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Comment by dsiroker | Hacker News Reader

I’ve posed this claim to dozens of neuroscientists. If you consider the connectome just the static connections then you might be right. If you include the dynamics of the brain (the biochemical processes) as part of the connectome then most neuroscientists would agree that is sufficient to produce the emergent property of mind. The honest answer is we don’t know yet. That said, it’s likely not necessary to model every atom’s interaction with one another so there must be a level of abstraction sufficient enough to emulate a mind. Our foundation is trying to identify what is the minimal level of abstraction necessary to emulate a mind.

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In support of the requirement for high-fidelity (atom-for-atom) modeling is the notion that an evolved computer would converge toward behaviors that supervene on specifics of the host environment. If porting a binary to another CPU architecture is tough, how easy will it be to port a mind to a simulated simple physics? How many edge cases will it have to get right to even run at all? If brains are hacks designed over millions of generations to surf overlapping fitness functions, it makes sense they'd find implementation (real physics) dependent optimizations that compound in ways which fall apart in toy physics. That's not to say we can't add cool peripherals.

ps even with atom-for-atom modeling, how do you know the behavior doesn't depend on relations which are not computable? If physics ranges over the reals, some of those edge cases might be hard to find with a simulator.

> If porting a binary to another CPU architecture is tough, how easy will it be to port a mind to a simulated simple physics?

It will be very difficult, but we shouldn’t underestimate what is possible decades from now. As an analogy, consider when the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) came out in the 1980s. Did anyone ever imagine it could be fully emulated in JavaScript in a browser [1]? Certainly not since those technologies hadn’t been invented yet.

[1] https://jsnes.org/

What's JavaScript? What's a browser?

I can hit myself in the head and I don't lose my train of thought, instantly lose consciousness, or die. If consciousness relied on the precise positions of individual atoms (as far as that makes sense with moving particles) it would be way more fragile than we've observed it to be. The fact that your brain is resilient to being knocked around a bit is evidence towards the underlying mind being at least slightly higher level than where strong quantum effects live and also fairly redundant.

I agree, but I think there is a case to be made that there is important state separate from just which cells connect to which and how strongly, but is also more coarse grained than single atoms floating around.

The cytoskeleton may be found out to have a role to play. The number and locations of ion pumps. Or epigenetic changes in clusters of brain cells.

If you hit your head hard enough all those things will happen though.

On the other hand, the brain is famously warm and wet. There's a limit to how much local state the brain can practically use to compute, given how messy it is.

>If physics ranges over the reals

I thought this was ruled out by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bekenstein_bound

That's my understanding as well. Quantum states encode finite information (despite their dynamics lying on the reals; the practical consequence is just that state transitions and information flow are smooth).

The formal discussion around this is largely centered on the Church-Turing thesis:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church%E2%80%93Turing_thesis

Essentially stating (in a certain interpretation) that any physical process can be simulated by a Turing machine (with no mention of efficiency). This seems to be the case, although I'm not sure we have a convincing proof from quantum field theory yet (note that quantum process can be simulated in classical Turing machines, although with an exponential cost).

Hopefully the brain doesn't rely on undefined behavior.

What if we find that the gut, which has 100 million nerve cells, also plays a part in the emergent property of mind?

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/09/your-gut-directly-co...

"In a petri dish, enteroendocrine cells reached out to vagal neurons and formed synaptic connections with each other. The cells even gushed out glutamate, a neurotransmitter involved in smell and taste, which the vagal neurons picked up on within 100 milliseconds—faster than an eyeblink."

That is one reason why I was very careful to name this the Mind Emulation Foundation and not the Brain Emulation Foundation. I also use the word 'body' instead of 'brain' throughout and define a connectome as: the comprehensive network of neural connections in your brain and nervous system.

People who have large parts of their gut removed surgically don't lose their mind.

If that were true, then quadriplegics would have cognitive issues, as would those who have their vagus nerve severed. Those people don't suffer from impaired cognition or drastic personality changes, so we can be sure that the nerves in the gut are not important for brain emulation.

Also human brains have an average of 86 billion neurons, so emulating an extra 100 million cells (0.1%) would be trivial in comparison.

It’s nice to see someone has consciousness all figured out.

But seriously, do you know of any studies that show no changes to mental state or capacity or personality or memory or any of the other things that compose “the mind” in such people?

I can’t believe anyone has done such studies yet. And just because you don’t see changes in such people, does not mean there haven’t been minuscule but measurable changes.

I feel like it just isn't that interesting if there are "miniscule but measureable changes" beyond a platonic ideal of self. Removing my minor back pain, or if I stopped drinking coffee, or a hundred other things would have larger-than-minuscule change on my personality but it's still "me".

Good point :)

86 billion neurons and ~1 trillion other cells, which interact with those neurons in non-trivial ways.

Quadriplegics do have altered cognitive function.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2633768/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6387693/

"once you have a comprehensive human connectome, there is still the challenge of emulating it digitally"

What would you do if Christof Koch is right and consciousness can not be computed?

His hypothesis if I understand it correctly, consciousness is the core part of existence so you would need to bring hardware into the world that not only is able to simulate the whole reality but to exist in it. Like property of physical reality and composition. That dude is a physicist believing in one single Universe, which probably also applies to most neuroscientists.

I'm not completely alien to the thought that someday we will get a digital companion that would be able to build a simulation of you in silico, but that simulation wouldn't be you.

This foundation sounds like complete science fiction, MRI really? We already have destructive approach in some countries - it's called euthanasia.

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