Bryan Bishop wrote:
On Monday 12 November 2007 22:16, Richard Loosemore wrote:
If anyone were to throw that quantity of resources at the AGI problem
(recruiting all of the planet), heck, I could get it done in about 3
years. ;-)
I have done some research on this topic in the last hour and have found
that a "Connectome Project" is in fact in the very early stages out
there on the internet:
http://iic.harvard.edu/projects/connectome.html
http://acenetica.blogspot.com/2005/11/human-connectome.html
http://acenetica.blogspot.com/2005/10/mission-to-build-simulated-brain.html
http://www.indiana.edu/~cortex/connectome_plos.pdf
This is the whole brain emulation approach, I guess (my previous
comments were about evolution of brains rather than neural level
duplication).
But (switching topics to whole brain emulation) there are serious
problems with this.
It seems quite possible that what we need is a detailed map of every
synapse, exact layout of dendritic tree structures, detailed knowledge
of the dynamics of these things (they change rapidly) AND wiring between
every single neuron.
When I say "it seems possible" I mean that the chance of this
information being absolutely necessary in order to understand what the
neural system is doing, is so high that we would not want to gamble on
them NOT being necessary.
So are the researchers working at that level of detail?
Egads, no! Here's a quote from the PLOS Computational Biology paper you
referenced (above):
"Attempting to assemble the human connectome at the level
of single neurons is unrealistic and will remain infeasible at
least in the near future."
They are not even going to do it at the resolution needed to see
individual neurons?!
I think that if they did the whole project at that level of detail it
would amount to a possibly interesting hint at some of the wiring, of
peripheral interest to people doing work at the cognitive system level.
But that is all.
I think it would be roughly equivalent to the following: You say to me
"I want to understand how computers work, in enough detail to build my
own" and I reply with "I can get a you a photo of a motherboard and a
500 by 500 pixel image of the inside of an Intel chip..."
Richard Loosemore
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