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Unfortunately, producing a working simulation of the brain doesn't mean the simulated brain would actually... work. Humans aren't created full form with persona

Unfortunately, producing a working simulation of the brain doesn't mean the simulated brain would actually... work. Humans aren't created full form with personality and behavior ready to go, they learn over years. A brain in a vacuum would have none of that input.

andai 10y ago
If you wish to make a brain from scratch, you must first invent the universe.
ccrush 10y ago
I think there are a few instances of medical science bringing back persons from comas that may help with identifying what would happen to a fully formed brain that was completely shut down for a decent period of time. Presumably, reproducing the physical structure of such a brain and giving it similar inputs would lead to an experimentally similar result. The question I would like to see answered is what happens if we do this to someone with a grown brain and wake them up in a simulation of a space ship that traveled to a far away planet. Again presumably, the person would need nutrition and care and education for some time, but then would they be able to carry out significant advances on behalf of humanity. Would they even want to? What if they feel betrayed by their fate and creator? Then again, who doesn't? Someone write a book about this.
- drzaiusapelord 10y ago
  That's not the criticism he's making. He's saying to get to a functional adult brain you must have a few cells that work together, then a fetus brain, then a baby brain, then an infant brain, then a toddler brain, etc all the way to an adult brain and all the care and learning needed in those stages to make it all work. You need the morphology and structures that happen in nature to get the structures and functionality needed to properly simulate a brain. We simply don't know about enough about learning, development, brains, and consciousness to just plug into a simulated adult brain and make it all work. We can only follow the path nature has laid out. I'm sure you can skip some parts like fetal stages, but we develop language at a very specific range of ages using specific techniques. We can't skip the language acquisition stage and then expect our simulated brain to magically know language. We can't skip the angry "me" stage of a toddler and expect the mind to have self-assertiveness. We can't skip the sexual and social awakening stage of teenhood and expect the mind to understand complex social concepts and sexuality, etc, etc. The only scenario I can imagine out of this problem is a per neuron copy of a working brain on the cellular level. I imagine this isn't, or won't ever be, in the cards for practical reasons. Or if you could someone divine the algorithms that create consciousness, assuming this is even possible on a transistor based machine, then that would also be a work-around. Right now we can't do either, so following nature's approach is the probably the sanest way forward. I wouldnt be surprised if the first AI ends up being more a biological 'computer' than anything having to do with x86 instruction sets and transistors, but that's just a guess on my part.
taneq 10y ago
If it doesn't actually work then it's not a working simulation, innit? Less flippantly, I've never heard a credible argument why a working simulation of an actual sampled human brain, with appropriate sensory inputs, would not function just as that human did. (Note that the magic is in the phrase 'working simulation' - this may require more than just a connectome depending on how much crazy molecular-level processing actually takes place inside real neurons, but assuming this is possible...) There was a news article a couple of days ago about some company in Japan "simulating a human brain" which disappointingly was actually just them simulating a randomly connected neural net with a similar number of neurons. That's not a 'simulated human brain', any more than a skip bin full of transistors is a 'simulated CPU'.

andai 10y ago

If you wish to make a brain from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

ccrush 10y ago

I think there are a few instances of medical science bringing back persons from comas that may help with identifying what would happen to a fully formed brain that was completely shut down for a decent period of time. Presumably, reproducing the physical structure of such a brain and giving it similar inputs would lead to an experimentally similar result. The question I would like to see answered is what happens if we do this to someone with a grown brain and wake them up in a simulation of a space ship that traveled to a far away planet. Again presumably, the person would need nutrition and care and education for some time, but then would they be able to carry out significant advances on behalf of humanity. Would they even want to? What if they feel betrayed by their fate and creator? Then again, who doesn't? Someone write a book about this.

drzaiusapelord 10y ago
That's not the criticism he's making. He's saying to get to a functional adult brain you must have a few cells that work together, then a fetus brain, then a baby brain, then an infant brain, then a toddler brain, etc all the way to an adult brain and all the care and learning needed in those stages to make it all work. You need the morphology and structures that happen in nature to get the structures and functionality needed to properly simulate a brain. We simply don't know about enough about learning, development, brains, and consciousness to just plug into a simulated adult brain and make it all work. We can only follow the path nature has laid out. I'm sure you can skip some parts like fetal stages, but we develop language at a very specific range of ages using specific techniques. We can't skip the language acquisition stage and then expect our simulated brain to magically know language. We can't skip the angry "me" stage of a toddler and expect the mind to have self-assertiveness. We can't skip the sexual and social awakening stage of teenhood and expect the mind to understand complex social concepts and sexuality, etc, etc. The only scenario I can imagine out of this problem is a per neuron copy of a working brain on the cellular level. I imagine this isn't, or won't ever be, in the cards for practical reasons. Or if you could someone divine the algorithms that create consciousness, assuming this is even possible on a transistor based machine, then that would also be a work-around. Right now we can't do either, so following nature's approach is the probably the sanest way forward. I wouldnt be surprised if the first AI ends up being more a biological 'computer' than anything having to do with x86 instruction sets and transistors, but that's just a guess on my part.

taneq 10y ago

If it doesn't actually work then it's not a working simulation, innit? Less flippantly, I've never heard a credible argument why a working simulation of an actual sampled human brain, with appropriate sensory inputs, would not function just as that human did. (Note that the magic is in the phrase 'working simulation' - this may require more than just a connectome depending on how much crazy molecular-level processing actually takes place inside real neurons, but assuming this is possible...) There was a news article a couple of days ago about some company in Japan "simulating a human brain" which disappointingly was actually just them simulating a randomly connected neural net with a similar number of neurons. That's not a 'simulated human brain', any more than a skip bin full of transistors is a 'simulated CPU'.