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>What's going to stop us from building a human body, including the brain, once we have the manufacturing technology to do so? it's that we don't know what "man

>What's going to stop us from building a human body, including the brain, once we have the manufacturing technology to do so? it's that we don't know what "manufacturing technology" we need, because we don't have a deep enough understanding of how the brain works. I think the parent's point was that attempts to engineer complex systems fail because these attempts can't reproduce the emergent behavior that arises from many layers of interactions from individual agents. a plane is complex, but it's not a complex system. edit: I actually disagree a bit with myself - you can make a case that planes have elements of complex systems, but it's not at the same scale as a brain, in my opinion.

moe 15y ago
Yes, I don't dispute that we can not build a brain today. But I'd say this is not very different to our inability of building a plane (or understanding how it could possibly work) back in the 1900s. I just checked wikipedia and about 100 years ago (February 1911): The first official air mail flight takes place from Allahabad, India to Naini, India, when Henri Pequet carries 6,500 letters a distance of 13 km. Today, 100 years later, I tell you about this event by typing my "letter" into a portable device that will soon transmit my message over the shy distance of ~8000 miles, in under 100 milliseconds. So, looking back at what we've achieved in the past 100 years, and unless someone discovers some inherent property of the human brain that prevents it from being replicated (did God add DRM?), I remain pretty optimistic that we will be able to build one soon.