Can a thinking, remembering, decision-making, biologically accurate brain be built from a supercomputer? Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne computational neuroscientists hope to model a complete rat brain within two years using their IBM Blue Brain supercomputer, then download it into a robotic rat, creating one with a "mind of its own." Before it was launched, Henry Markram -- a neuroscientist at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and the director of the Blue Brain project -- had likened it to the Human Genome Project, a comparison that some found ridiculous and others dismissed as mere self-promotion. When he launched the project in the summer of 2005, as a joint venture with IBM, there was still no shortage of skepticism. Scientists criticized the project as an expensive pipedream, a blatant waste of money and talent. Neuroscience didn't need a supercomputer, they argued; it needed more molecular biologists. Terry Sejnowski, an eminent computational neuroscientist at the Salk Institute, declared that Blue Brain was "bound to fail," for the mind remained too mysterious to model. But Markram's attitude was very different. "I wanted to model the brain because we didn't understand it," he says. "The best way to figure out how something works is to try to build it from scratch."
The Blue Brain project is now at a crucial juncture. The first phase of the project -- "the feasibility phase" -- is coming to a close. The skeptics, for the most part, have been proven wrong. It took less than two years for the Blue Brain supercomputer to accurately simulate a neocortical column, which is a tiny slice of brain containing approximately 10,000 neurons, with about 30 million synaptic connections between them. "The column has been built and it runs," Markram says. "Now we just have to scale it up." Blue Brain scientists are confident that, at some point in the next few years, they will be able to start simulating an entire brain. "If we build this brain right, it will do everything," Markram says. I ask him if that includes selfconsciousness: Is it really possible to put a ghost into a machine? "When I say everything, I mean everything," he says, and a mischievous smile spreads across his face.
If computing speeds continue to develop at their current exponential pace, and energy efficiency improves, Markram believes that he'll be able to model a complete human brain on a single machine in ten years or less.
Read full story at Seed Magazine.
Blue Brain Consciousness
I admire the ambition of the Blue Brain project and despite all the skepticism (my own included) I believe it will be a great contribution to our understanding of the brain, because nothing like this has ever been tried on this scale, and putting that much computation to work will surely give researchers some new insights.
However, I have serious doubts about the idea of self consciousness emerging. An article I wrote recently for this site, Design is Bad, provides a detailed argument for this point. But in a nutshell, Blue Brain is designed, not emergent, and this raises some problems for the possibility of consciousness.
The first question is, how are they arriving at the structure of the brain and its vastly many connections? In the physical brain, the structure and connections form during embryonic development. The persistence and strength of those connections are determined largely by environmental factors, as the baby learns about its world. As the child nears/enters puberty, a great many of these connections are pruned.
In other words, the environment is shaping the brain as the child grows. What is shaping the Blue Brain? Are the researchers modeling senses and a body? In what ways can it act in the world, and sense the results of those actions? That kind of feedback is mandatory for consciousness to emerge, because that's the only way we can build up and trust out own mental models. Without that kind of process in place, why should we have any confidence that the Blue Brain is building up appropriate models of its world, and more importantly, of itself?