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We can't even model most two-element chemical systems using QM as the state space just becomes too complex.

Having a model does not mean you can necessarily run the computations to sufficient accuracy to make good predictions. Even with something as well-understood as gravity, N-body problems are still quite difficult and calculations must be numerically approximated. This method works fine for most systems but diverges rapidly if a chaotic perturbation is present.

And intelligence seems to be specifically driven by chaotic processes, built to amplify small signals until they cascade.

A few different photons impinging on an eye can completely change the state of the brain a few seconds later.

I have noticed that specifics scents have a pretty huge impact on the state of mind; memories and feeling come almost like an overwhelming flood.

This is because the sense of smell bypasses the thalamus (router for all other senses) and is located deep in the lymbic system, very close to the hippocampus and amygdala which process memories.

Well, the OpenWorm project [1] estimates to be about 20-30% into simulating the 302 neurons and 95 muscle cells of Caenorhabditis elegans. The human brain has over 86000000000 neurons (about 300 million times more than the worm). I'd say we're about 0% into simulating (thus understanding) that. Mind you previous generation computers (32-bit) couldn't even count that high.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenWorm

An idle thought... are there any professional ethics standards that control treatment of the Caenorhabditis elegans worm, like there are higher animals? Or (I expect) is it considered simple enough that concerns of animal cruelty don't apply?

I wonder, because if there were, such standards should apply to the simulated copy of the worm's mind, as well.

Looking this up - apparently in most jurisdictions animal welfare/ethics standards only apply to vertebrates and cephalopods. If it's an invertebrate and isn't in the smarter category of squids and octopodes and the like, it's open season.

Ummmm how did arthropods get left out?

Relevant qntm.org short story about "MMAcevedo, also known as Miguel, [...] the earliest executable image of a human brain": https://qntm.org/lena

"should apply"

It depends on whether the simulation itself is conscious, which is an open question in the philosophy of mind (is our wetware the only feasible substrate?) with much debate. If the answer is no, it's therefore not capable of suffering and not worthy of ethical concern, but as of yet we don't know the answer. We may of course wish to assume that it is conscious, just for the sake of risk aversion.

yeah, while i personally suspect that a high enough fidelity simulation would be comparably conscious, and i think we should certainly err on the side assuming that's the case from an ethical perspective, i do fully agree it's still an open question.

I've thought a lot about the morality of potential openworm simulations. How tiny it is and close to being working has made me wonder about some absurd thought experiments.

Imagine a worm hell webpage that had a full neural simulation of the worm with its pain receptors all firing constantly. Would it be immoral to open that page and leave it running? Imagine instead of getting rickrolled by a link, you get wormhelled by a link and cursed with the knowledge your computer just instantiated a worm spirit to hurt it. What if someone made a webpage that had that secretly embedded in the background?

(What about the opposite: what if you had a worm heaven simulation in a webpage? Are you doing anything good by leaving that running for a while and then closing it? Does it make a difference if there's persistence or not?)

Imagine if you placed the worm hell or heaven simulation in a smart contract on a blockchain and made transactions to execute it. The simulation would be executed by every node in the network that verifies the transaction, and it would be executed again by anyone that verifies the blockchain any time in the future.

Certain compressed file and video formats contain instructions for computing the decompressed results. Imagine encoding the worm hell or heaven simulation in a short video file, so that merely viewing the video file causes the computation to happen on your device.

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Well this is pretty moot anyway while we're talking about worms specifically, but at some point it might be doable with higher animals like mice. Or humans. Substitute different animals for worm in any of this.

My current thinking is that computations that don't use their results to meaningfully affect the outside world are meaningless. Nobody who opens the webpage that has it secretly in the background without realizing it is committing any sin. Creating or deliberately accessing the worm hell webpage (without entangling the results meaningfully with the external world) is bad only to the degree that it normalizes the idea in your mind of hurting beings that are fully entangled in our world.

If you simulated a worm hell, and then physically instantiated the resulting worm in real life (say by writing its neural data into the neurons of a real live worm), then you should be considered as having done the moral equivalent of torturing a live worm. If you run worm hell and then give the resulting worm full internet access, then you've done the moral equivalent of torturing a live worm to the degree that worms can live, socialize, and empathize online (which is not much in the case of worms, but is significant for humans).

If you run worm hell and then persist the result, it's bad in the sense that there's continuous potential for the situation to become one of the above. Sharing the results of a worm hell simulation is more bad because it increases the potential for the above.

I don't think there's any moral difference between running two identical deterministic worm hell simulations and saving the results, vs running the worm hell simulation once and saving the results and then copying the results file once. (I don't think copying the results file makes much difference except as much as it increases the risk of sharing the results.)

I think you should consider trying to write sci-fi short stories to play with your ideas.

What does it mean to "understand something"? Why don't we consider "big lump of axons and dendrons" to be an understanding?

To me at least, understanding is quantified by the difference between the number of bits in your model and the number of bits in the thing you want to understand. "True understanding" is when you've gotten the model down to a small enough size that you can fit it in your head. But there is no a priori law that everything interesting in the universe should be able to fit in your head. We've just been lucky so far. Maybe we will keep making progress understanding how consciousness works, but never shrink it down far enough that we are satisfied with the "explanation".

I agree. This is the only definition that matters. People are confused because the language we use to talk about this stuff is full of assumptions and misunderstandings that leak into their logical reasoning. Imho, compression is a perfectly adequate description of intelligence. This is why GPT-3 does so well, intelligence is an emergent property of predictive power. Marcus Hutter really needs to rejig his compression challenge to allow much larger models, it could really be relevant to judging progress.

IANA neuroscientist but I suspect it's a measurement problem. The structures of the brain are microscopic and enormous in scale, so how do you capture all that data and make sense of it?

Not to mention, the minute you open up the brain the situation is entirely different than when things were functioning in state. It's like figuring out how a functional car works by analyzing a bag of seemingly random parts and loose scrap metal. Biology is difficult science.

It could just be that it requires scale. Some science projects just can't be done by small research teams.

You mention our understanding of physics. That understanding only got pinned down and refined by spending billions on large research projects.

The only brain related research project I know off that has a budget even close to what we routinely spend on physics is the Human Brain Project [1], and that only started in 2013. It's not expected to be complete until 2023 and even then it is only laying the foundation for more ambitious projects to build on.

[1] https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/en/

>Surely we can track any and every physical mechanism in the brain "accessible" to consciousness

To add to other replies, there's a gap in our ability to measure these mechanisms.

We can see the big picture with bad resolution (e.g. lesion studies, EEG, fMRI), or take tiny keyhole peeps with somewhat better resolution (e.g. single-neuron recording or MEAs). Moreover, each of these methods gives us just a narrow kind of indirect data (e.g. blood oxygenation, or electric activity at few synapses) out of a rich functional context.

They are amazing but perhaps still far too limited to inform truly detailed models and understanding.

Right, we would have to measure perhaps most of the neurons in a living brain at the same time to understand what is going on.

Building an artificial brain made of billions of artificial neurons and of synapses is a worthy goal but it could be like building a working computer. Having a computer does not tell us what is running in the computer. Software is the ghost in the machine. We don't want to simulate neurons and synapses, we want to simulate the programs that are running in actual brains. But what are they? And how could we find that out?

Because what those particles in a supercollider are doing is way simpler than what a neuron is doing, let alone a brain full of neurons. It's like the way you can simulate and predict billiard balls but if you take the billiard table apart and build a Turing machine out of the parts, suddenly all bets are off.

I believe we'll finally figure out some 'Maxwell's Equations of Consciousness', stare at them for a while, then collectively say 'ah crap' because seeing the maths doesn't equate to understanding what it means.

We can’t ethically do the tests needed.