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A Mind Made From Memristors
Csiko writes "Researchers at Boston University's department of cognitive and neural systems are working on an artificial brain implemented with memristors. 'A memristor is a two-terminal device whose resistance changes depending on the amount, direction, and duration of voltage that's applied to it. But here's the really interesting thing about a memristor: Whatever its past state, or resistance, it freezes that state until another voltage is applied to change it. Maintaining that state requires no power.' Also theoretically described, solid state versions of memristors have not been implemented until recently. Now researchers in Boston claim that memristors are the new key technology to implement highly integrated, powerful artificial brains on cheap and widely available hardware within five years."
The state is read by applying voltage to it, this voltage is less than the threshold required to change the state.
Even if the rest of the things explained in the article happen many years away, the last couple of paragraphs explain the trend:
Neuromorphic chips won't just power niche AI applications. The architectural lessons we learn here will revolutionize all future CPUs. The fact is, conventional computers will just not get significantly more powerful unless they move to a more parallel and locality-driven architecture. While neuromorphic chips will first supplement today's CPUs, soon their sheer power will overwhelm that of today's computer architectures.
The semiconductor industry's relentless push to focus on smaller and smaller transistors will soon mean transistors have higher failure rates. This year, the state of the art is 22-nanometer feature sizes. By 2018, that number will have shrunk to 12 nm, at which point atomic processes will interfere with transistor function; in other words, they will become increasingly unreliable. Companies like Intel, Hynix, and of course HP are putting a lot of resources into finding ways to rely on these unreliable future devices. Neuromorphic computation will allow that to happen on both memristors and transistors.
It won't be long until all multicore chips integrate a dense, low-power memory with their CMOS cores. It's just common sense.
Our prediction? Neuromorphic chips will eventually come in as many flavors as there are brain designs in nature: fruit fly, earthworm, rat, and human. All our chips will have brains.
Hopefully, this is the solution to 2018's problem of reaching atomic levels of miniaturization. We have a breaktrought to continue with Moore's law beyond current technology.
"Sum Ergo Cogito"
This opens up a whole huge assload of debate again.
Let us assume they map out the brain, create an FPGA of memristor devices like this that can mimic the brain's exact structure.
First round it doesn't work.
Because robots can't have a soul. You need a spirit to have that kind of consciousness. You'll hear this argument immediately; I'm not going to argue directly against the spirituality thing, but the question to me is more complex than that, of course. Still, that'll be the first argument.
Then someone will make it work.
Now the interesting shit happens.
A lot of people have told me they're never going to die because, by the time they're old, technology will exist to copy their minds into machines. Think about that. Immortality through perpetuated consciousness.
Stop for a moment.
Realize you are alive, aware, and conscious.
Now, why do you experience consciousness?
You want to say, well, all that "soul" bullshit is weird and freaky. Scientifically unsound. I experience consciousness due to a series of electrochemical reactions in my brain. End of story.
Now suppose I move your brain's data into another organic brain, electronic brain, or anything else of the source. Would you continue to "live"? Would YOU continue to live?
To make the point more clear, what if I made an identical copy and booted both at the same time. Do you suddenly develop a psychic link with your other self, experiencing both existences at once, living in two different places? ... ridiculous.
So you're bound to your brain. You cannot live forever unless your particular, specific, physical brain stays in tact. If I copy your brain to another cloned brain, yank yours out, and replace it with the clone, everyone else will interact with you as if you were you, no difference; but YOU would vanish into the blackness, you'd stop living, you'd die.
Why are you conscious?
Hmm that would be convenient for suicide cases. So much easier. Copy my brain into a biological clone brain, swap, and destroy mine. I get to die and nobody else has to worry about it because I don't die. The ultimate escape: you make your life someone else's problem!
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Well, the whole problem with the destruction of the original could probably be solved by slowly replacing the original organic brain with the electronic one. Instead of copying everything at once and then deleting the original you basically "graft" the electronic brain onto the original (obviously it would be a lot trickier than that in practice but so would "just copying" it be) and slowly let the electronic hardware do more and more while the organic does less. Eventually you'll have an all electronic brain.
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
Yes, and this would work why? (in practice, would it?) My point is we don't understand consciousness (and have no way to verify things like this actually work) and that the question is very complex. Even if you don't accept the concept of a "soul," you have a very difficult problem in front of you. If you DO accept the concept of a "soul," you have something confusing and complex in front of you.
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Now suppose I move your brain's data into another organic brain, electronic brain, or anything else of the source. Would you continue to "live"? Would YOU continue to live?
I don't want to foster a false dichotomy but it seems to me that there IS something of a binary choice here. Either there is some undefinable quality we can call a "soul", or what you think of as "life" or "consciousness" is an illusion. The data of whatever was just going through your head is still there to some degree, so you perceive your continued existence, but life is actually only a series of moments and one only has to do with the other because they're somehow connected, not because there's something special about being alive.
If there is a soul and you "die" tomorrow then destruction of the flesh is not the ending of your life. But if there is not a soul and you "die" tomorrow you won't care. And if there is not a soul and you copy yourself to a mechanical brain, then you're both "alive" in that you are both functioning. You're both "you", and yet, neither of you is really you. Change your memories and you're someone else.
Or in other words, when we actually have the technology to mimic the behavior of the human brain, then we may actually be able to answer fundamental questions about the "soul" that cannot be answered today.
Personally I don't see any need for a soul to explain the behavior of a human; it's the same physical processes at work all the way down through bacteria and vira. But we could argue about that all day and achieve nothing but a big fat waste of time, both user and CPU.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Well, I don't know why works. "Why" is a question above my pay grade. But your body is already doing it when it replaces dead cells with newly created cells.
This is my great-great-great-grandfather's axe. It has had the head replaced twice and the handle replaced three times.
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
Hell, you don't even need to go that high tech.
Replacing her brain with a Roomba would likely triple her IQ.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
When you go to sleep (or are knocked out, or drugged, or in a coma, etc) your consciousness ends. When you wake up, your consciousness resumes. You do not freak out about that. You remember your consciousness from before, that it was in the body from before. We believe we have a soul that is immutable from our consciousness because we have had no other experience and cannot comprehend what it would be like.
Look at the experiments that have "reprogrammed" people to believe they like something they didn't before by creating memories of experiences where they liked it. They cannot remember not liking it.Or schizophrenics or people with split/multiple personalities. Our brains are not the infallable machine devices that we like to think they are; they are squishy, malleable things. Consciousness is not a black and white state; it only appears to be because that is the typical way of experiencing our mind.
What makes us conscious? The belief that we're conscious. If you cloned your mind and put it in another body you would have two minds that both believed they were you. But why should we have trouble with that? We don't believe twins are one person. Their actions distinguish them. The two entities that shared one mind at one time would diverge and quickly become two distinguishable entities.
If I copy your brain to another cloned brain, yank yours out, and replace it with the clone, everyone else will interact with you as if you were you, no difference; but YOU would vanish into the blackness, you'd stop living, you'd die.
Which is the exact reason I'd never take a ride on a Star Trek teleporter. I don't want to die and leave my entire physical, mental, and emotional estate to my identical twin who hasn't been born yet.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Amnesia and Alzheimer's is enough proof we don't have souls, no doubt what we call "consciousness" is really just a network of developed cells and memories that are attached to it. After all no one claims to be able to remember what it was like as an embryo, also when one is under amnesia. One's "soul" doesn't float away. The concept of "soul" is just our irrational psychic defense against the fact we all die someday. That so many peoples and cultures have come up with an afterlife speaks volumes that it is just a reaction against our powerlessness to heal and fix ourselves because of the expense, energy, intelligence and tools to do so.
We experience the self as a unified thing but it isn't. This is proven by people who've had brain damage in accidents and strokes where their "self" functions but they lose specific functions and aspects of 'who they are'.
You can find out more by reading the following book by a Neurologist.
This is Damasio's refutation of the Cartesian idea of the human mind as separate from bodily processes draws on neurochemistry to support his claim that emotions play a central role in human decision making.
http://www.amazon.com/Descartes-Error-Emotion-Reason-Human/dp/014303622X/
Also related clip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ
That was the old theory. Years ago it was discovered that new brain cells are in fact produced throughout your lifetime.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
At least some are, just at a slow rate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurogenesis#Adult_neurogenesis
http://preview.tinyurl.com/dxar9m
Also in mice at least, fetal cells can get into the mother's brain and grow neurons etc there: http://brainethics.wordpress.com/2006/07/20/on-a-mothers-mind/
Maybe that's why some couples start looking like each other over time :).
This technology fundamentally mistakes what is the hard part about building brains as adaptable as biological ones. The physical instantiation is not important, if the Church-Turing thesis is true. (And if you're saying Church-Turing is false, that's an enormous claim and you'd better have very compelling evidence to back you up.)
The hard part about building a brain is figuring out the patterns of connectivity between neurons. Biology solves this in some brilliant way, starting from a seed with almost no information (the genome) and implementing some process to incorporate environmental data, self-organizing into a very robust and complex structure with orders of magnitude more information. The great unknown is the process whereby this growth and self-organization occurs. Figure that out, and you'll be able to make any kind of computer you like function as a brain.
This is the program I wrote in 5th grade. I replaced the computer twice, the monitor 3x, and now it runs in an emulator.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
I'm just replying AC so I can read your comment.
The reason slow replacent would work is because the opposite also works. Consider that everyday, hundreds of neurons in your brain are dying right now. Some are replaced by new neurons while others are not. And yet the continuity of you still exists.