Out of the Blue
This week’s must-read (thus far, at least), in Seed. I can’t imagine why anyone who has a mind and is mature enough to contemplate it wouldn’t want to read this. So just read it. A couple of choice quotes:
Markram estimates that in order to accurately simulate the trillion synapses in the human brain, you’d need to be able to process about 500 petabytes of data (peta being a million billion, or 10 to the fifteenth power). That’s about 200 times more information than is stored on all of Google’s servers. (Given current technology, a machine capable of such power would be the size of several football fields.) Energy consumption is another huge problem. The human brain requires about 25 watts of electricity to operate. Markram estimates that simulating the brain on a supercomputer with existing microchips would generate an annual electrical bill of about $3 billion.
So if it worries you, we’re still far, far from even approaching the efficiency of the brain.
And yet, Markram is candid about the possibility of failure. He knows that he has no idea what will happen once the Blue Brain is scaled up. “I think it will be just as interesting, perhaps even more interesting, if we can’t create a conscious computer,” Markram says. “Then the question will be: ‘What are we missing? Why is this not enough?’”
The article also addresses the Hard Problem, which pop-sci articles aren’t wont to do. Some naturalists, such as Daniel Dennett, argue that once we have solved the Easy Problem, that of modeling and understanding the brain (what this computer model is all about), we will understand consciousness and the seeming Hard Problem of how conscious experience arises from matter will be shown to be empty, meaningless, or already solved. I can see why a naturalist would want to say this (after all, I do consider myself a naturalist), but I’m not sure I agree. At least, I have no trouble making large-scale pronouncements in other fields of philosophy (for instance, I believe there is no God and no mind-independent moral value), but I can’t bring myself to do that about consciousness.
