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Artificial Brain '10 Years Away'
SpuriousLogic writes "A detailed, functional artificial human brain can be built within the next 10 years, a leading scientist has claimed.
Henry Markram, director of the Blue Brain Project, has already built elements of a rat brain.
He told the TED global conference in Oxford that a synthetic human brain would be of particular use finding treatments for mental illnesses.
Around two billion people are thought to suffer some kind of brain impairment, he said.
'It is not impossible to build a human brain and we can do it in 10 years,' he said."
Moreover, if the brain is simulated well enough, it will certainly appear self-aware. Even if there is a difference (such as it not having a soul), that's not something we can (so far) experimentally determine, and therefore any metaphysical postulations are, or should be, beside the point in the question of ethical behavior towards the simulation.
Tell you what: tell me how that thing with the car keys works (you know, the one where you look at the table three times and it isn't there, you search for it for 10 minutes elsewhere, and suddenly you see it right there where you looked before), and I'll believe you.
What's so special about that? The human eye can only see a very tiny fraction of your field of view in focus, everything else is very blurry and pretty much impossible to recognize unless you already know its there. On top of that your eye has a blind spot, everything in that is completly invisible. Your pattern recognition also doesn't work 100% perfect, if you see something upside down instead of the way you expect it, you might not recognize it or not recognize it fast enough and so your eyes might have moved on before the key was recognized.
Or to sum it up: The brain actively recognizes only a very tiny fraction of the world, everything else is interpolation and guesswork and if your key hides in the later part, you won't find it, especially if you don't expect it there. Seen this? Pretty much the same thing.