I think it's perfectly possible to create a simulation of the brain. How the mind works is a different story.
To clarify. We have computers with 1.4bil tranzistors in them. And i'm talking about commercial computers. I think some FPGA devices breached 5-6bil last year. I think my professor told me something about that in college.
The human brain has at least 100 trillion neuron connections. 100 trillion. So we have some time to go till we can model the brain with transistors, and lets face it, it's the only viable way to do it now, electronically. But again, modelling the mind is a huge task. We can model parts of the brain. Each lobe as it were. Alternatively, we could just use software... and that's ok. But we would need huge processing power. I mean something like they use when they do airplane calculations and all that. Even more.
Anyway, it's a daunting task and it is something people should be working on for decades. It's not an easy win scenario, but then again, nothing worthwhile ever is.
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Is it realistic that the human brain as a whole will be simulated? Or is it just people looking for research grants and making everything sound awesome?
I see three problems, one of which can probably not be overcome
1) Limited computational power
2) Imaging/measuring techniques for biological parameters
3) The huge variation of the physical and chemical properties of everything in vivo means that you have thousands of model parameters with huge uncertainties and thus biological simulations won't tell you much about reality once they reach a certain complexity (this is the one which can probably not be overcome in a few years).
Therefore, I think it's people looking for research grants and making things sound cool. Which doesn't mean they won't do anything interesting, but it most probably won't be a simulation of the entire brain imo.
What do you think?
I think the simulation of the brain is inevitable barring a metaphysical intrusion there is no reason it should not at some point be possible. Will we do it in 50 years? I think it is likely that we will get to something approximating it. One of the themes of invention is that usually we make our greatest breakthroughs by building upon nature instead of replicating it the prime example being heavier than air flight as we do not copy birds. A salient reason for pursuing brain simulation is to develop artificial intelligence, neural prosthetics, medical advances, psychological understanding, etc. It may be that we accomplish all of those things by using superior methods or innovations than the more difficult ones presented to us by nature.
But to give my answer on your three points:
1. I think the computing problem will be rapidly overcome this century if not much sooner. As we move towards exascale supercomputing infrastructure and extremely large data storage technologies we are quickly approaching the raw capacity to tackle this problem. Software and scientific understanding are another question.
2. Maybe I'm being simplistic but I don't actually see much of a problem with this. We already have fairly sophisticated metrics for measuring biological items as well as categorizing non-numerical phenomena.
3. This is closely linked with the first point and I'd actually disagree that aren't closer to it than people think. Though my definition of close is probably on the order of sometime before the middle of this century.
For me the real question is will brain simulation research efforts and experiments offer us the practical benefits and progress towards the areas I mentioned before and I think the answer is yes. Whether or not we create an exact replica of the human brain is less important to me personally.
One of the most fascinating things to me is the energy efficiency of the human brain compared to energy needs to simulate the human brain.
As for what you mention...I think useful things typically come from trying to do the impossible.
If you view the human brain as just a collection of neurons, then why could it not be duplicated?
If, on the other hand, there is a human spirit in possession of that brain, using it in the same way you use any other computer, then it can't be duplicated.
Time will tell, won't it?
it also brings up the question that if the human brain is successfully duplicated, does that entity attain personhood?
An animal analog. Or a machine a thinks like a person. We aren't the only ones who think and are self-aware.That is an interesting question. Create a machine that thinks and is self aware, and just what is it?
Good point. Some of the higher animals do the same.An animal analog. Or a machine a thinks like a person. We aren't the only ones who think and are self-aware.
Good point. Some of
the higher animals do the same.
which kind of blurs the distinction between human and non human, and
brings up the question of just what a human being is, doesn't it?
We can understand the workings of the human body on a genetic scale but to this day scientist really have no idea where the individual seat of consciousness exist and what in our brains is responsible for it.
Theories is all they have, but to think it could be replicated on a digital scale is stil just science fiction.
Creating an artificial brain seems do-able; as sooner or later raw computational
power will be sufficient. However, to create a human mind consisting of imagination,
opinion, morals, etc does not seem possible as we utterly lack any clue how this
comes about.
Whether or not simulating a human brain is ever doable, it is not possible to simulate what "lives" in the brain, so to speak.
Heart, mind and soul are more than just major neuro-clustered families at the center, left, and right of the new brain (in western 'man).
They reflect the zero-point matching-frequency spirit that unites there with the material, the spirit of us that gives one the "I am" experience and personally unique decision power.
That can't be realistically simulated.
Einstein and the classical gang recognized the zero-point field long ago, but because it was such a constant, they simply factored it out of their equations.Based on what scientific evidence do you claim that? There is no reason that I've yet been made aware of that would seem to indicate that consciousness cannot be replicated artificially. Most in neuroscience today adhere to a naturalistic theory of the mind with one of the rising theories of the past twenty years being the computational theory of the mind. If you were to create a thinking machine, an artificial intelligence, it would be because we managed to replicate many of the cognitive rules or mechanics of our brain. Heart, mind, and soul can very well be 'nothing more' than neuro-clustered families and chunks of cerebral cortex. Neurons, axons, dendrites in my opinion (and I should say in the opinion of most neuroscientist's I've ever heard of or read) the sum of the mind, anticipating that there 'must' be a spirit acting behind the brain as you seem to be indicating can never be proven it requires an act of faith.
Einstein and the classical gang recognized the zero-point field long ago, but because it was such a constant, they simply factored it out of their equations.
We now know that there's much more going on there, that the nearly limitless unique frequencies of photons in this absolute-zero field is found in dark matter, dark matter that exists in abundance between the galaxies .. and that also exists inside the human body.
Each brain with its unique frequency receiver can house one of these dark matter spiritual entities.
Without that spiritual entity, the brain is just a machine without an "operator".
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