3 ms·
I'm going to take the unpopular stance and say that it's very hard to make a prediction like this. Anyone who has a very strong stance one way or another proba
by Xcelerate 14y ago
I'm going to take the unpopular stance and say that it's very hard to make a prediction like this. Anyone who has a very strong stance one way or another probably needs to reevaluate their predictive capabilities.
I do work in molecular dynamics. To even simulate a million atoms requires huge approximations. You can get more accurate as you simulate less. If you want an almost perfect match with reality, simulation will get you about 2-3 helium atoms. Now consider how many atoms are in a human brain.
So it's hard for me to imagine fully simulating a human brain, although I don't see why it is theoretically impossible. Brains behave according to the same laws of physics as everything else in the universe.
On our current technological improvement path, I don't see a brain simulation occurring any time soon. If quantum computers were developed, it would make things much easier, but we would still need a new "kind" of technology. I wouldn't rule it out completely though. Who in the 1600s would have predicted microprocessors?
As for his talk about souls or consciousness, that just confuses me (and I'm religious too). Everything that we have thus far discovered obeys the laws of physics, so ruling out a simulation via some mystical "property" that human brains have seems sketchy to me.
Now, if you want to talk about things that really aren't computable, I'll direct you to Chaitin's constant: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaitins_constant http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaitins_constant
- muglug 14y agoAs I understand it, currents attempts to simulate brain activity operate on a slightly higher scale, mimicking the behaviour of neurons and the electronic signals between them, without resorting to modelling the behaviour of individual atoms.
- Xcelerate 14y agoYeah... what I've found from my work is that higher-order modeling tends to leave out important effects. Which is okay when you're specifically trying to understand one particular property of a system (diffusivity, charge distribution, etc.), but when you want ALL properties to be accurate? That's difficult. Edit: I'll elaborate a little bit more. We currently simulate large proteins using force fields like CHARMM or AMBER. The problem we're trying to solve is what structure these proteins will fold into, and these force-fields work pretty well for that. But consider this: these potentials are basically a handful of equations that describe stretching, bending, torsional, van der Waals, and electrostatic interactions. The parameters for these equations come from measurements of simple compounds that have similar structure, and these are used to extrapolate what will happen in a different substance. Good enough for folding, but if you want accurate energy levels? No way.
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- MaysonL 14y agoBoyle's Law is statistical, but pretty damn accurate, even though it's nowhere near a simulation of the dynamics of the myriad molecules whose dynamics it aggregates.