... if one is able to emulate a human brain in sufficient faithfulness to be experimentally useful, does that not also imply one has created an emergent human mind that is due the same ethical protections as a biological human?
I very much share your intuition here - that at a certain degree of sophistication brain emulation research needs to deal with exactly these sorts of questions. Encouraging that there is already an existing field of neuro ethics that starts to take this line of thinking seriously.
Excellent analysis, it's fascinating to see how your perspective on brain emulation has evolved since you first discussed the challenges, truely highlighting the rapid progress in the field.
Emulating any mammalian model to the specifications outlined in this tome is a pipe dream. It's no wonder it's published under the guise of an homage to Isaac Asimov, a figurative grandmother cell in the pantheon of science fiction.
The second image in the "Computational Neuroscience" section is mislabeled. The image is showing compute requirements for inference, not training as the caption says.
Not a dumb question. One of many big unkowns. Right now basically no computational brain models simulate glia cells. And the data we have is even more scarce than the data on neurons. I wouldn't be surprised if future brain models also will incorporate glial data to account for their modulation.
They make up 50 percent of the cells in the brain and there are different kinds, each of which may or may not be directly involved in cognition. It seems like a major oversight unless I'm missing something.
... if one is able to emulate a human brain in sufficient faithfulness to be experimentally useful, does that not also imply one has created an emergent human mind that is due the same ethical protections as a biological human?
I very much share your intuition here - that at a certain degree of sophistication brain emulation research needs to deal with exactly these sorts of questions. Encouraging that there is already an existing field of neuro ethics that starts to take this line of thinking seriously.
Excellent analysis, it's fascinating to see how your perspective on brain emulation has evolved since you first discussed the challenges, truely highlighting the rapid progress in the field.
Emulating any mammalian model to the specifications outlined in this tome is a pipe dream. It's no wonder it's published under the guise of an homage to Isaac Asimov, a figurative grandmother cell in the pantheon of science fiction.
The second image in the "Computational Neuroscience" section is mislabeled. The image is showing compute requirements for inference, not training as the caption says.
Thank you for flagging this. Updated!
Forgive the dumb question, but do glial cells complicate things at all?
Not a dumb question. One of many big unkowns. Right now basically no computational brain models simulate glia cells. And the data we have is even more scarce than the data on neurons. I wouldn't be surprised if future brain models also will incorporate glial data to account for their modulation.
They make up 50 percent of the cells in the brain and there are different kinds, each of which may or may not be directly involved in cognition. It seems like a major oversight unless I'm missing something.