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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."
Read "How Brains Think" by William H. Calvin; he's a neurologist and the book goes into lots of detail about how brains think (dur), how they evolved, and the possibility of AI.
He's an expert in the field and you can feel his bitter dislike of "quantum consciousness" proponents through his writing. He writes that it's just saying "we don't know how X works, and we don't know how Y works, but if we say that Y depends upon X then we have one problem instead of two".
Consciousness is built on the interactions of neurons. We understand how neurons work at interact at a low level (from studying the ~50 neuron brains of snails etc), and we understand on a large level which regions of the brain do what, but we don't understand the "middle ground".
It's as if we understand the transistor, and logic gates, and we can recognize which part of a chip is the ALU and which is the cache, but we can't recognize an adder circuit or microinstruction translator for what it is.
Quantum physics is certainly involved in the action of transistors but it doesn't explain how they combine to process data.
(On a similar note some I saw, in a documentary, one crackpot explain away "spontaneous human combustion" with an unknown quantum particle.)
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