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First brain simulation online by 2015! Oh, a bee's brain

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Thu, 2012-10-04 04:02

Smokeskin

First brain simulation online by 2015! Oh, a bee's brain

Won't it be nice if they get this working, so we don't have to listen to people who say "AI is impossible. Chinese Room argument"? (Yes, that happened to me, and the funny thing is he misunderstood the chinese room, it doesn't say that AIs can't act with incredible intelligence, it just says that they won't actually "understand" what they're doing in some sort of philosophical sense.) http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-205_162-57525206/engineers-plan-to-upload-be... It would be more groundbreaking if they don't get it working, and there's no good reason for it. Bee brain simulated, doesn't act like bee! Dualism will get back in fashion :)

Thu, 2012-10-04 15:40

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Well, as far as I know they

Well, as far as I know they are not planning to do an actual automated scan-model-simulate pipeline, just a model and simulation. We need a bit more to get proper uploading, although it might be useful for convincing people that it can be done.

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Thu, 2012-10-04 16:20

Smokeskin

Yeah it's not uploading. But

Yeah it's not uploading. But it's going to be a proof of concept. Another thing it could help clarify is something that's been bugging me that you might be able to shed some light on Arena. Take the BlueBrain project, where they think they'll be able to run a whole human brain simulation in this decade. As I understand it they're not going to do an upload - they're only going to figure out how brains are generally wired, not do a full scan of a single individual. What they will then end up with doesn't seem like it will be a working brain. It will be a randomly wired brain. I imagine that it is absolutely essential for a brain to undergo the feedback process through childhood, where connections and neuron response that give adaptive behavior and accurate are enforced and the rest shrivel away. Short of a full scan, wouldn't they have to "raise it" or train it? It could probably be done differently from our brain development process since they could tune the ability for forming and cutting connections through software parameters, but it would be a process they'd have to go through. Not to mention the ethics of it...

Thu, 2012-10-04 18:29

Gantolandon Gantolandon's picture

Quote:What they will then end

Quote:
What they will then end up with doesn't seem like it will be a working brain. It will be a randomly wired brain. I imagine that it is absolutely essential for a brain to undergo the feedback process through childhood, where connections and neuron response that give adaptive behavior and accurate are enforced and the rest shrivel away. Short of a full scan, wouldn't they have to "raise it" or train it? It could probably be done differently from our brain development process since they could tune the ability for forming and cutting connections through software parameters, but it would be a process they'd have to go through.

Given that we don't know much about some crucial things (consciousness, identity, etc.), the only way to get something resembling a human mind would be feeding this brain artificial data and raise it like a child. And even this can be insufficient - it's entirely possible that some crucial elements are hard-coded when the brain forms, or learned inside the womb.

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Thu, 2012-10-04 21:39

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Smokeskin wrote:Another thing

Smokeskin wrote:
Another thing it could help clarify is something that's been bugging me that you might be able to shed some light on Arena. Take the BlueBrain project, where they think they'll be able to run a whole human brain simulation in this decade. As I understand it they're not going to do an upload - they're only going to figure out how brains are generally wired, not do a full scan of a single individual. What they will then end up with doesn't seem like it will be a working brain. It will be a randomly wired brain. I imagine that it is absolutely essential for a brain to undergo the feedback process through childhood, where connections and neuron response that give adaptive behavior and accurate are enforced and the rest shrivel away.

Yup. That is my standard criticism of the project. They are going to get something that is brain-shaped, possibly even having the right kind of micro-circuitry to do the same things... but no contents. Its like a computer with an empty hard-drive: the hardware is OK, but there is no operating system or software to run on it. No doubt there are interesting things that can be learned from this (if we can figure out the cortex we have a super-adaptive generic learning/processing module), but it is not going to produce a mind, a person or even real behaviour. So either you need to model growth - a heavy project, and quite separate from the current aims - or you need to scan the peculiarities of a particular brain. In theory one could train a "blank" adult-network brain, but there are likely so many critical periods involved in formatting a brain that can perceive, move and learn to interact with the world that it is likely equivalent to a growth model.

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