ChristianKl comments on an ethical puzzle about brain emulation - Less Wrong

14 Post author: asr 13 December 2013 09:53PM

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Comment author: ChristianKl 14 December 2013 04:56:49PM 0 points [-]

Wikipedia tells me that the brain has ~120 trillion synapses. Most of the storage cost will be the per-timestep data, not the underlying topology. If we need one byte per synapse per timestep, that's 120TB/timestep.

I don't think there any reason to assume that one byte is enough to fully represent the state of a synapse.

Comment author: asr 15 December 2013 04:51:10AM 0 points [-]

I don't think there any reason to assume that one byte is enough to fully represent the state of a synapse.

I have no particular background in neurology -- my goal was an order-of-magnitude estimate for how much storage it would take to describe a brain accurately enough for simulation. I'd enjoy hearing better numbers if anybody has them.

Comment author: ChristianKl 15 December 2013 05:08:06PM 1 point [-]

I have no particular background in neurology -- my goal was an order-of-magnitude estimate for how much storage it would take to describe a brain accurately enough for simulation.

Accurate enough for simulation is a tricky term. It depends on the purpose of the simulation. If you just want to simulate what happens in a time window of 1 second you can ignore changes in myelin sheath thickness. But the resulting system isn't equivalent to a human brain and it's complicated to argue that it's conscious.

When it comes to long term learning neurons are capable of expressing genes as a result of neurotransmitters. We don't know the functions of all genes in the human genome.