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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.'"
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
with more details:n 2005/tc2005066_6414_tc024.htm
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/ju
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.
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.
but what to do with a schizophrenic supercomputer ?
Dual boot!
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.
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
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 %]
No, send him to space to investigate black slabs. And to operate pod bay doors.
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
--
Schizophrenia has nothing to do with so-called "Dual/Split" personalities. Look it up
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.
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.
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.
22.8 teraflops of processing power should be enough for anybody.
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.....
... 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.
Zero evidence, yes. But we're looking to define the difference between a system that is alive (as we define ourselves to be) and one that is merely responsive. If you create a replica that works, at some point you cross the boundary that people define as unlife to life; and as logical and scientific we want to be about it, there will be those who consider it an aberration and will rise against it. The question will come of whether a soul is being made, whether it's founded or unfounded, evidence or not.
;P ) would be blasphemous, arrogant against God, etc etc. This is the kind of thing that gets ranted about in churches. Whether or not there is "evidence" for it, to enough people it matters.
I've tried to keep the following part objective. It is not intended as a troll. Please read it objectively, and consider as part of a discussion over brain simulation and its repercussions rather than about religion. I believe what I believe, you believe what you believe.
I consider there to be no evidence - as such - for religion. Christians point to the bible, others to their own spiritual texts, but I'm quite cynical about the whole thing because there's no manifest evidence. But I don't go out and try to convince them that it's untrue, because I also don't have evidence to the contrary, and I'm also not fussed enough to feel an urge to bring people round to my way of thinking on that. However, as seen over and over (crusades, holy wars, jihads... the list goes on) the percieved insults against a religion are, often enough, responded to with force. US currency and (I think) the White House sigil bears the words "In God We Trust", even though the state is nominally unaffiliated with a religion; can you think of what would happen if it was motioned to be changed? Enough of the US population *believes* it enough that there would be outrage.
These same people believe that the creation of life, of soul, is for their God alone, and creation of new life by humans (other than the conventional way
Browsing with +2 to insightful posts and a higher threshold makes the average post seen seem a lot more ingenious
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]
For more details, see
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.
Schizophrenia was named for the apparent split between the emotional state, or affect, of the patient and the patient's surroundings. I think its a bit misleading to say the schizophrenic lives in a world in which the real and unreal are not differentiable. Its more the case that thought processes are poorly controlled, and delusional, disordered, psychotic, thinking cannot be controlled. A runaway mind seeking its own solutions.