I was never satisfied with their explanation for why they had to start with the human brain rather than the brain of a MUCH simpler organism like C. elegans.
About two decades ago, I heard Rod Brooks talking about building a human brain. He'd done some good artificial insects and was big on purely reactive AI. At the time, he was promoting Cog [2], as a way to get to human-level AI in one big jump. I asked "You've done an insect brain. Why not try to get to a mouse brain next?". He replied "I don't want to go down in history as the man who created the world's greatest robot mouse." 20 years later, Brooks doesn't even have mouse-level AI, although he does have a robotic vacuum cleaner company.
A mouse has about 1g of brain mass; a human has about 1000g. But they're both mammals, with about 90% similar DNA. If someone could simulate a mouse at the neural simulation level, that would be real progress. Once you have a mouse simulation, human level is a scaling problem.
The Human Brain Project blew through a billion dollars in funding while OpenWorm is a volunteer effort. That's the real problem.
[1] http://www.openworm.org/ [2] http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/humanoid-robotics-group/cog/c...
It would appear that there is some emergent phenomenon (consciousness) somewhere on the scale between mouse and human. This phenomenon may be triggered by a surplus of "computational resource" with respect to "body to be controlled", which I personally think is unlikely. It may be triggered by a matching of computational resource to controllable complexity, i.e. the hands and fingers -> tool use, who knows?
There is so much we don't know about cognition. For example, are Whales/Dolphins self aware/conscious? They have the requisite brain mass, if it's simply a scaling problem.
I am genuinely interested in your perspective.
I adore my dog. He shows a wide range of what I believe to be genuine emotions. But I do not think he is self-aware, and by self-aware I mean able to contemplate his own existence (and therefor lack of existence). For that matter, I don't think he ever contemplates the lack of my existence (despite feeling it when I am not around, so I am told).
I would expect him to exhibit less reliably to stimuli. His behaviour is closer to a large switch(stimulus){} statement than the emergent behavior of human reaction to situations and stimuli.
One example: he was stepped on when a small puppy by a very old man from that point on and to this day, many years later, he has a major dislike of old people that he does not know well.
If the same thing happened to a child, I would expect the child to slowly, over time, question why they disliked all other old people when the old people they do know are kind to them. This would result in a change of behavior without someone explicitly teaching them.
The only thing that makes humans truly unique is the fact that we can store, retrieve, and process information outside our bodies. While we can question our responses, as in your example, we don't - unless we live in a social environment that suggests we should. (Not all environments do. Some actively discourage it.)
Everything else we do - solving puzzles, counting, acting socially, teaching in person, showing emotions - appears in simple forms in at least some other animals.
Going up a level, humans are actually an extremely large, planet-spanning colony organism with very limited collective consciousness. We act more like an aimless flock of birds or mound-building insects than a collective with awareness of its own planetary situation.
“Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly; Man got to sit and wonder 'why, why, why?' Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land; Man got to tell himself he understand.”
Other animals then present more consciousness, like chimps, dolphins, elephants etc and would place somewhere between the mouse and humans.
I'm not saying dogs sit around quoting Kant, but they're highly social animals and I find it hard to believe they don't have some internal representation of themselves.
furthermore there is a reason why in Buddhism this intellectual thinking and questioning is considered unessential to being.
Sure seems like the EU has it's fair share of incompetent technocrats if you can throw $1 billion at some nonsense any handful of PhDs in the field could have told you was nonsense if you'd just picked up a phone.
Sounds like most VC firms nowadays.
The problem with groundbreaking work is often that any handful of experts can tell you that it's nonsense. E.g., look at the reception that Barry Marshall got when he proposed that stomach ulcers were caused by bacterial infection. [1] All the experts "knew" it was caused by "stress, spicy foods, and too much acid" in the stomach. Eventually he got the Nobel prize, but you have to wonder what else we're missing out because whoever discovered it wasn't as dogged or as lucky as Marshall.
[1] http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/printmember/mar1int-1
So what to do with a billion Euros? Obviously, we shouldn't put everything in a single pot. Particularly not in one crazy pot. That's why people complain about Markram's ego trip and enabling politicians. If you got a certain amount of funding, diversify: fund a couple of cranks, sure, but 90% should go toward what's often called normal science where small steps add up to comparatively predictable progress.
(In Markram's/the HBP's defence: Ultimately, the project will yield a metric tonne of normal science, especially in terms of infrastructure etc. However, everybody will be disappointed at the end...)
Anybody responsible for science funding should be keenly aware that the machine they steer is much better at responding to obvious failures like Markram than silent failures that ulcer treatment was for decades.
Now maybe there is some extra physics that comes into play at scale (like some quantum-computery effect with human-size brains that induces conciousness) but maybe this would be detectable as small discrepancies in the small simulations (especially as they progress in size to e.g. mice).
For even the simplest mammals (let alone humans), surely the cost is >> X. So might it be a decent idea to give it a shot with C. elegans first? Because if we fail with C. elegans, we're almost guaranteed to fail with a mammal. And it's not immediately clear to me that we currently have the ability to do it successfully even for C. elegans.
I am definitely not a neuroscientist so maybe I am misguided. I'm also not wedded to C. elegans as being the ideal prototype, and I doubt anyone is (except possibly the people already studying C. elegans). But the first attempt should definitely be on something as simple as possible.
There's also http://www.openworm.org/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Dalrymple_(computer_sc...