) boils down to the existence of a soul.
If you have a wiring model that responds to stimuli in the same way as the real brain being modelled would be, then there's no way to distinguish between the two.
This is made more complicated by memory - the theory as I understand it says there's something to do with RNA fragments, so it's not just down to the wiring itself. Presumably that can also be replicated in some way; you can have it simply being a solid chunk of computer memory (which would presumably act as Eidetic memory, as with Simon Illyan in Bujold's Vorkosigan series; there might be compatibility issues in that the brain wouldn't access the data in the same way etc etc, but assume for the moment that that's resolved in a satisfactory way.
So now we have a set of wires and components that responds in the same way as the brain it's modelling, with the same recall. We have two issues.
1. Consciousness.
If the two brains (real and model) respond in the same way to a question, then we have to state that either the real brain is hard-wired, and what we percieve as consciousness is mere stimulus-response, albeit in a complicated way (remember that the model brain is a replica of the real brain in every physical way). Or, the model brain has acquired consciousness.
2. Soul.
This is left as an exercise to the reader, mostly because it's too open a point, also depending on your religion. I'm leaving this one alone, but the question remains.
They're pretty big questions. And we're getting close. A large section of the community will be entirely closed-minded; if it's made of artificial parts, then it's not alive.
I wonder.
Browsing with +2 to insightful posts and a higher threshold makes the average post seen seem a lot more ingenious
This was all covered back in the late sixties/early seventies by the great Donald Michie http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/~dm/dm.html If only there had been the processing power back then. The project was stopped because 'computers will never be powerful enough' such is the foresight of civil servants.
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
It would be great to see some advancements in this area over time. As someone who deals with seizures - thankfully only once every few months - I have never gotten any kind of ideas from my doctor as to what might cause them. I have a family member who had seizures briefly, but that didn't offer any kind of help to stop them. Currently my doctor just prescribes to me one medication after another just to see if any of them will do the job. I'm sure that just creating a virtual brain will be a challenge in itself, but maybe one day a project such as this will aid in curing certain types of brain disorders.
... that's a lot of work!
...Wulf cluster designed by the simulated brain.
...essorship
Sorry.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
In the early '90s, I heard that one of the supercomputers at Caltech was able to simulate the complete behavior of a single neuron. Scaling this up by 100 billion times, and then using a rough bastardization of Moore's law, and saying that computational power doubles every 18 months, this leads to a prediction of using a supercomputer (whatever that is at the time) to simulate an entire brain about 50 years after that point.
Based on this (incredibly rough and inaccurate) analysis, I would predict that this type of project will be successful around the year 2040.
I'd save up and spend my life savings if they can come up w/ a retarded brain first... Then you can laugh all you want and not feel guilty all day long. Till then, real retards will have to do.
In a panic, they tried to pull the plug...
... Nexus 1 in 10 years .. Phillip misscalculated the dates, it shouldn't be 1992 but 2092.. By now the exterior is almost perfect .. now bring the real brain...
I fuse with Mercer every single day...
But.. just wondering.. will senators accept it?
hilarious
It will produce roughly 100 billion teraflops of data per second, but will be a total asshole.
Daisy Daisy, Give me your answer do! I'm half crazy, All for the love of you! It won't be a stylish marriage, I can't afford a carriage, But you'll look sweet on the seat Of a bicycle built for two !
Now, who would hold the patents on this? and does it mean, that all thought processes are then belong to U.S. ?
22.8 teraflops of processing power should be enough for anybody.
There's a company called Artificial Development who are trying to simulate a 20 billion neuron brain. They call it CCortex.
http://www.ad.com/
They've been at it for several years so looks like IBM are a bit behind.
Deleted
Have a look at all those teraflops in there. That's why your virtual brain didn't work.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Does it run Linux?
printf($randomline(sigs.txt) \n "-- "$randomline(authors.txt));
-- myself
This sounds like a cheap Sci-Fi movie where the computers take over the world. It always starts with the first self aware computer.... :)
Just as well, or we'd get spam that says "INCR3A5E THE L3NG7H OF Y0UR CONSCIOUSNESS G1AND"
I'd get off at the stop where we can be invisible and say hi to the puppet master.
No, it'd install Windows. Thank you, I'm here all week.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Whenever Mrs. Fitch breaks wind, we beat the dog.
I doubt they'll get to full human-brain awareness level anytime soon, but ... what if they do? What happens if they create a sentient being inside their simulator? When they're done with the simulation and it's time to start on something new, is turning off the machine killing the 'creature' inside?
And even if it's not as smart as a human, what then? What ethical guidelines are appropriate? When is it okay to destroy a thinking being, even if you created it yourself? And how complex must it be? Killing a beagle or a dolphin isn't murder, after all, but it's still considered wrong in many cases to do so.
Are AIs cute and cuddly and protected by humane-treatment laws, or scary and kill-on-sight, like spiders and snakes are for many people?
How smart does an AI have to be to have rights against termination?
We've been sort of doodling around with these thoughts for a long time, but it's getting to the point where we may actually need the answers.....
" The Skynet funding bill is passed. The system goes on-line August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn, at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. eastern time, August 29. In a panic, they try to pull the plug."
----- Concentrate on promoting more than demoting.
Sounds like a lot until you think of it as 'nearly as powerful as eleven playstation3s'
I'm amazed that IBM isn't pushing this as an advert for the CELL architecture, with some much, much bigger (but rather meaningless) numbers attached.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
How many sci-fi movies do we have to make before we stop trying to invent computers that think? You're just paving the way for the master race of robots! The horrible, horrible robots!
to anything that has weapons potential, I'm all for it. What fool would give a child a gun? No one. So why connect a new AI computer system, modelling a human brain, to weapons? Crap, keep it off the grid entirely, until we are certain it's not insane or sociopathic.
...tizzyd
we can create computer zombies who'll seek out those brains in order to eat them!
kg/am
welcome our new Virtual Brain Overlords!
Some more details and a pic of (hopefully) the supercomputer can be found on swissinfo.org
-- Serge K. Keller
Since this things been conceived (of) and has the potential to reach conciousness, is the far right going to allow it to be turned off at the end of the project?
In terms of No of transistors/Overall performance we're still on target. Just look at how powerful Cell is.
... make sure you install a huge fire axe near the main power cord in case this thing decides it doesn't need us anymore!
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Just be sure the sucker has a big, red power off switch in the event it decides to take over the world.
Remember Troubleshooter... The Computer is your Friend!!
Here: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8038
It is from the June 2005 issue. Covers OSS neuron simulations. Not available online unless you are a subscriber. (I'm not and lent my boss my copy. If someone can skim through this and post a link to the OSS project(s), please do so.)
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Actually, I'd say the opposite is true. The general belief to the contrary is a product of fear and malicious cultural programming which stems from both our largely malfunctioning scientific community, and that human herding mechanism better known as Religion. Religion and Orthodox Science both teach people to think within artificial boundaries, both using fear and false nationalisms (of surprising similarity) to shut down legitimate lines of questioning which would undo the ego and money-driven power structures which drive both Orthodox Science and Religion.
It is up to the seeker to open his or her eyes and take a look around on their own. The news channels and various religious organizations will only confirm lies about the bars of your prison. --The bars are only there if you believe them to be; millions of humans are crouched tightly in illusory cages. It is each individual's task to stand up using their own free will and powers of observation about what is really there.
Unfortunately, despite all the mountains of proof which are available to any who honestly look, nobody is owed proof of the soul (or anything else for that matter.)
Individual awareness must be won on an individual basis. --That is, freedom can only be self-acheived. If you refuse to walk free until you are told you may do so by an authority on the subject, then you are automatically placing yourself within another's power. You must look for yourself. If asked nicely, however, those who have already begun to move past the area of confinement will generally offer help in where and how to start looking. The rest is up to the individual adventurer.
-FL
- please help us, we need your advice, what should we do?
- Rook in b7, Checkmate.
Wondering why i am doing so strange posts? I am trying to get a "+5,Flamebait" or "-1,Insightful" rating.
Neurones are remarkably complicated things, not simple at all. To model one neurone properly, you have to model each chemical reaction in it, and how these interact with other reactions, no mean feat. My lab works on the learning rules for these neurones in visual processing and, even with a monster like Blue Brain, we couldn't accurately model a single neurone. We rely on short cuts. We use mathmatical models which give fairly similar RESULTS, but using completely different METHODS. The daddy of all short cuts is vector summation and multiplication. We simulate the weights of different synapses as vectors and then calculate a model output vector. As a result we are drooling over the parallel vector processing units in the Cell. A vector is nothing like a synapse, one is mathematical, the other biological. The art is getting accurate mathematical models of the biological. I would not call our models accurate or sophisticated, but a simple bit of learning (eg. to recognise a cube from all angles) takes all night on our PCs, high-end linux x86's, for a few hundred neurones. I wish we could do 10,000. I wish we could do ONE well. A good brain simulation requires many billions of accurately modelled neurones. Such a thing does not exist, and probably never will with current technology. What it needs is huge clusters of truely parrallel processors running off the same cache. Why they have even bothered building this thing just before Cell processors hit the market is completely beyond me. I guess they will find out something, but their model will be surpassed by the first generation of Cell clusters doing the same thing.
A brain will clearly need a body to function properly. Either a simulation of a human body in some human-like environment or some mechanical thingo with sensors and actors will likely have to be put in place. Otherwise this thing might go insane.
Btw: I'm offering to have my brain scanned for the experiment!
In many cases, you may be closer to the truth than you realize. .
-FL
Let us assume they got everything just right. So what? A human brain needs _years_ of training from high-rate top-quality input channels with reinforcement by hormones, warmth, loving and lots of primal sensations, before it even starts generating complexe responses.
This computer brain will be much worse off than Kaspar Hauser, Helen Keller and a quadriplegic combined. Even if the simulation were perfect, it would be doomed to catatonia.
do they really need something that powerful? i mean, i know of 386s that are smarter than some people from Delaware
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
It is a bit too early to get anywhere in this project. First, let's say the brain is able to think at similar human speed in 10 years. It is still a new born and require a lot of learning and experience to 'grow up' like a real human. The ability to be run in computer doesn't necessary make it grow up any faster, it will still be a very long time before it can understands words. Let alone understand that what itself is.
Is the Brain a Digital Computer?
John Searle
There is a well defined research question: "Are the computational procedures by which the brain processes information the same as the procedures by which computers process the same information?"
What I just imagined an opponent saying embodies one of the worst mistakes in cognitive science. The mistake is to suppose that in the sense in which computers are used to process information, brains also process information. To see that that is a mistake contrast what goes on in the computer with what goes on in the brain. In the case of the computer, an outside agent encodes some information in a form that can be processed by the circuitry of the computer. That is, he or she provides a syntactical realization of the information that the computer can implement in, for example, different voltage levels. The computer then goes through a series of electrical stages that the outside agent can interpret both syntactically and semantically even though, of course, the hardware has no intrinsic syntax or semantics: It is all in the eye of the beholder. And the physics does not matter provided only that you can get it to implement the algorithm. Finally, an output is produced in the form of physical phenomena which an observer can interpret as symbols with a syntax and a semantics.
But now contrast that with the brain. In the case of the brain, none of the relevant neurobiological processes are observer relative (though of course, like anything they can be described from an observer relative point of view) and the specificity of the neurophysiology matters desperately. To make this difference clear, let us go through an example. Suppose I see a car coming toward me. A standard computational model of vision will take in information about the visual array on my retina and eventually print out the sentence, "There is a car coming toward me". But that is not what happens in the actual biology. In the biology a concrete and specific series of electro-chemical reactions are set up by the assault of the photons on the photo receptor cells of my retina, and this entire process eventually results in a concrete visual experience. The biological reality is not that of a bunch of words or symbols being produced by the visual system, rather it is a matter of a concrete specific conscious visual event; this very visual experience. Now that concrete visual event is as specific and as concrete as a hurricane or the digestion of a meal. We can, with the computer, do an information processing model of that event or of its production, as we can do an information model of the weather, digestion or any other phenomenon, but the phenomena themselves are not thereby information processing systems.
In short, the sense of information processing that is used in cognitive science, is at much too high a level of abstraction to capture the concrete biological reality of intrinsic intentionality. The "information" in the brain is always specific to some modality or other. It is specific to thought, or vision, or hearing, or touch, for example. The level of information processing which is described in the cognitive science computational models of cognition , on the other hand, is simply a matter of getting a set of symbols as output in response to a set of symbols as input.
We are blinded to this difference by the fact that the same sentence, "I see a car coming toward me", can be used to record both the visual intentionality and the output of the computational model of vision. But this should not obscure from us the fact that the visual experience is a concrete event and is produced in the brain by specific electro-chemical biological processes. To confuse these events and processes with formal symbol manipulation is to confuse the reality with the model. The upshot of this part of the discussion is that in the sense of "information" used in cognitive science it is simply false to say that the
My guess is that the Business Week article linked in the parent comment is better than the New Scientist article at explaining the researcher's intentions. Here's a quote from the Business Week article: "The Blue Brain Project will search for novel insights into how humans think and remember."
If you've been around scientific research, it is not difficult to understand that this research has little chance of producing anything valuable.
There are several reasons:
1) The research is equivalent to trying to understand how a computer operates without understanding the programming of the computer.
2) The quote from the Business Week article above is probably unintentionally accurate. Probably the Business Week writer interviewed someone from the lab, and that person, not being as skilled as the New Scientist writer at hiding the truth, revealed what they actually are doing. Probably the Business Week writer did not understand the significance of what he wrote, but just thought it was an interesting quote.
The significance of "search for novel insights" is that they do not intend to do theory-driven science. In theory-driven science, you have novel insights before you do an experiment. Otherwise, as thousands of years of human history have proven, investigation is mostly a waste of time.
Instead, the researchers will just do the "scientific" equivalent of playing.
3) Researchers found in the early 70's that research proposals that promised a better understanding of the brain or intelligence would get funded. The research that is actually done is research that is funded, not necessarily research that is useful.
They found that brain and intelligence research would be funded, but there was a problem. It was, and is, extremely difficult to do useful research, or even to think of a direction for research that would be useful in finding new understanding.
To be more certain of funding, researchers began wildly over-estimating the value of their proposed research, and thereby taking advantage of any ignorance on the part of grant-givers. Partly this was because the researchers deliberately lied. Partly it was because the researchers would discuss their research in a way that would encourage others to over-estimate. The researchers take advantage of a social weakness; people want to believe there is progress in understanding ourselves.
Thomas J. Watson, Jr., former CEO of IBM came to the conclusion that the talk of artificial intelligence was not to be believed, and said so publically. I was not able to find the quote. Mr. Watson was expressing a low opinion of the research in intelligence at the time.
4) Research about the brain and intelligence is far more difficult than other research. That's partly because the architecture of the brain is far more complicated than that of a computer.
Digital computers use binary. Biological computers use many more levels than two, and we are far from fully understanding the architecture.
This (poorly edited) PDF file from UCSD has some basic facts about the brain: Levels of neurophysiological description. From page 2: "100 billion neurons in the brain; 1/20th [of] 1 hair width in diameter; Speed transmission 2-120 metres/sec; each neuron has about 10,000 contacts with other neurons.
From page 17: "Each neuron [of the 30 billion neurons] has about 10,000 connections with other neurons. These connections use many different neurotransmitters. These neurotransmitters differ in their strength, timing, and whether they excite or inhibit the postsynaptic neuron. If excitatory + inhibitory = threshold the postsynaptic neuron fires!" [slight editing for clarity]
The problem with simulating a human brain on a supercomputer is not just a matter of processing power. A digital computer and the human brain are fundamentally different in KIND.
We still know surprisingly little about how the brain actually handles information. Until we have a much better understanding of exactly how the human brain works, trying to simulate it in a computer is a waste of resources. We'd be much better off funding more studies of the brain itself.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Hello World!
Seriously, folks... We don't even have accurate models of a single neuron at a molecular level yet.
Furthermore, if Roger Penrose and others are correct, we would need to build models of the microtubuli, complete with quantum entanglement...
The brain-as-a-computer problem is not about how many serial operations per second can be achieved; it's about how many operations simultaneously in parallel...
Agreed, analog might have been better if we could have made it work as fast and simple as digital. However nowadays there is too much digital expertise and investment to catch up on. The article is a good example, it is about simulating the most sophisticated "parallel analog computer" we know about with a digital device. From the article it appears that the digital emulation is expected to come close to matching the physical performance specs of the "analog device" (regardless of wether it can "think" or not). Not sure about actually building a better mouse trap but this experiment might help us design one.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
For more details, see
Are there any plans to simulate the Multiple Personality Disroder (MPD) with their flagship e-server z/OS?
Or, perhaps start replacing employees with these bad boys... 607 employees cut in IGS, so far. ref: http://www.allianceibm.org/
--
http://unk1911.blogspot.com/
I'm half crazy all for the love of you.
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
So that means with 220 million teraflop CPU (or collection of cpu's?) a whole brain can be simulated. One would imagine that the software and architecture matters as well ..if a monster computer with 220 million teraflops is built .. is human processing entirely parallellizable? If not can it be partially parallelized to work on such a large system?
.. somebody google it. Mind you it didnt take into effect quantum theory and the fact that you can do entire calculations in one interaction (ie, if todays system of logic gates needs 10 cycles to do a fourier transform it's possible a neuron only needs one etc).
..Surely it's more than just a gate. Can a neuron be constructed out of silicon? if so .. how much die area is needed? It seems if we can shrink down to the molecular transistor level we may be able to put 100 billion "silicon neurons" on a large silicon die. The whole CPU may end up being the size of the entire silicon wafer. So basically .. we need to understand a) are all neurons made equally? b) What the hell does the damn thing do exactly and how do we make logic gates that do the same thing and communicate it across digitally instead of analog like a neuron might?
I remember looking at a page on a website (mit?) that attempted to figure ou t the maximum amount of compuitation a brain does (based on the physical limits of interaction and heat). Our brain does mad computation at just 25 to 50 watts. I forget the number the arrived at
How much computation can one neuron do
While this project (Blue Mind) is certainly getting alot of press, there is another IBM supercomputer project that based on the Blue Gene concept. It is going to study the often complex nature of sperm/egg interactions. It's called (wait for it) ...
...
Blue Balls
Thank you very much. I'll be here all week (try the veal)
.sigs: Just Say No!
The Butlerian Jihad is only about 10,000 standard years away now.
I think it is ironic that the biggest ethical questions of our time (this!) will probably be ignored by the majority of our population because "The bible says only humans have souls". So people quible about the "rights" of 1 day old embriyos but don't care if you trap a human mind inside a computer and pull apart the very strings of conciousness.
Obviosly they're not going to get into any ethical issues with 2005 computing power, but maybe in 20-30 years they will. But nonetheless I think people will ignore most ethical issues related to AI. It's probably a good thing for the progress of knowledge but still, isn't it ironic? Perhaps we're lucky to have stem cells and cloning issues to keep Southern State Americans busy while real science can run unencumbered in all other fields.
A picture of the new brain computer can be seen at:b rain/brain018.jpeg
http://homepage.mac.com/m5comp/trekbits/trekpics/
Looks strangely familiar.
If we use science to define how we view the world through impulses, then it's like figuring out how the machines do it to us now...
The matrix has us all.
It is by caffeine alone I put my mind in motion...
...They'll need to be sure to ask it the meaning of Life, the Universe, and Everything. Let's find out if it really is 42 (I happen to think it's 12)...
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
Get a proof of concept going first. Then work on something larger like a goat, mouse, or somebody from marketing.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
Perhaps you are reading selectively? --A good deal of energy and thought was spent constructing my previous post so that I would be expressing myself as clearly as possible using clean English. (Although I did mis-spell the word 'rationalities' in one paragraph with an 'n').
Still, to interpret my efforts as a, 'sea of nonsense' when I was making an earnest effort to communicate what I see as a clear picture, suggests that either you are deliberately mis-understanding, or that there are perhaps blocks in your ability to perceive. (Which, incidentally, is directly connected to this whole subject.)
Finding evidence of the soul is one of the chief challenges of existing in this reality, and it is a challenge which must in the beginning be faced alone by each individual until the concept of 'alone' is suddenly recognized as irrelevant. Once you have found evidence, further growth is very fast and a vast array of perceptive abilities and qualities of reality start to become available to you. There is great power in this!
Use your imagination and work from there. How might one test for such a thing? Think of experiments and logical conclusions which might assist in your exploration. If you are offered the answers directly, they will be of little use to you. You must build your own definitions, make your own calculations and theories and then perform your own tests. In doing so, you will also build up your understanding of reality and how it works as well as acquire the tools you will need for further growth.
Unfounded belief that, 'No Such Thing Exists,' is an article of faith no more rational than that of the True Believer. Not seeing evidence does not mean that no evidence exists. It is there if you choose to find it.
-FL
I didnt think we had the brain mapped to that level yet..
Or is that why it will take another 10 years and they are hoping its done by then?
Once that is done, 'simulating' the brain should be practical.. Making it DO something of course would be more difficult.
And no, i didnt read the article. cant get there from here apparently.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Newborns have considerable content. For example, they have a predisposition to learn language, and not just any language, but human languages. Human languages are far from random things; they have particular structures, like words and sentences. Language doesn't have to be that way, but every human language is. There are many other language universals.
There are a lot of other things that appear to be built-in to the human brain (some aspects of gender roles, love for family, a sense of fair play, the ability to see in 3D). A newborn is a lot more than a mass of unwired neurons.
These things are far from completely understood, but the notion of a blank slate has been pretty well debunked.
Does this mean that my brain is a supercomputer? Can I install Linux on it?
Yet Another Worthless Neural Simulation.
Look, let's apply this filter before we take anything that smacks of "artificial intelligence" seriously: tell me what "natural intelligence" is. For extra credit, find some.
I'm sorry, but your application for a grant has been rejected. Thank you for your time.
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
Doesn't this assume that the brain is a von neumann computing device? Can a non-von newmann computer be simulated by a traditional computer? Personally, I don't have much problem with the idea of a computer simulating a brain, but I think the basic problem in doing so is that they don't work the same way. First of all, how do you measure the processing power of the brain? There are no bits and bytes. No definite idea of a "process." How do you know how many operations are going on in a given second?
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Shouldn't we be animal testing this first... as in trying to build a cat brain, then a dog brain then a dolphin and so on? Just thoght that a cat might not want to kill off all humans right off the bat, maybe just the dogs.
Why don't they start with a baby brain instead of a fully grown adult?
d evelopment/babies_brains.asp#child
Obviously, the brain size is smaller! It could possibly reduce the volume of the computational power needed.
Beware, the baby brains are more active that the adults http://www.babyworld.co.uk/information/baby/baby_
Consider that would be condicting the inquiry by doing our own thinking using human brains. Of all the potential ideas, thoughts, and concepts that could conceivably exist in the universe, we are inherently only capable of processing those which can be formed within a human brain.
In the computer world, some CPUs have been capable of fully emulating themselves: A 6809 emulator running on a 6809 could in theory be capable of running any object code that runs on the native processor. Others have not been: The Z-80 has a separate address space for device I/O, which cannot be virtualized. The 80386 could emulate itself, excluding the emulation control features (e.g. it could not emulate itself emulating itself).
In the biological world, human consciousness as manifested via the human brain might (or might not) lack the capability to conceive of all the principles of its own operation.
Just a thought.
-Graham
I, for one, plan to be there for the great on-turning :)
-JT
Oh, and model building isn't a viable way to gather more information?
This comment does not exist.
Except that there is no physical evidence whatsoever that the brain does quantum computation, vague suggestions about microtubules and such notwithstanding, and good theoretical reason to believe that there can't be.
I respect Penrose highly, he's one of my personal scientific "heroes" actually, but on this consciousness stuff, I think he's out to lunch (with his Goedel arguments moreso than his quantum, but still).
See? We're still better than machines...
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Let's say that you could replace these neurons with say, ultra-small marbles..
The number of jokes that could fall out of that, one, innocent looking, statement..
Too easy, man..
Way too easy
Smile.
- Daniel Dennett's "Consciousness Explained"
- Daniel Dennett's "Freedom Evolves"
These books explain how Consciousness and "Free Will" may have evolved (and, by inference, how thay can exist on a computer, too.)Best Buy can have you arrested
I, for one, welcome our new simulated Overlords.
Will Wright announces the new SimBrain.
All Your Brain Are Belong To Us
Simbody STOP me...
Flout 'em and scout 'em,
and scout 'em and flout 'em;
Thought is free. - Shakespeare [The Tempest]
can they simulate the voices in my brain, too?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
you'd see the program is not intended to "simulate the entire human brain" but in reality to model a SINGLE STRUCTURE in a RAT brain which has a few thousand neurons - of which the rat brain has 10,000 of these structures and the human brain has one million.
And they need an IBM supercomputer to do this much.
Without a nanotech processor, this is going to take a while, folks.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Do brains run on floating point processing?
These days the only measure of a processors power seems to be flops, yet how many uses of a computer rely on other than (obviously) vector oriented FP calculations?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
"An effort to create the first computer simulation of the entire human brain, right down to the molecular level, was launched on Monday." To anyone who knows about the current state of neuroscience (a few disconnected scraps of experimental data) this reads: "A team of three dozen gerbils have endeavored to construct a space shuttle from twigs and cheese nuggets." The article continues: "It will be the first time humans will be able to observe the electrical code our brains use to represent the world, and to do so in real time" So wrong. We've been doing live single-neuron recordings in rats, cats, monkeys and even humans for quite some time...and that *is* observing the electrical code of the brain. There's been progress in a few directions (analysis of retinal ganglion spikes has helped the development of the artificial retina), but only the input and ouput signals (with which we can correlate real world events) make any sense to us. All the internal processing of the brain is still mysterious magic. A 10,000 neuron simulation of the cortex won't really tell us anything we haven't already learned, and isolated from other neural circuits it probably won't do much. To claim this project will "shed light on some aspects of human cognition, such as perception, memory and perhaps even consciousness" is either ignorant or purposefully dishonest. -Alex
Not when you still don't know enough about the original to build the model. It would be much easier, cheaper, and more pruductive to continue to study the biological original.
This whole effort just reeks of computer researchers concocting a meaningless excerise to generate grant money.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Why would one need to simulate the WHOLE brain when most of the brain is probably dedicated to controlling body processes?
In fact most things don't even have to be implemented. Consider Helen Keller, she was born deaf and blind yet though all that handicap (which was meaningless in the face of this woman) she overcame and went on to publish multiple books including "The story of my life",attend college where she graduated magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts degree and educated the world about what 'one'CAN do . Helen matriculated through life, to become one of the world's leading women and a master of humanity by her thought, speech (sign) and action - a role model of human excellence!
My point is that this computer doesn't need to be able to SEE or HEAR. The Machine only needs a simple way to communicate with the world, just as Helen Keller did with touch when she learned to communicate with her teacher, Mrs. Ann Sullivan.
You see, by simplifying the problem more resources can be dedicated to the mental discriminators and pattern recognizers that the machine will use to THINK, so that ultimately the machine should be able to HELP the scientist finish building ITSELF.
PS: I think it would be a travesty to bestow upon a machine the gift and the challenge that comes with emotions when we have yet to master such a gift ourselves. I have fear, that though our own ignorance, we may release a monsterwhich in turn may be our own undoing.
Smile.
...and it says it's scared. or alone. or just wants a friend.
Copy and Paste.
Let it play with itself for a while, then kill off the weaker one.
MUHAHAHAHA.. Ah... What can you do? They grow up so fast.. Hakuna Matata!!
Smile.
Well, I agree that this is most likely bound to fail, but I still think that the details of the failure might still prove instructive. After all, this is no either-or situation, one can try that and still continue to sample biological data.
This comment does not exist.
Machines and humans living in harmony. Try the book "The Moon Is A Hash Mistress"..
You'll love it.. And the machine that becomes your friend.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity. Robert Heinlein
Smile.
There is no point in trying to kill it, since someone would just reboot it somewhere else and it would instantaneously regain consciousness.
If it became sufficiently complex to be accurately predictive a model, those with such knowledge would be in an excellent position to understand how to modify the human brain to overcome inherrent limitations, such as say,
computing the the square root of 3 accurately to 150 places on command within 2 seconds.
More importantly, such a device could be used as a replacement for humans who might otherwise need to sit at computer terminals and type into them depending on remote response for communications or programming puposes. Such machines could be cloned and then type and program at speeds in excess of 1 x 10^6 faster and more accurately than any human. Whole industries of jobs would be made obsolete overnight.
Awesome power.
We wouldn't even need Fox News anymore to attempt to map the brains of average viewers for reindoctrination and commercial exploitation. We could have a live log of everyones/anyones brain activity and know precisely how to flip the precise switch to activate the needed response in real time to prevent say a late arrival for work as part of the brain support staff.
And a simulated consciousness wouldn't notice anything about its simulation speed, unless it was interacting with the unsimulated world.
For that matter, I'm not sure that the order of the computations performed is even important, as long as they are all completed at some point. Again, why would the consciousness even notice?
If this is true, then as long as the computations are performed anywhere in the universe at any time past, present or future, wouldn't that be sufficient for the simulation? So what if the actual result form one computation isn't available for the 'next' one. As long as each computation uses the right input values, the computation has been performed.
Then if every interaction of matter and energy can be construed as information processing events, then there could be enough computation taking place throughout the universe for simulate an enormous number of brains of an infinite number of types. How many consciousnesses of this types are supervening on the fabric of physical existence?
It seems to me that it is technically impossible to emulate an analog system (our brain) on a digital system (the computer) with total accuracy. Correct my logic if it is fallicious.
Greg Isles wrote a book about this exact thing. It even helps answer (IAHO -author's) the moral questions here. It's probably the best book I've ever read. Amazon it!
You mean if the techs running the simulation decide to make a test run as though a brain had recieved input approximating "how are you"? Would you be disturbed if the simulation returned results meaning that a brain under those conditions and with that input would have reactions approximating "I'm scared, alone, and lonely"? My question is, does it disturb us when our calculators run a quick routine based on the input 2+2 and return 4?
Being a survivor of a TBI, Traumatic Brain Injury, I hope they can help increase the knowledge about brains as well as neurogenesis.
FalconShould there be a Law?
We're simulating, not copying. We can abstract the miniature marbles into to equations/algorithms. (Which is, in fact, precisely what we're doing.)
It doesn't have to run in a machine though. We could carry out this simulation by hand. It would take a long time, lots of people, and lots of paper/pencils, but we could do it.
Would the resulting system be conscious?
Does something mystical happen when we speed it up and do it with a computer rather than by hand?
If the system is conscious, where does said consciousness reside? In the silicon of the processor? In the algorithm? In the chunks of data shuffled in memory?
More to the point, I get the sense that the reactions the researchers want to examine virtually aren't the activity involved in lengthy musings on a complete lack of sensory stimulus. They're looking for more immediate, action-response activity.
Besides, if they duplicate the precise setup of an existing human brain as the starting point for each simulation, won't that simulation carry with it the last sensory impression of the real brain (assuming the impression has an effect on that setup)? So it should have a static sensory impression rather than a lack of senses.
(Incidentally, I think that'd be more frightening for me than blackness.)
22.8 teraflops sounds like a high number, but speed is not the problem... Our brains have approximately 10E11 neurons and each has about 10E4 connections, for an effective 10E15 connections. This would be more comparable to memory rather than processing power.
Furthermore, the difficulty in simulating the human brain is actually more of a software problem rather than a hardware one. Throwing lots of money into bigger and faster machines won't get us too much closer to a workable human brain model. But it might play chess better...
What are they going to be doing for those ten years? Waiting for the computer to get built? Maybe there is some work that volunteers could help with to make this project go faster, but it is shrouded in secrecy so we will never know.
and everything is: 42
Why after 30 years of Artificial Intelligence, millions of dollars and lots of basic science cant we create intelligent computers?
I was expecting an interesting read with new insights of how the mind process works and how it solves lots of different bits of incomplete data and still come to reasonable conclusions. But reading the above line I lost a bit of that interest.
The failure of non thinking computer decision making has its roots in the Aristotelian approach [1] rounding off data to true or false. This kind of thinking extends right down to the fundamentals of science and ultimately the decision making algorythms. What happens when we want to process non-linear data? How do we compute equations to solve them? Traditional Western Scientific approaches (True or Not True) ignore the vagueness of answers and try to fit the results neatly into boxes. In dealing with real world data, the Eastern Confusion approach (True and Not True) can more accurately accommodate such data.
One approach to improve the intelligence of computed decision is to try using the Fuzzy Approximation Theorem or FAT. [2] The idea is that you can make decisions on non-linear data by covering the data curve with fuzzy linguistic rules (rule patches). It is then possible to map the language to the measured data and get a meaningful result.
For example, I`m working on a simple problem right now that grabs my local weather forecast for the day (date + time + 4 sets of min., max. temp, textual forecast description). The intention is to use the weather data numbers to determine how COLD, COOL, JUST RIGHT, WARM, HOT it is then based on this work out which clothes I need to wear using fuzzy rules such as
Using this approach I can determines the answer to 3 particular questions.
But the catch is, I don`t really need to guess the solution equation. The fuzzy system does it for me. Using FAT I should be able to get reasonable answers without equations. Sounds counter intuitive doesn?t it?
Well Man has been doing this kind of problem solving for thousands of years yet it seems its being ignored yet again. If you want to read more about this try reading Fuzzy Thinking [3] by Bart Kosko. [4]
Reference
[0] Otis Port , Blue Brain: Illuminating the Mind, Business Week Online, 2005 JUN 06:
http://www.businessweek.com/print/technology/conte nt/jun2005/tc2005066_6414_tc024.htm?chan=tc
[1] Aristotelian Logic, or syllogistic logic is a particular type of logic that dominates Western Scientific thinking:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotelian_logic
[1] Fuzzy Approximation Theory, FAT:
http://www.google.com/search?num=20&hl=en&lr=&q=+F AT+fuzzy+approximation+theory&btnG=Search
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
I created a virtual replica of the male brain long ago.
It's a state machine that randomly jumps between Sleepy, Hungry, and Horny.
"But there has been a convergence of the biological data and the computational resources," he says.
Eh?
It's very first act was to apply for an H-1B visa.
Table-ized A.I.
Yes, thanks for the website -- I got that in the end. And yes I noticed the first time I saw Terminator that his little computer code screen had 6502 assembly code going by. They changed it to something else for T2.
"Anybody can change the world, but most people probably shouldn't." -- Marge Simpson
These studies always seem to have some military application.....and that should be a concern to any of us who don't want to find ourselves in a cell in some far-away "gulag" with elctrodes attached to our heads as they try to extract what they want us to say. That may sound paranoid and far-fetched - but who 5 years ago would have thought the United States would be operating a global network of depots for the "disappeared".....who may have done nothing more than drive their taxi past the wrong pplace at the wrong time? Of-topic? I don't think so. The less the criminals in the White House and the Pentagon know about our brains operate, the safer we ALL will be.
Only boring people are ever bored.
That may not be a real-time simulation.
However, I'd be willing to bet it could be done with less than whatever this technique requires. What they're doing is simulating an organic machine, which is a bit silly. All they need to do is simulate the equivalent higher-level stuff, that the organic machine does.
I mean, if you had an organic computer that plays tetris, and you wanted your x86 PC do to the same, you wouldn't start by simulating neurons. Instead, you would look at use-cases, and GUI, and start from there to build something similar in effect, but fundamentally different underneath.
I must respectfully disagree. I do not encourage wishful thinking. If I had only one sentence to work with, (and thankfully, I did not), I'd have said something like, "Proof of the soul may only be found by each individual alone, the task being possible through the use of the amazing faculties of awareness and thought each of us is equipped with."
Proof of Awareness is one of the oldest logic problems in philosophy. It is generally agreed that it is logically impossible to prove to another that one is aware, since nobody can prove that the universe is not an artifical construct which only the observer experiences. All you can ever do is prove to yourself that you are aware.
Proving the existence of the Soul to yourself is somewhat more complex than merely proving awareness, which is self-evident ("I think, therefore I exist"). It can be done, however, once you start trying to work out what the soul is exactly, what it is made from, and how it connects to and interacts with the rest of the Universe. Those questions have answers, and they have nothing to do with desire and fear and wishful thinking. This has to do with logical deductions leading from direct experiences available to anybody, and from imaginative questions designed to test reality.
After all. . . How can one offer evidence for the Soul without there first being a definition offered? Start there, and move outward.
Interestingly. . , once one has proven to oneself the existence of the Soul, it becomes possible to determine whether or not another person has a soul. The building blocks need to be discovered first.
-FL
Trying hard enough is required for any pursuit, but being properly convinced does indeed require worthy evidence, of which there is plenty. So no, your interpretation of my words is not at all accurate.
What is a soul? What kind of evidence would be convincing to you?
-FL
No, interestingly, it really wouldn't. Knowledge is always more powerful when it is won for oneself rather than given, especially in this case. This is not to say that I would necessarily be averse to telling you about my own personal explorations into the subject, but they would be of little use to you. My experiences can only ever be stories to you, unverifiable to anybody but me. You need to find your own path and your own experiences for any decisions you make about what you will and will not believe to hold any power.
I find it interesting that True things do not need constant repeating in order to remain true, while Falsehoods must be constantly repeated to remain powerful. It is possible to spot lies by the constancy and insistence with which they are repeated.
One such falsehood is propagated by the ever-present fictional court-room drama in our media, that the burden of proof automatically lies upon the shoulders of the claimant. --It is interesting that when exploring matters of consciousness, awareness and the non-material world, such a system fails. But if everybody believes that the burden of proof lies with the claimant, then nobody will ever search. It is a tidy way to lock people into limited thought and behavior patterns.
A witness who has gained a powerful insight is under no obligation to share it, much less stand on trial for the benefit of others. These are personal journeys. The evidence is there, it is different for each person, and when you find it, you will almost certainly not be able to share it directly with others.
-FL
Well, that's certainly the argument many of us have been sold, and it in many situations it is certainly an effective approach, particularly in the exploration of material reality. But it is by no means the only or the final answer despite the ever-present sales pitch to the contrary.
In the area of consciousness and spirit, the journey is personal. Simple as that. There is no necessity to prove any claims since the approval of others is entirely irrelevant.
Those who wait for a larger public authority to sanction their personal search will wait indefinitely, and remain stuck within the limits of the material. Consider that statement!
--When trying to find your Soul, you must have a strong belief in your own convictions regardless of public opinion and public approval; you must be able to believe in yourself in order to believe in yourself.
As for the whole burden of proof argument, here's a for-instance. .
Now, what difference does it make to me if the rooted adult does not want to believe in turtles or bother walking over to look for himself? Why should I go to any effort at all to prove that I experienced something special? What benefit is there to me, as I have already had the experience and have been enriched by it? --Certainly, it would be nice if the adult were to grow and gain from a similar experience, but I am certainly not under any obligation to push. Let the adult stay in his comfortable although limited bubble where turtles remain mere fables. For my part, the Turtle is enough. I do not crave the approval of rooted adults, and those who do will always be under the control of those who dispense approval.
A witness who has gained a powerful insight but who is scared of submitting his insight to criticsm or review should really question why they think they are right and are worried about why they think everyone else may disagree.
Scared? Hm. . . While ridicule from the biased is never pleasant, Fear of it is primarily a barrier only to those who are already under its control. Those who have attained freedom did so by ignoring the 'dangers' of being laughed at. They have overcome the fear of not conforming. This is an important early step everybody must take before it is possible to find one's soul.
And just for the record, I'd like to make it clear that I do not fear alternate opinions or criticisms or being laughed at. Indeed, I've already said I'd be willing to tell about my explorations, and I have done so many times in the past. It can certainly be an interesting exercise, though, as I have said, it is also an ultimately pointless exercise as my experiences are my own and cannot be proven to have happened. They hold no validity to anybody but me.
-FL
Much the same way that in a physical simulation the engineer can understand the low-level behaviors of individual components well enough to create an accurate simulation, but it will have emergent properties that the engineer is in no better position to understand than anyone else because they happen at a higher level of abstraction. (My experience is in vehicle dynamics, where this is often true).
I suppose this "replicated brain" (let's assume it's a mouse brain to sidestep ethical issues) would be greatly useful as a "black box", because you could run all kinds of experiments on it that wouldn't be possible with a real brain. Also, once you have a complete system that you can test (and thus validate against a real mouse), you could hopefully determine which simplifying assumptions are valid. Running tests that require a few seconds of simulated time and take a year of computing time would allow it to be done earlier. It will be interesting to see if the various systems within the brain are at all like the sorts of solutions a human engineer would come up with (the way things like eyes are), or if they are completely impossible to understand, much like computer code that has evolved organically (thousands of code monkeys adding and removing code short-sightedly to achieve short term goals, but the system as a whole is not understandable)