Bryan Bishop wrote:
On Tuesday 13 November 2007 09:11, Richard Loosemore wrote:
This is the whole brain emulation approach, I guess (my previous
comments were about evolution of brains rather than neural level
duplication).
Ah, you are right. But this too is an interesting topic. I think that
the order of magnitudes for whole brain emulation, connectome, and
similar evolutionary methods, are roughly the same, but I haven't done
any calculations.
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.
Hm. It would seem that we could have some groups focusing on neurons,
another on types of neurons, another on dendritic tree structures, some
more on the abstractions of dendritic trees, etc. in an up-*and*-down
propagation hierarchy so that the abstract processes of the brain are
studied just as well as the "in-betweens" of brain architecture.
I was really thinking of the data collection problem: we cannot take
one brain and get full information about all those things, down to a
sufficient level of detail. I do not see such a technology even over
the horizon (short of full-blow nanotechnology) that can deliver that.
We can get different information from different individual brains (all
of them dead), but combining that would not necessarily be meaningful:
all brains are different.
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.
You see no more possible value of such a project?
Well, I think that it will have more value one day, but at such a late
stage in the history of cognitive system building that it will
essentially just be a mopping up operation.
In other words, we will have to do so much work at the cognitive level
to be able to make sense of the wiring diagrams, that by that stage we
will be able to generate our own systems.
Richard Loosemore
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