Slashdot Mirror
Can We Build a Human Brain Into a Microchip?
destinyland writes "Can we imprint the circuitry of the human brain onto a silicon chip? It requires a computational capacity of 36.8 petaflops — a thousand trillion floating point operations per second — but a team of European scientists has already simulated 200,000 neurons linked up by 50 million synaptic connections. And their brain-chip is scaleable, with plans to create a superchip mimicking 1 billion neurons and 10 trillion synapses. Unfortunately, the human brain has 22 billion neurons and 220 trillion synapses. Just remember Ray Kurzweil's argument: once a machine can achieve a human level of intelligence — it can also exceed it."
....We have hardly begun to understand how the brain works....
All of this assumes that the brain is the seat of consciousness or even intelligence. The brain may be nothing more than a processor in the same way that a computer processes software, which is not a material object. Jesus Christ spoke frequently of an immaterial part of man called the soul. There are also numerous reports even today of out of body experiences or near death experiences where consciousness is preserved without brain operation.
No matter in how much detail you examine the hardware of a computer, you can tell nothing about it until you turn it on, that is until it becomes alive so to speak. The basic performance characteristics of a computer are not determined by hardware, but by software. Software is not subject to the usual laws of physics, such for example gravity. Because software is not a material object, it can be transmitted at the speed of light and can be endlessly copied. Even if computer hardware could be made as complex as the human brain, it would still have to be programmed.
The Bible characterizes a person as being essentially a living spirit or soul, living in a physical body. It tells us that someday, after we die physically, the software of the soul will be loaded into a new more capable body which lives forever. We have to take all this on faith at the present time, because we do not yet have access to the world that exists beyond the physical.
All theory is gray