If that simulation would be conscious, wouldn't it be just as bad (if not worse) as performing experiments on animals ? and if it wouldn't be conscious, wouldn't it conflict with the beliefs of most scientists on the origin of consciousness ?
> Modern computing technology has brought these goals within sight.<p>Haven't we been saying this since we had vacuum tubes and early chess programs?<p>We thought machine vision would be easy and that turned out pretty tricky.<p>> ICT is ready to give us a completely new understanding of the brain and its diseases; understanding the brain will lead inevitably to radical innovation in computing.<p>I can't help feeling this is backwards. As we learn more about the brain our simulations become better. But I'd be really interested in any computer simulations that have improved our understanding of brain stuff.
This sounds really interesting - I would definitely apply to work on such a thing. But I am scared away by the science career path. So optimistically you get to develop some neuro simulation code, maybe get a couple of papers out it. What do you do then? Who in industry hires people who worked on this kind of stuff? I'm not trying to be pessimistic - if I figure out a good idea then I'll go for it and apply.
<i>At what resolution would you have to simulate the brain to get "human like" properties like consciousness? (quantum/subatomic? molecular? cellular? biologically inspired mathematical abstractions of neurons? simplest computationally useful mathematical abstractions of neurons - like current artificial nns?)</i> - this is the question I find most interesting ..instead of unrealistic goals like predicting drug effects in-silico.<p>It would be helpful to run simulation algorithms with "tunable resolution" on supercomputers to see at what level the interesting properties appear. Though I have better hopes of seeing an answer to this question from the guys doing AI research than from a medical mega-research project or a collaboration... This is <i>very different from the human genome project</i> (where people alredy knew what information they needed and they put together resources to obtain it faster) that they try to imitate in the PR vids...
Why start with the human brain? Why not do something simpler first? We can't even simulate the <i>C. elegans</i> brain yet <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/88g/whole_brain_emulation_looking_at_progress_on_c/" rel="nofollow">http://lesswrong.com/lw/88g/whole_brain_emulation_looking_at...</a> and that is ridiculously simpler than the human brain.
The project received one billion euros funding today <a href="http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/programme/fet/flagship/doc/press28jan13-01_en.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/programme/fet/flagship/doc/p...</a>
It'd be interesting if that page listed jobs at partner organisations.. I'd love to be involved with a project like that, but it's difficult to get involved.
It seems they gave another billion to graphene research:<p><a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/01/28/us-eu-science-idUSBRE90R0HI20130128" rel="nofollow">http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/01/28/us-eu-science-idUS...</a>
I don't <i>necessarily</i> doubt the scientists' competence here, but they're just playing the fundraising game when they talk about "disease" in this context.