Let's be clear on at least one thing: they're building a simulation of the physical brain hardware. At least according to the article, there is no goal to simulate human consciousness.
A grown, working brain has been shaped by its input – changing the connections, the chemical balances, and other things we don't yet understand (but someday will). So when talking about a 'simulated brain', I think an embedded history of meaningful input, and continued interaction, is implied.
(Also, creating such a brain and then depriving it input might be torture, as with extended sensory deprivation in natural humans.)
I'm not saying it's impossible, but I am saying that you're taking a rather unscientific leap of faith.
I take issue with your assumption that there is some 'clear' distinction between the goal of '"building a simulation of the physical brain hardware" and the 'goal to simulate human consciousness". A distinction, if any, between those goals is anything but clear.
Further, the people most interested in 'physical simulation' also tend to be 'materialists' who think a suitably precise simulation can reproduce everything interesting about a human mind, including 'consciousness'. Without any personal 'leap of faith' as to whether that's true or false, this is an interesting and deeply murky question.
What about a sadly-not-too-hypothetical case of a child being raised in total isolation? Do they not possess consciousness?
> A large portion of our instincts are hard-wired.
We are what we are because our brains are hard-wired to adapt to typical environments. Full isolation would cause substantial aberrations -- that's exactly what you observe in real-world cases.
That is unless you are not a materialist, i.e., you believe that the mind is the product of some non-physical plane that somehow interacts with the physical world through the brain...
Is there any good arguments in favor of materialism? It's always struck me as a completely ridiculous position.
First of all, almost by definition, we can't really look at anything that's not materialistic; it's just a limitation.
For instance, there's no way to prove or disprove the existence of awareness in something or someone. If a robot walks like humans, looks like humans, is it a human? Does it experience anything? Do insects have consciousness? Do animals have it? Does anyone besides me have it? Who says even I have it? How can we test for it? Can we even define it? Who says that my computer mouse doesn't have it?
Second, I believe that we only know a tiny fraction of what's out there, or of what's there to know, so it's hard to say that there's nothing beyond matter. And who even says that everything we looked at is materialistic? Is time materialistic? Can it be made from something else?
Third, there's nothing materialistic about awareness. It's not as though we can say "it's like a computer program, just more complicated". We can't say that emotions are like variables that control the behavior of a program.
Do you know any reason why awareness might be materialistic?
So far, we've found exactly zero processes which we can observe (i.e., which affect the physical world) that can't be explained by physics.
Yes, there are some processes which we can observe which we can't YET explain very well. But when I am ignorant about a phenomenon, that is a fact about my state of mind, not about the phenomenon.
It seems likely that consciousness / awareness is just another physical phenomenon that we haven't explained yet. Here are some other examples of "mysterious phenomena" which it took a while to explain: fire, why the sun rises and sets, the discrepancy of Mercury's orbit (explained by relativity), discrete energy levels (explained by quantum physics).
Now, what makes you think physics will never explain consciousness?
I think I answered your first and third. To answer your second question, both the theory of relativity and quantum physics dissolve time (it's just a variable), as I understand them.
Decision-making can be completely robotic. Will, or Free Will, and whether or not it's compatible with materialism, is another controversial problem. Awareness, is what you feel subjectively. I can build a robot that senses colors, and when it sees the color red, it screams "OMG! RED!!!". This robot however has no awareness what so ever. What you described is exactly the kind of thing that might happen with robots, but it has no relationship to the awareness/consciousness aspect of the problem.
> Here are some other examples of "mysterious phenomena" which it took a while to explain (...)
This is a weak argument, and really it's irrelevant to the mind-body problem. All things you described are physical states to begin with.
A more approximation of the mind-body problem might be some one saying something like this: fire is not the same sort of thing that water is. I can hold water in my hand, but can I hold fire in my hand? I can store water for later use; can I store fire for later use? Now this sort of argument could be right or wrong, but it seems like a plausible thing to say. It's not saying fire is some kind of a super-natural miracle.
I think we both agree that we don't know what awareness is; the difference is I'm saying I know what it's not: and I know it will not arise from a computer simulating a brain.
Overall I think consciousness is an interesting topic that's worth reading about. I don't mind someone being a materialist, but it doesn't seem like you appreciate the difficulty of the problem.
It's theoretically possible that one day we'll know more about awareness, and I don't know what that knowledge would be like, but I'm pretty sure it's not something that arises from running some sort of a computer program. And I can also say with about 85% certainty that it's not reducible to any of the physics we know about today.
It's also theoretically possible that we'll never know what awareness is. It might seem outrageous and somewhat a "forbidden" idea to speak, but it's a possibility. Either due to time restraints (the universe dying before we get there) or conceptual restraints (as in, maybe our minds are just not smart enough to figure it out). Unlike most other things in nature, I don't know of anyone who even came up with a hypothesis of what awareness might be. For instance, atoms where theoretically discussed long before science proved they existed, and many different models were advanced to explain and account for planetary motions (many of them were wrong, but you get the idea). But awareness, doesn't even have any model that might account for it; not even a wrong one. That's a strong indication that it might be something outside our comprehension; not much unlike the nature of space and time.
See David Chalmers, among others.
EDIT: Really? Downvotes?
http://www.diss.sense.uni-konstanz.de/virtualitaet/delanda.h...
Science can't prove that there aren't any supernatural requirements for a sentient mind.
However, Science has proven that most of our intuitions about our own cognition are wrong.
Since intuition is the only evidence we have that subjectivity and qualia can arise from mysterious nonphysical processes but not computational, physical processes, Occam's Razor demands that we accept the explanation which accords with proven laws of physics.
It has a name: dualism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dualism_%28philosophy_of_mind%2...
Why are you implying that it's stupid?
EDIT:
Also note, you don't have to be a dualist to think that consciousness is not a property of a brain model. You could be a materialist and think that consciousness can be given to a machine, but still think it's separate from the turing-machine model of computation. That is, hold the view that consciousness is not a property that can emerge from a computation process; but rather some other different kind of process that's not yet known.
edit, s/emergency/emergent
Can you imagine how weird it would be if we backed into proving a universal consciousness existed in a different dimension and an exactly modelled/simulated brain didn't get to participate because it wasn't given a 'soul' by that consciousness?
Or the flip side where our brain model does develop sentience as an emergent property and the spiritualists have to deal with the possibility that they are just animated meat.
Or the creepy side where you take an imprint of your current brain state, impart it on the model and suddenly the model thinks it's you?
Science fiction has explored these concepts for a while. I know that personally I'd like there to be something "special" about consciousness and/or sentience but I am rational enough to know that this isn't backed up by solid reasoning, just wishful thinking.
In a highly networked, highly automated, world the idea that consciousness could simply 'emerge' from a sufficiently constructed system is deeply disturbing.
While much of what the film "Eagle Eye" speculated on with a sentient computer connected to everything seemed pretty bogus, the ability to disrupt and render unusable a wide range of systems simulataneously by a disgruntled AI is not an experience I would anticipate as being 'pleasant.'
It's not the first time someone attempts to replicate a "whole brain"; somebody used Izhikevich simplified models to simulate a cat brain (Markram had a very public spat with them) a few years ago. Those results were not very revealing - they did notice some brain waves but nothing like an indifferent catish thought.
That said, this project needs to go forward. It's the LHC of computational neuroscience. It can be completed much faster, though, all we need is computers, lots of them.