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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.'"
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?
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.
> So what happens if this thing develops a consciousness?
...and it says it's scared. or alone. or just wants a friend.
Yes. That's what has me thinking. Not that I think we should stop, but it's going to be a disturbing moment when the techs running these things get to a point where they ask a simulation brain questions, get it to perform tasks, get it to react like a human does...
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.
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.
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.
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One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
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.
And why would we care ? It's not a human conciousness
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.....
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
We don't have to simulate the brain function in real time for it to be a valid simulation. And, if you read the article, they are modeling this on many, many slices of mouse brain. As it says, they hope by doing this that they will shed light on perception, memory, and perhaps even consiousness. It doesn't say they will achieve this, just that they hope to.
No sensationalism here. Move along.
This irks me, too. The hell that schizophrenics live in is far worse than the experience of a person who simply shifts between multiple personalities. Confusing the two does a disservice to those who suffer with this condition.
Schizophrenia literally means "Shattered Mind," a person who's cognitive processes are so discombobulated that they can't differentiate the real from the unreal. It's not being Josh one day and Tom the next.