Reverse engineering the mind

by Caution Thu Sep 12, 2013 1:15 am

It didn’t take long before the model reacted. After only a few electrical jolts, the artificial neural circuit began to act just like a real neural circuit. Clusters of connected neurons began to fire in close synchrony: the cells were wiring themselves together. Different cell types obeyed their genetic instructions. The scientists could see the cellular looms flash and then fade as the cells wove themselves into meaningful patterns. Dendrites reached out to each other, like branches looking for light. “This all happened on its own,” Markram says. “It was entirely spontaneous.”

“The column has been built and it runs,” Markram says. “Now we just have to scale it up.” Blue Brain scientists are confident that, at some point in the next few years, they will be able to start simulating an entire brain. “If we build this brain right, it will do everything,” Markram says. I ask him if that includes selfconsciousness: Is it really possible to put a ghost into a machine? “When I say everything, I mean everything,” he says, and a mischievous smile spreads across his face.

[LINK]

We're on our way to creating a soul. I think it's in one of the videos below, but it all seems very plausible. They did all the hard work necessary to get this far: taking nano-slices of tiny proto-brains for a decade and then averaging the dataset, feed it into a computer that can put it together morphologically and apply the the neurochemical rules as we understand them and voila, it "POSTs" :-) If he's right and it's just a matter of scaling up at this point, I don't see this as entirely impossible. As with string theory, we just need faster computers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySgmZOTkQA8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgNk-VLVPvc

His TED talk on the matter
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXWTL6Myg5U

by Lurker Thu Sep 12, 2013 1:26 am

That's amazing!

by Ben Reilly Thu Sep 12, 2013 5:02 am

Uh, yeah. Holy crap!

When we do manage to create artificial life, let's make sure we show it love and respect.

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Reverse engineering the mind

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