Immersion Blog

Nick Carr reports that Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute has published an in-depth roadmap to “whole brain emulation”- the replication of a fully functional human brain inside a computer. As a non-scientist it makes for strange but fascinating reading. At one point, for example, it wrestles with the problem of where to stop, or start simplifying the simulation. One obvious place is where “scale separation” exists, where different aspects of the system exist on such different scales that they can become uncoupled;

An important issue to be determined is whether such a cut‐off exists in the case of the human brain and, if it does exist, at what level. While this paper phrases it in terms of simulation/emulation, it is encountered in a range of fields (AI, cognitive neuroscience,
philosophy of mind) in other forms: what level of organisation is necessary for intelligent, personal, or conscious behaviour?

A key assumption of WBE is that, at some intermediary level of simulation resolution between the atomic and the macroscopic, there exists at least one cut‐off such that meeting criteria 1a and 1b at this level of resolution also enables the higher criteria to be met.

At such a spatial, temporal, or organisational scale, the dynamics on the larger/slower scale is not functionally sensitive to the dynamics of the smaller/faster scale. Such scale separation might occur at the synaptic scale, where the detailed chemical dynamics underlying synaptic function could be replaced by a simplified qualitative model of its effects on signals and synaptic strengths.

At the other end of the scale, there is also the cut off point relating to, well, the entire body and world that the brain exists in. That’s the aspect of this concept that seems most fudged;

Similarly, the high‐level achievements related to social roles, mental states, and personal identify (6a, 6b and 6c) are both poorly understood and hard to operationalize, but given the philosophical interest in WBE we have included them here for completeness. It is not obvious how these criteria relate to one another, or to what extent they might be entailed by the criteria for 4 and 5.

So, at the low end of the achievement scale there is “functional emulation”, whilst at the high end (for example 5) there is “individual brain emulation”. So what they’re talking about, really, is to use the brain as a model to try and create machine consciousness. The road map to emulate a human brain at high-level achievement of 6, would have to also emulate the body and world, surely?

Nick Carr picks up on the way in which they deal with free will- “They deal with the problem of free will, or, as they term it, the possibility of a random or “physically indeterministic element” in the working of the human brain, by declaring it a non-problem”;

Hidden variables or indeterministic free will appear to have the same status as quantum consciousness: while not in any obvious way directly ruled out by current observations, there is no evidence that they occur or are necessary to explain observed phenomena.

The whole document amounts to a kind of philosophy or expression of the idea of materialism. Both of a materialistic concept of the human mind and materialism in general. They write, “the economic impact of copyable brains could be immense, and could have profound societal consequences.”

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 29th, 2008 at 11:10 am and is filed under Psychology & Neuroscience, Research studies, Virtual Worlds. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.