Blue Brain and Deep Thought

Seed Magazine has an interesting article on the Blue Brain project, which is using supercomputer technology to model the activity of biological brains. So far, the project team has managed to model the activity of a clump of about 10,000 neurons. While, theoretically, this can all be scaled up, I can’t help feeling that the project director, Henry Markram, woefully underestimates the difficulty if he believes, as he appears to, that he’ll be able to model a complete human brain in a single machine  in ten years or less. Moore’s Law states that computing power doubles about every two years. If that’s what Markram is putting his faith in, then it’s going to take a lot longer to go from modelling 10,000 neurons to one trillion at least 100 billion neurons than just ten years, more like 40 years…

 

Nevertheless, I have no doubt that the team will be able to model simpler brain structures. And it will be fascinating to see if they can demonstrate evidence of the emergence of some form of consciousness. A necessary pre-cursor of this, it seems to me, is that the brain model must be exposed to external stimuli. A brain sealed into its own prison, cut off from everything, is unlikely (I think) to exhibit the emergent property of consciousness.

 

And then there is the question of what happens if it does develop a consciousness, and then the team switches it off. Shades of "Daisy, daisy, give me your answer do…" (a reference to a scene from 2001 that I still find heartrending). Speaking of which, here’s another short extract from 2001 that also brought tears to my eyes, but for a different reason…

 

  

 

(hat tip to the Richard Dawkins Net for the link – and the comments thread there makes for interesting reading as well)