> We will probably have to deal with this someday.
This is quite an extraordinary claim with no extraordinary evidence.
As said elsewhere in this thread we can at this moment not even simulate single atoms.
I see no reason to believe at all that we will ever be able to simulate a human brain.
Unless you want my simulation here:
if ishungry:
Eat(FindFood())
else:
PracticeFingersnowboarding()Why do you assume that we need to exactly simulate single atoms to simulate the brain? We can also do CFD to simulate fluid flows without simulating every atom in the fluid. Maybe that's possible with the brain, too.
Yes, and CFD simulations notoriously break down the moment you scale them up. Look at weather forecasting! Extremely complex models that push the boundaries of modern computational capabilities, and yet we are barely able to forecast weather a day or two out. Sure, we can make vague forecasts over large areas, but errors compound and we lose both granularity and accuracy.
And that's with us having a pretty solid understanding of how fluid dynamics works. We have an extremely poor understanding of how a brain works, doubly something of the complexity of the human brain. We are fundamentally unable to study it during operation, because we don't have a non-invasive high resolution access to it's internals. We are basically butchers sticking electrodes into living tissue.
The article itself proposes that we may - barely - be able to study the workings of the brain of an extremely simple organism.
A rocketry analogy would be Archimedes dreaming about people traveling to the stars.
I would say the issue with predicting weather by simulating flows isn’t mainly that we can’t simulate single atoms, it’s that we just don’t have enough input data. If I would magically give meteorologists a method to instantly simulate every atom of the atmosphere, they still couldn’t exactly tell me what the weather would be like in a week. It’s too dependent on small input changes for that.
> A rocketry analogy would be Archimedes dreaming about people traveling to the stars.
What’s wrong with that? The claim was „some day“, not in 5 years. It could take a few centuries or longer.
It could also be impossible, which for some reason people hardly consider.
It might be. But is there any hint that there are things we can absolutely not simulate?
I think there’s a good chance we won’t be able to simulate a exact propagation of a brain into the future due to quantum effects and unknowable starting states, but I don’t see how simulating one possible future could be impossible.
We have some hints to be skeptical on the prospect, I would say.
Like the fact we can't even explain an everyday phenomena all humans experience like consciousness. If you don't understand a common phenomena that (supposedly) occurs in the brain, you have a fundamental lack of knowledge on how the brain itself works, and thus simulating it would not be a thing possible to do.
Another hint is the fact that we can't currently even simulate a single cell because of how much complex they are, and the most advanced neuron models (like hodgkin-huxley) are still gross simplifications of how we think a real neuron works. We don't have any proof that this is a possible thing, it is something people believe it is the case, but pretty much could be a dead-end.
Other is that we don't have a way to reliably know the state of the alive brains without modifying them, so reproducing one with fidelity appears to be very hard or maybe even impossible.
And so on.