Do you need to understand it in order to try it out and see what happens? I see lots of things experimenting with a small colony of neurons. Making machines that move using the organic part to navigate or making them play games (still waiting on part 2 of the Doom one). Couldn’t that be scaled up to human brain size and at least scanned to see what kind of activity is going on and compare it to a real human brain?
xmunk@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
We need to understand what we’re simulating to simulate it. We know the structure of neurons at a simple level, we know how emergent systems represent more complex concepts… we don’t know how the links to build that system are constructed.
Neuromancer49@midwest.social 5 months ago
Even assuming we can model the same number of (simple machine learning model) neurons, it’s the connections that matter. The number of possible connections in the human brain is literally greater than the number of atoms in the universe.
xmunk@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
I just want to make sure one of your words there is emphasized “possible”
Yes - the value of 86 billion choose two is insanely huge… one might even say mind bogglingly huge! However, in actuality, we’ve got about 100 trillion neural connections given our best estimates right now. That’s about a thousand connections per neuron.
It’s a big number but one we could theoretically simulate - it also must be said that it’s impossible for the simulation of the brain to be technically impossible… We’ve each got a brain and there are a billion of us made up out of an insignificant portion of the mass+energy available terrestrially - eventually (unless we extinct ourselves first) we’ll start approaching neurological information storage density - we’re pretty fucking clever so we might even exceed it!
Neuromancer49@midwest.social 5 months ago
I’ve been quoting Jordan Peterson for years?! Ahhh fuck.