This article is fluff, yes, but the subject matter is not. 1) Understanding brain function is, of course, not strictly a hardware problem, but right now hardwa

This article is fluff, yes, but the subject matter is not. 1) Understanding brain function is, of course, not strictly a hardware problem, but right now hardware is the bottleneck to progress. 2) Of course the brain is complex, but it is not incomprehensibly so. The neural structure has hierarchy: cells wire into microcircuits, which combine into mini-columns, which combine into columns. These neocortical columns are more or less repeated across the surface of the cortex. The brain is not just a jumble of cells. It's Markram's hypothesis that this is a tractable problem: understand each of the bits (ion channels, dendritic arbors, gene expression, etc.), understand how they're put together, run it through a massive supercomputer, and you've simulated a brain. Moreover, if you've done it right, that simulation should behave similarly to a biological brain. I think he's optimistic on the time scale, but I think he's within an order of magnitude and I agree his approach is sound. 3) Pretty much everything about the brain is an emergent property. As an example, the Blue Brain Project's neocortical column simulation shows alpha wave-like oscillations (private corresponence; but I believe Markram mentioned this in his TED lecture). Nowhere is there a cell ticking at 8-12Hz to create the waves. The oscillations emerge because the cells spontaneously synchronize at that frequency. 4) We can't define consciousness because it's an ill-posed question. Common definitions rest on the everyday experience of the 'ghost in the machine', when in reality that experience is an illusion of coherency created by our brains to help make sense of itself and the world. If there's one thing cognitive and neural science has shown over the past several decades, it's how small the domain of the unknowable consciousness is. Take the work of Gazzaniga, 1998, on split brain patients, as described in the book Brain fiction (page 154, starting from the top): http://books.google.ca/books?id=_rkKxbevFZEC&lpg=PP1&ots=9gZT3BFmNq&dq=split%20brain%20confabulation&pg=PA154#v=onepage&q=split%20brain%20confabulation&f=false http://books.google.ca/books?id=_rkKxbevFZEC&lpg=PP1&#38... Et cetera.