My day job is building and evaluating such models; we have one on seizure propagation that is entering clinical trial.
The only "model of a whole brain" we have currently is the one of C. elegans, and even that's debatable because it does not model chemical processes which modulate neural activities, and therefore does not provide an accurate input/output mapping (in general).
No, it doesn't predict activity from parameters.
> C. elegans, and even that's debatable because it does not model chemical processes
"the map is not the territory". This sort of criticism isn't even scientific
Not sure what you mean.
For example, we have a whole brain model of rest state dynamics that can represent aspects of data (eg graph metrics such as degree) from multiple sclerosis patients, distinctly from healthy controls. Here, the map is the model parameters, and the territory is the patient's actual brain. The map is deemed useful if its structure represents that of the territory.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-root-of-though...
AFAIK, nobody has ever claimed to be trying to produce a human whole-brain emulation in the style of https://neurokernel.github.io/. It's a problem that is obviously intractible right now.
I don't think anyone playing SimCity thinks there's a whole real city running on their CPU. And certainly no one has a heart attack if you say SimCity is a simulation of a whole city.
We need to have some standard, and I would say the bare minimum is modeling each neuron in an ultra-simple way along with the connections between them.
Great question (to which I have no idea what the answer is). It seems to me that the various attempts are trying to simulate sets of emergent behaviours at different levels of the brain's "stack". I guess, one way of determining the success of a "lower level" simulation/emulation, is the emergence of known "higher level" behaviours?
Their website is https://nengo.ai and I am not affiliated with them just an alum that took his course.
Human brain is a very specific and complex brain which we do not understand - vastly less than even cities at any scale. And to produce any useful answers, the model has to be accurate to some degree - and we don't know how much. HBP indeed had no question which it tried to answer - it's more like climbing a mountain because it exists.
No. No one has simulated a human brain. All those projects have simulated something that might vaguely resemble some of the brain's structures or operations, but we know so little about the whole thing that it was pretty much a pointless exercise.
HBP has been different from all of them because they attempted to do the true bottom up approach, not feasible without massive resources. As the article states, it turned out that even given the massive resources the task is just too difficult currently.