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Comment by zionic | Hacker News Reader

How far off do you think we are from simulating an entire human on a protein level in accelerated time?

Imagine a world where a drug concept could be simulated on an entire human model in parallel cradle to grave 1000x faster than normal. What level of compute is necessary to pull that off?

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We're still struggling to accurately simulate a C. elegans. We're a little way off simulating 50+ kg of conscious organism.

Not to mention the ethical implications. If we're happy to run "cradle to the grave" tests on a human simulated to that level of accuracy, why not just run them on actual humans bred for research? We can do that right now, far cheaper.

...of course, maybe that just means that we're the disease model...

Ethics aside, if we could simulate a whole brain, then we could simulate billions of brains and try all sorts of things, something we wouldn't be able to do with physical humans. At least not without being labelled as mass murderers and turning into a bird.

This made me laugh. If you put ethics aside, couldn't you just do all those things on physical humans?

I have a hard time believing we'd find it ethical (at least in the long term) to experiment on a simulated brain. If it were accurate enough, might it be considered a person?

Why wouldn't an accurately simulated brain be considered a person?

> Why wouldn't an accurately simulated brain be considered a person?

Ah, and here we come to the crux of the matter! What makes a person a person? Is it merely electrochemical activity in a certain type of tissue?

It's important to recognize that this question comes to the border that marks the end of the territory of biology and the beginning of the territory of philosophy. It's possible to charge right through this border (as Stephen Hawking did in his book The Grand Design) but there is a peril in doing so.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/may/27/physic...

> The attempt to fit consciousness into the material world, > usually by identifying it with activity in the brain, has failed dismally, > if only because there is no way of accounting for the fact that certain nerve impulses > are supposed to be conscious (of themselves or of the world) > while the overwhelming majority (physically essentially the same) are not.

Is he charging through the border, or gently rebuking the concept of a border?

OK this is still bugging me a day later... I'm missing the reference with the bird bit. What's that from?

Decades at least, we don't even have close to a complete list of the proteins in our bodies which would be needed to start thinking avout simulating them.

500+ years? Last I looked into what some major players in computational neuroscience were doing simulating highly accurate neurons they were doing on the order of maybe thousands of neurons. It’s been a few years so maybe they can simulate 100k today. The human brain has 100billion neurons. And that’s just part of a system. I don’t know how many other cells you’d need to simulate to model just the space between your ears. And I don’t think we’re even talking at the protein level yet of simulations. Proteins are notoriously difficult to simulate. If bitcoin had managed to use protein folding as it’s proof of work I’m not sure we’d even be able to fill the current demand for research let alone simulating an entire human. I don’t think I can fathom the amount of compute we’re talking about to simulate a human at the drug interaction level to any real degree of accuracy.

That seems overly pessimistic to me, in the last hundred years we've gone from basically no understanding on a molecular level of the human body to a decent understanding of much of the chemistry of the body, it seems like the next hundred years could conceivably advance to the level where we have a good understanding of even the smallest interactions.

If you are willing to bend some ethics, brain organoids and other similar organ-on-chip solutions are quite promising. Though it is important to note that scaled down brains may not necessarily express the same behavior vis-a-vis a full sized human cortex.

Well, if they did, you could never power them down...

I did say if you are willing to bend some ethics.

we can’t simulate a single protein long enough to determine how it folds, even with a supercomputer. we’re so many orders of magnitude away from such a thing it’s basically unthinkable.

Very, very far. There are 10^27 atoms in a human body. Even if you go down to individual proteins, that saves you maybe 4-5 orders of magnitude. That's about a zettabyte of data just to describe initial conditions.

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