Building a Supercomputer Brain
A neat article from Jonah Lehrer detailing the joint venture with IBM that’s attempting to simulate a brain within a computer. This isn’t any ordinary simulation, though, for a few different reasons:
- Bottom-up, with the team simulating the fundamental building-blocks of the brain to see if they can get accurate enough that higher-level behavior emerges from the cognitive soup.
- Brutally realistic, with the team systematizing old experimental data to get the best possible evidence as to how those building blocks actually operate.
- Comprehensive, with the team eventually aiming for an actual simulation of a rat brain.
Most of the efforts these days have been taking high-level behavior and trying to guess at deeper features that would generate this behavior. While this is more immediately useful (see behaviorism and the rest of psychology), it can only dig so deep. Bottom-up simulations of the brain allow us to put ever-rising computing power to good use.
Additionally, it gives us the best chance at finally getting those dualists to see the light and become full-blown physicalists - putting one more nail into the coffin of metaphysics. Yes, I still hold grudges from my Philosophy of Mind class and will have my vengeance against John Searle in this world or the next.
