I sometimes wonder about being able to fully simulate a human brain. Maybe even scan/copy a real person’s brain.
So many philosophical, ethical and legal questions. And unsettling possibilities.
We will probably have to deal with this someday.
So many philosophical, ethical and legal questions. And unsettling possibilities.
We will probably have to deal with this someday.
This is quite an extraordinary claim with no extraordinary evidence.
As said elsewhere in this thread we can at this moment not even simulate single atoms.
I see no reason to believe at all that we will ever be able to simulate a human brain.
Unless you want my simulation here:
if ishungry:
Eat(FindFood())
else:
PracticeFingersnowboarding()And that's with us having a pretty solid understanding of how fluid dynamics works. We have an extremely poor understanding of how a brain works, doubly something of the complexity of the human brain. We are fundamentally unable to study it during operation, because we don't have a non-invasive high resolution access to it's internals. We are basically butchers sticking electrodes into living tissue.
The article itself proposes that we may - barely - be able to study the workings of the brain of an extremely simple organism.
A rocketry analogy would be Archimedes dreaming about people traveling to the stars.
> A rocketry analogy would be Archimedes dreaming about people traveling to the stars.
What’s wrong with that? The claim was „some day“, not in 5 years. It could take a few centuries or longer.
I think there’s a good chance we won’t be able to simulate a exact propagation of a brain into the future due to quantum effects and unknowable starting states, but I don’t see how simulating one possible future could be impossible.
Like the fact we can't even explain an everyday phenomena all humans experience like consciousness. If you don't understand a common phenomena that (supposedly) occurs in the brain, you have a fundamental lack of knowledge on how the brain itself works, and thus simulating it would not be a thing possible to do.
Another hint is the fact that we can't currently even simulate a single cell because of how much complex they are, and the most advanced neuron models (like hodgkin-huxley) are still gross simplifications of how we think a real neuron works. We don't have any proof that this is a possible thing, it is something people believe it is the case, but pretty much could be a dead-end.
Other is that we don't have a way to reliably know the state of the alive brains without modifying them, so reproducing one with fidelity appears to be very hard or maybe even impossible.
And so on.
That alone wouldn't be enough to fully clone a person's consciousness. There is information stored in the actively firing synapses. For example short-term memory seems to be stored by sending signals in a loop, and there might be more such mechanisms. Those signals are obviously lost once the brain is dead. Another issue are hormones. The same brain regulated by a different (simulated) body might behave completely different. And then there are probably a lot of unknown unknowns. Despite decades of research there are still a lot of open questions, and more questions will become apparent once we actually start simulating complex brains.
But that doesn't mean that those early methods wouldn't be useful, both for science and for more questionable efforts. For example accessing the long-term memory of a recently deceased might be comparatively viable if given enough funding
1: https://edition.cnn.com/2024/05/15/world/human-brain-map-har...
I suspect this wasn't your intention, but I feel this heavily undersells how much work is involved in "scaling up" to simulating a human brain. I wouldn't even say that it is inevitable, because there are so many unsolved questions and unknown-unknowns.
There are decades of research and we are still an unknown and large number of years away from doing this. Fusion power is more tractable that this.
It's not even clear whether our current approach to computation will ever be able to do this. We might need completely novel types of computers, maybe organic-machine hybrids.
I'm not even touching on the very real and serious ethical questions of simulating human level consciousnesses.
Also note how my "just" only applies to scaling from mapping a grain-of-rice-sized piece of human brain to mapping a full human brain. Going from there to simulating it would be another big leap, never mind the challenges to simulate it in a way that actually produces results comparable to the actual brain of that person.
To wit, no one expects human brains to be capable of arbitrarily complex computation.
This does not follow from any theorem of Gödel.