

The Brain in the Machine: IBM's Compass - drnewman
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/11/ibm-brain-simulation-compass.html

======
mercuryrising
We're just starting to unlock the secrets of the brain, but for all those
hoping that this is the one that does it, I will take the risk of saying "It
won't happen this time".

We don't know what the information transfer mechanisms are in the brain, nor
do we know how information is stored. We do know that action potentials are
the observable and recordable signs of potential brain activity, but that's
all we can see. If you have something as complicated [1] as the brain,
assuming that one of the first things we found about the brain is the way it
lets me think of art, reason about the past, and adapt to my surroundings is
plain stupid.

Since we discovered neurons [2], there have been monumental changes in how we
understand the world. But this still isn't enough. We cannot explain the
things that happen in brains with our current understanding of physics. Minds
are more connected than one may initially assume.

I'll tell you a story about why I know this to be true, and what it means for
our attempts to recreate a brain.

For as long as I can remember, I have been falling asleep with some sort of
music or movie playing.

Whenever I would drift off to sleep, I would hear this noise in the
background. It let me sleep easily, giving me something to focus on. When I
went to Norway this past summer, I didn't have anything to listen to, only my
mind.

I noticed when I was about to fall asleep, something weird would happen. I
would hear things that weren't thoughts I had, they were thoughts in other
languages. They sounded like what I was hearing in Norway, but they could have
been Chinese for all I know, but what I do know is that they were sounds I
never recognized, and they were in languages that weren't my own.

Whose thoughts were these, and why were they in my brain when I was falling
asleep? Weird things happen when we sleep, but before all contact from the
real world shuts off, the transition into sleep may be one of the most
important for figuring out what is really happening in our brains.

How would this information transfer boundaries between my brain and another
person's brain, or another region in space time? This would be easy to pass
off as misinterpreted noise, but this happened for many times while in Norway,
but when I got back home, it tapered off (I lost my peace of mind when I
returned home).

Our current understanding of physics is not advanced enough to allow us to
understand the brain. We have done cool things with technology, but I think we
are farther from understanding what is a person is in the true sense of the
question. It's interesting to think about the 'hard problems' that persist
over life times. Almost all the problems that we are solving today are not
'hard problems'. They are challenging, fulfilling, rewarding, and helpful in
the short term.

I once went for a long bike ride, and it had been a while so I was pretty
excited. I told my dad about my achievement. I said "Dad, I went for a 50 mile
bike ride today!". He said "Yeah, but did you get anywhere?".

We are solving problems, but the solutions are not advancing the human race.
We are riding around in a circle.

I'll stop now, and hopefully start a blog so I can put out my long winded
rants there.

[1] <http://www.cerebromente.org.br/n17/history/neurons2_i.htm>

~~~
Permit
>Whose thoughts were these, and why were they in my brain when I was falling
asleep? Weird things happen when we sleep, but before all contact from the
real world shuts off, the transition into sleep may be one of the most
important for figuring out what is really happening in our brains.

Why do you immediately assume they aren't your own thoughts? Surely you have
no problem simulating garbled language or your own garbled interpretation of
other languages in your mind right now, why couldn't this have been the case
when you were falling asleep? It seems strange to me to think that because of
some bizarre or out of character thoughts that the only answer would be
someone else's thoughts invading your mind.

~~~
mercuryrising
The thing that made these 'thoughts' different is that they felt real. I
experienced hearing something in another language, I wasn't just thinking
about it. This happens with music, and every once in a while I'll hear my
name. They aren't just thoughts, they are experiences.

I don't think someone was invading my mind, I think I was detuning my brain
and tuning into something else, a 'sea' of thought. I think they aren't my own
because I can't consciously think those thoughts, I cannot simulate what
happened just by thinking about it.

I think we have more control over the world than we give ourselves credit for.
It's easy to cast off stories that are not backed by fact, but what if this
was the divide? What if we just needed a little bit of faith to see something
that most people can't see? What does a kid see when they play in a box? They
see whatever they want to see, they are not tied down by what society deems as
real, they create reality for themselves.

For a while, I had a spurt of thinking about some new tech idea and seeing it
within a week of thinking about it. It was almost like I was forging the path
through the sea of unknown information around me. I don't have enough
experience in the world to determine whether or not my thinking had influence
on what happened, but it provides an interesting framework for some thought.
What if you could control the world, and you were the center of the 'relative
universe'? Quantum mechanics predicts that prior to the first consciousness
observed a wave function collapse, the world could have not existed, it was
merely a fuzzy combination of wave functions that never had definition. What
if this was happening every time I did something, interacted with something,
noticed something. What if, when I thought about something, it collapsed the
wave functions necessary to bring me that information? What if I controlled
the world, and whenever I reached in to grab information, the necessary wave
functions collapsed (regardless of where they had to). What if we could have
multiple layers of collapsing wave functions, so you can live your life, I can
live my life, and until we communicate, we lose the necessity of having the
same time or space clocks? What if the world reconciles the differences when
necessary, rather than all the time?

It's easy to get sidetracked when I'm thinking.

At what point do I call a thought my own? I'm not sure, I'm not even sure if
ideas are my own thoughts. My thoughts are the ones where I can follow the
train of logic that got me to where I am now. An idea is a lightning bolt. To
backtrack where an idea came from, generally all I get is a couple inputs, a
big jump in logic, and a conclusion. you can say what inputs were necessary,
but that doesn't always get you to the output. I call these 'prime ideas',
these are the good ones that cannot be assembled from combining (in some way,
shape, or form) previous ideas. Prime ideas are ones that don't feel like they
come from me, I wasn't thinking about anything, I was cleaning the kitchen
when a lightning bolt in idea space struck my brain. Those don't feel like
something I made, they feel like something that was given to me, like someone
saying "Here, look at this picture" and I see something cool in my brain.

~~~
robbiep
I get where you're coming from, but I firmly, although respectively, disagree.

 _> The thing that made these 'thoughts' different is that they felt real. I
experienced hearing something in another language,_

\- So do schizophrenics. That doesn't make their experiences any more
concrete.

 _> What if we just needed a little bit of faith to see something that most
people can't see? What does a kid see when they play in a box?_

\- Faith in things is important - probably intrinsic to our existence. It
gives us things to aim for, to believe in. Systems of rationalisation. But
believing something that is not possible will not make it so.

Kids are playing. Daydreaming. creating possibilities. You can do that when
you're grown up too. I daydream all the time. But that reality doesn't exist
outside of the story, the fantasy in the head of the creator. It could be
argued that the greatest inventors and innovators (not to mention story
tellers and artists) are able to mobilise their vision and dream into reality
through faith. But there are still lots of things that can't, won't, exist.

 _> For a while, I had a spurt of thinking about some new tech idea and seeing
it within a week of thinking about it_

\- This is a relatively well known phenomenon. -
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery> \- It has happened
throughout history. I have personally felt this a number of times - that I
have come up with an idea independently - and then you see the idea out in the
wild. On closer reflection I realise that I was more likely influenced by my
extensive readings and my day-dreaming to make links between existing
technologies, discoveries and inventions; formulate and write up an idea - but
these ideas are in the 'potential space' of possible ideas and concepts; and
someone was more on the cutting edge than me; and did it better and faster.

 _> What if you could control the world, and you were the center of the
'relative universe'?_

\- interesting, and i've had similar thoughts. Forever unprovable however; and
the idea of us each controlling a 'relative universe' I think on some level is
true - i.e. we can do amazing things if we just set our minds to them and rise
above apathy and entropy; but on another; we still exist as part of the
universe, which has universal rules.

we are the universe experiencing itself; there is so much we don't know;
keeping an open mind is important; so is dismissing things that are not the
truth; the hard part is filtering the wheat from the chaff.

------
adriand
This article, and the author's critique of Ray Kurzweil's latest book, which
was also on HN last week, makes me think about a powerful point made by David
Deutsch in his book "The Beginning of Infinity". He says (excuse the
paraphrasing) that explanation-less theories are useless and bad science.
Devoid of an explanation, data are meaningless and can be interpreted in
countless nonsensical ways.

When it comes to consciousness the problem is not that we haven't built a big
enough simulation with enough neurons, but rather that we lack an explanation
for consciousness and its associated complex phenomena, like qualia. When we
can explain consciousness, he suspects it will be easy to program. Conversely,
if you can't program it, you don't understand it.

~~~
thirdtruck
The notion of "qualia" confuses me.

Tracking down such a thing sounds like trying to find the essential "Tuxness"
of a given Linux installation.

If I install one kernel patch, does that make the system "less Linux-y"? What
if that patch was a bug fix by Torvalds himself? Would that have the opposite
effect?

I know the answer to the questions above: they're nonsense questions, so
answers don't even enter the equation.

We have identified specific modules of the brain that, among other things, let
us distinguish faces from mere shapes, friends from strangers (even when it
comes to the same individual), and language processing itself. Our own _sense
of self_ seems to reduce to a distinct, _toggle-able_ neurological phenomenon.

In short, the very idea of qualia reduces to just various artifacts of our
brain's multiple systems of abstraction.

------
6ren

      Simulating a brain using the same number of neurons is like simulating a body using
      the same number of atoms.
    

Also relevant, Chomsky vs Norvig, on AI
[http://www.tor.com/blogs/2011/06/norvig-vs-chomsky-and-
the-f...](http://www.tor.com/blogs/2011/06/norvig-vs-chomsky-and-the-fight-
for-the-future-of-ai)

Which boils down to "make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler".
Chomsky wants to understand what's happening. Norvig says it's too
complicated.

I think we can _usually_ carve off an aspect or layer of phenomena that - in
isolation - is simple enough to understand. But I don't see any guarantee that
this will necessarily be the case; models are possible that aren't
decomposable into simpler parts (because they must interact with everything
else, informationally). However (1) understanding is what we _seek_ in
Science; and (2) it's always been possible before - for whatever reason, the
universe _does_ seem to be decomposable hierarchically... at least, the bits
that we've understood, so far...

------
Claudus
How will the world change when you have hundreds of virtual human brains,
overclocked to think hundreds of times faster than a normal human?

Create the biggest MMO ever made, in a week?

~~~
tejaswiy
Brain uploads living in simulated universes are I think are our surest bet at
immortality. @cstross has a highly entertaining book called Accelerando which
deals with this. Check it out if you haven't yet already.

If you push is a bit, you can also branch the human brain at a certain point
in your life and merge back to master whenever you see fit, and you can
experience more than you ever could in a single life.

EDIT: I realize space is a big deal, but I only wish some organization working
with the funds that NASA has that can explore the human brain and
consciousness. This could initially lead to a variety of psychological hacks
coming out which could be used by marketers and ultimately a deeper
understanding of intelligence. Like OP said, if we could simulate a brain in a
computer, there's no reason we couldn't make it better. If we could make it
better, and this is pushing it even further, provide it with the right
"memories" as a starting point, you could have the equivalent of the greatest
minds of humanity living simultaneously. Think about what we could achieve
then ?

------
fragsworth
So many questions about the future.

Will there be movements to give legal rights to our virtual creations based on
the notion that they are conscious? Will this cause humans to lose control of
things as the computer minds grow more powerful?

Will we have laws that force us to imbue emotions in them? So that they can
only be created with empathy for human beings?

Will everyone obey these laws when creating computer minds? Will there be
black markets of unempathic, cold-hearted superminds that blindly obey their
self-serving owners?

Will we all be out of jobs? Will we even need or want money?

~~~
anonymfus
Because human moral is based on emotions, answer to first question will depend
on applications of such virtual creations. We have movements to give legal
rights to dolphins because they are cute, but we don't have such movements for
chimpanzees or parrots because their human-like behavior is inside our uncanny
valley. So probably we will have movements to give legal rights for toys and
chatbots with AI and no such movements for medical or scientific AI's.

~~~
javert
Morality is properly based on reason. Many people do use a primitive kind of
morality that is based on emotion.

------
aristidb
If the goal is to learn about how thinking works, and maybe find ways to adapt
specific methods to software problems, simulating brains makes a lot of sense,
of course.

But it bewilders me how so many people see the "holy grail" in simulating
whole human brains. Two things:

1\. Human brains are extraordinarily power efficient - I don't think we can
beat them anytime soon, as long as we are power constrained. I believe the
difference in efficiency for tasks the human brain is good at (such as visual
pattern recognition) is a significant number of orders of magnitude.

2\. Computers are at their best when they complement us, when they solve tasks
the human brain is NOT good at.

------
VexXtreme
Some theorists say this is the first step to achieving technological
singularity. Once it becomes possible to replicate human mind/consciousness in
computer memory (by running a brain simulation), the line between man and
machine will become very thin. What happens once you upload your consciousness
into a computer? Are you creating a new instance of yourself? What happens
once such creations are able to harness the power of underlying infrastructure
and use high powered processors to perform calculations and do reasoning?

I remember reading somewhere that humans might well become a completely
digital species if this ever occurs. Interesting stuff to say the least...

------
scrumper
This kind of work has applications in neuroscience to model specific parts of
the brain. Blue Brain is just such an effort. I'd also be confident in saying
this thing isn't going to become intelligent any time soon.

We also don't have any idea how the physical structure of the brain maps to
its functional characteristics (pattern recognition, consciousness.) This work
may help us explore that. It's a brain simulation, maybe, but it's definitely
not a 'mind' simulation at all.

------
joeyo
Before you get too excited, (from the IBM article):

    
    
      It is important to clarify that we have not built a biologically
      realistic simulation of the complete human brain. Rather, we
      have simulated a novel modular, scalable, non-von Neumann,
      ultra-low power, cognitive computing architecture at the DARPA
      SyNAPSE metric of 10^14 synapses that itself is inspired by the
      number of synapses in the human brain.

------
briggers
It's important to note that while this simulates approximately the number of
synapses in a human brain, it does so 1542 times slower than realtime.

------
geuis
There are many thing that science doesn't yet know conclusively about neural
architectures. Arguing that a machine such as described in the article will
get us nowhere massively misses the point.

We live in the age of simulation in science. Computation has reached the point
where, in many disparate systems such as weather models, particle physics,
protein folding, and neural architecture, building complex simulations lets
investigators freely play with hypothesis and compare the results to real-
world data. Hypothesis are proved or disproved, science advances, and we know
that much more about how such complex systems indeed work.

The author of this article derides this approach, saying that we just don't
have enough information to do anything useful with the machine. I call
bullshit.

One of the entire points of the machine is to allow experimenters perform
experiments that are either impossible or morally unethical on biological
creatures.

In a few years, suppose a research decides to change the algorithm about how
simulated neurons exchange a neurotransmitter or an electrical pulse. The
simulation then produces patterns very similar or identical to an FMRI or
electrocardiogram of a living brain. Biologists can then use that as an
unexpected avenue to exist living neurons to see if they react in the same
way. Its an instance of simulation allowing experimentation that illuminates
the real deal.

~~~
Xcelerate
> ...the machine is to allow experimenters to perform experiments that are
> either impossible or morally unethical on biological creatures

Ignoring the fact that whether this ever happens is up for debate, why would
it be moral to torture a simulated animal as long as you're not torturing a
"real" one?

> In a few years, suppose a research decides...

You vastly overestimate what research will produce in a few years.

~~~
javert
_why would it be moral to torture a simulated animal as long as you're not
torturing a "real" one?_

Morality is a human concept that should serve human ends--individually and
socially. As such, performing experiments on a dog to gain more knowledge _is_
moral.

~~~
toomuchtodo
_Morality is a human concept that should serve human ends--individually and
socially. As such, performing experiments on a dog to gain more knowledge is
moral._

If life arrives on Earth from elsewhere, and is much more intelligent than us,
let us hope they don't consider us to be dogs.

~~~
javert
Agreed.

I think the same arguments that establish that humans have rights would still
hold, even for the aliens. I also think that they would apply to the aliens,
so that we should recognize that they have rights. But all that is just
"possibly," because it's hard to speculate about a case like that.

~~~
mdda
Or it may be that when they hear us debating with each other about their
ability to have 'rights', they think it's as comical as we would listening to
dogs debate among themselves.

------
mck-
Once technology advances to a level at which we succesfully replicate the
human brain and its interactions all the way down to the nano/quantum level,
would that artificial neural network then gain consciousness?

~~~
D_Alex
Nobody really knows, but I think the informed consensus is that consciousness
would probably happen long before we "replicate the human brain and its
interactions all the way down to the nano/quantum level".

------
kghose
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4KrhDZQ088>

A popular debate about what knowing the brain's wiring diagram will bring us

------
fudged71
I found a comment on the article to be more concise and interesting than the
article itself.

------
javert
The author has committed a serious epistemological error by repeatedly
conflating neruons with simulated neurons. For example:

"In sheer scale, it’s far more ambitious than anything previously attempted,
and it actually has almost ten times as many neurons as a human brain."

No, it has ten times as many _simulated_ neurons. It does not have _any_
neurons. Unless it's a big wet biological computer.

This kind of sloppy thinking is not too surprising to me, given that this is
The New Yorker, which I consider to be exemplary of sloppy thinking almost as
a rule.

------
mememememememe
Google has Big Brains. It's expecting open source either the end of this year
or early next year.

~~~
anigbrowl
Link?

~~~
mememememememe
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gb3Wed9M25A> click to 08:50

