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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.
but what to do with a schizophrenic supercomputer ?
Dual boot!
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.
A valid moral question.
Luckily the situation is more convenient. Call something like "suspend to disk", backup the whole state and you have the equivalent of hibernation. Can be "defrozen" and brought back to life anytime.
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
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.
22.8 teraflops of processing power should be enough for anybody.
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
As someone who is receiving my PhD in "Computation and Neural Systems" from Caltech this week, and having worked briefly in that lab, I can tell you that the simulation you read about, which is called GENESIS probably simulated the neuron in much greater detail than is ultimately required to create a brain. It simulated the entire physiology and chemistry of the neuron ... every ion flow, trans-membrane voltage, etc. One of the many goals is to explore precisely what information-processing behavior arises from the chemistry and biology.
But, once you determine that information-processing behavior, one should in theory be able to simulate that without a detailed model of the underlying structure. I mean, if I know that impulses from X input synapses cause the voltage at the soma to raise/lower according to a certain time function, and that a certain voltage at the soma causes an action potential to be fired, which will trigger the neuron's own output synapses to fire Y milliseconds later, I should be able to simulate these properties without going to the pain of modelling the ion channels, capacitance, and resistance of every patch of membrane on the whole neuron's surface.
That should buy a few years' worth of Moore's law for your prediction. Consider yours an upper bound, and assume we can make shortcuts to bring it sooner than 2040.
I actually think the top supercomputers are within spitting distance of modelling a human brain - or at least smaller mammalian brains now. The trouble is that despite what TFA leads you to believe, far too little is known yet about the interconnections of those neurons. Even less is known about their learning functions. The state of the art in much of the brain is to stick a few electrodes in, hope you find a couple of neurons that are connected in some way, record for a while and then do statistics on their firing patterns to estimate the strength an type of their pairwise connection. Then by using that they hope to work backwards to deducing the connection patterns of whole clusters of neurons. It's slow, messy work.
The group in TFA uses thin slices of brain where they can more accurately observe which neurons are connected to which, and which neurons they are recording from. It's a useful technique, but since the connections in the brain are three-dimensional, taking thin slices fundamentally alters the structure. It can't tell us anything.
Much of the brain is still a black box, effectively. It will still be a while before we can model an entire brain, regardless of CPU power available. My personal gut feeling is that the understanding of the neuronal network is far more the limiting factor at this point.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.