Building a Silicon Brain

prostoalex tips us to an article in MIT's Technology Review on a Stanford scientist's plan to replicate the processes inside the human brain with silicon. Quoting: "Kwabena Boahen, a neuroengineer at Stanford University, is planning the most ambitious neuromorphic project to date: creating a silicon model of the cortex. The first-generation design will be composed of a circuit board with 16 chips, each containing a 256-by-256 array of silicon neurons. Groups of neurons can be set to have different electrical properties, mimicking different types of cells in the cortex. Engineers can also program specific connections between the cells to model the architecture in different parts of the cortex."

Comments

Depends on What Consciousness Is

[reporter]

Building a working brain from silicon circuits depends on one profound assumption: consciousness is a function of only newtonian physics. If this assumption holds, then you could just write a massive computer program that computes the newtonian equations. Run the program on a multicore processor. The program would become sentient on its own. Attach some peripherals (e.g., a camera, a microphone, heat sensor, and the like) to the multiprocessor to give sight and sense to the sentient artificial being.

Building a hardware version of that sentient computer program is unnecessarily expensive. A software model of the actual hardware should be sufficient to prove the validity of the idea.

However, some scientists believe that consciousness is not newtonian. Rather, human consciousness is derived from quantum processes.