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jkaufman comments on Whole Brain Emulation: Looking At Progress On C. elgans - Less Wrong Discussion

40 Post author: jkaufman 29 October 2011 03:21PM

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Comment author: jkaufman 28 March 2012 03:46:52PM *  0 points [-]

I'm not sure what you're responding to. I wasn't trying to say that the human brain was only 100x the size or complexity of a nematode's brain-like-thing. It's far larger and more complex than that. I was saying that even once we have a nematode simulated, we still have done only ~1% of the "real work" of developing the right methods.

Comment author: orthonormal 28 March 2012 03:48:23PM 2 points [-]

Even once we have a nematode simulated we still have done only ~1% of the "real work" of developing the right methods.

I understand that this is your intuition, but I haven't seen any good evidence for it.

Comment author: jkaufman 28 March 2012 04:03:57PM *  4 points [-]

The evidence I have that the methods developed for the nematode are dramatically insufficient to apply to people:

  • nematodes are transparent
  • they're thin and so easy to get chemicals to all of them at once
  • their inputs and outputs are small enough to fully characterize
  • their neural structure doesn't change at runtime
  • while they do learn, they don't learn very much

It's not strong evidence, I agree. I'd like to get a better estimate here.

Comment author: orthonormal 13 April 2012 05:06:04PM 2 points [-]

This lecture on uploading C. elegans is very relevant.

(In short, biophysicists have known where the neurons are located for a long time, but they've only just recently developed the ability to analyze the way they affect one another, and so there's fresh hope of "solving" the worm's brain. The new methods are also pretty awesome.)

Comment author: orthonormal 28 March 2012 04:10:08PM 2 points [-]

My intuition is that most of the difficulty comes from the complexity of the individual cells- we don't understand nearly all of the relevant things they do that affect neural firing. This is basically independent of how many neurons there are or how they're wired, so I expect that correctly emulating a nematode brain would only happen when we're quite close to emulating larger brains.

If the "complicated wiring" problem were the biggest hurdle, then you'd expect a long gap between emulating a nematode and emulating a human.

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