Oops, didn't see a further comment below: In response to a comment, " I still don’t understand why biologists insist that you have to do a perfect simulation, down to the smallest molecule, and then state the obvious fact that it’s not going to happen.", PZ says this:
"Errm, because that’s what the singularitarians we’re critiquing are proposing? This whole slice-and-scan proposal is all about recreating the physical components of the brain in a virtual space, without bothering to understand how those components work. We’re telling you that approach requires an awfully fine-grained simulation.
An alternative would be to, for instance, break down the brain into components, figure out what the inputs and outputs to, say, the nucleus accumbens are, and then model how that tissue processes it all (that approach is being taken with models of portions of the hippocampus). That approach doesn’t require a detailed knowledge of what every molecule in the tissue is doing.
But the method described here is a brute force dismantling and reconstruction of every cell in the brain. That requires details of every molecule."
Still seems like a straw man.
Still seems like a straw man.
Erm, please clarify how.
From: http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/07/14/and-everyone-gets-a-robot-pony/