Human Brain Project: $1.61 billion to achieve human brain emulation by 2024

Re:Human Brain Project: $1.61 billion to achieve human brain... by erikpukinskis on Wednesday May 18, 2011 @09:29PM (#2562548)

This is great science, and I'm sure we will learn a lot about brains, but there is no way a simulated brain will have any kind of consciousness without a simulated body as well. Without a body and an environment to interact with, the brain is like a computer program with no data to run on.

Experiments have shown that if you yoke a paralyzed cat to another cat and let it experience a complete array of visual inputs, the yoked cat will still be completely blind. Interactive embodied experience is the foundation of cognition and consciousness. A brain in a vat is as empty as a computer without i/o.

It would be interesting to have a full-scale simulation to learn about how activation propagates, how different systems interact, yada yada yada. But until you give it a body there won't be any ethical issues.

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Re:Human Brain Project: $1.61 billion to achieve human brain... by hasenj on Thursday May 19, 2011 @12:36AM (#2562894)

Processes in a computer can create input/output between each other. If the brain is just another program, why couldn't some other program running inside the same computer send it inputs?

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Re:Human Brain Project: $1.61 billion to achieve human brain... by erikpukinskis on Thursday May 19, 2011 @04:13AM (#2563252)

It could! But simulating the human body, not to mention the environment a human being grows up in, is a much harder task than simulating the brain.

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Re:Human Brain Project: $1.61 billion to achieve human brain... by hasenj on Thursday May 19, 2011 @04:25AM (#2563274)

But the brain exists in a certain state at any given time, and this state theoretically can be uploaded (from some individual person) to a computer simulating a brain so that we don't always have to "grow" the computer brain.

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Re:Human Brain Project: $1.61 billion to achieve human brain... by erikpukinskis on Friday May 20, 2011 @08:12PM (#2569876)

Your brain wouldn't be worth much without your body. You'd be surprised how much your body does. Think of typing for example. You couldn't do it without the exact nerve/muscle pathways in your hands. Hook up robot hands (even crudely modelled after your existing nervous/muscle/bone system in your current hands) and you'd basically have to relearn to do anything. You'd be a baby again.

I think you'd be surprised how much this applies to. Speech, even things like counting we rely on our bodies for.

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Re:Human Brain Project: $1.61 billion to achieve human brain... by ciphergoth on Thursday May 19, 2011 @10:33AM (#2564012)

That's the opposite of my understanding; Sandberg and Bostrom discusses this and at least as far as compute resources go, simulating the brain is by far the harder problem.

http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/selected_outputs/fohi_publications/b...

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Re:Human Brain Project: $1.61 billion to achieve human brain... by erikpukinskis on Friday May 20, 2011 @08:14PM (#2569878)

That may be true of the body, although our nervous system in our body is quite large, not to mention the spinal chord. But it's certainly not true of the developmental environment. For one thing, simulating that would require simulated thousands of other human brains.

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