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Supercomputer that simulates entire human brain will switch on in 2024
(www.westernsydney.edu.au)
this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2023
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To actually simulate a brain you'd have to put its connections and weights in there and AFAIK that data simply doesn't exist. Not even the connections.
What this is is a computer capable of simulating neuronal nets of the size of the brain... and AFAIU only the synaptic network. There's a hell a lot more going on in actual wetware, think neurotransmitters, plasticity, gene expression changing on the fly etc. To actually simulate a brain you'd either have to have a scan that's rather inconceivable to get in the necessary detail, or you need to grow it virtually from virtual DNA, simulate the development of the whole body and an environment for it to develop properly as our genome expects environmental stimulus, a mould to grow in.
That's pretty much what I got from the article, that they managed to build a computer that theoretically has the horsepower to compare to a human brain, but specifically what they want to use it for was more vague in the article than the headline implies.
Your last paragraph is spot on imo if they are going to straight-up simulate intelligence. People underestimate how much "training" we go through ourselves. Millions of years of evolution training our instincts encoded in dna + training through a body with dozens of senses (input data) collecting data 24/7, that can manipulate itself and interact with the environment (output data) and observe the results (more input data) for at least a few years starting from embryo.
Kinda OT regarding simulating something if you have the DNA, but evolution itself learned how to learn, it's not just random chance: If you take the natural error rate during DNA transcription it's quite high, error correction processes then take it down to practically nothing, and after that randomness is again introduced, in a controlled manner, to still allow mutations -- our genome could in principle spit out clones with no mutations whatsoever but it doesn't because being adaptive is beneficial for the species. That is, evolution is not a random walk through the possibilities, "throw shit at the wall and see what sticks", but an algorithm deliberately employing randomness to introduce variety when it has reason to believe that it's beneficial.
And ironically evolutionary scientists don't like to hear that, physiologists have a hard time getting through to them. "We don't care whether that mechanism is theoretically unnecessary to explain that stuff evolves and adapts, it's what's happening in the actual body, here, have a microscope". And while the genome using deliberate strategies to create mutations may indeed be strictly speaking unnecessary, from a computational POV it's way more efficient: Makes no sense to fuck with mitochondrial DNA if your bird has trouble drinking nectar, better mess around with the beak.
That was… a very interesting thought experiment you just sent me on. I’d never considered this, but it immediately sounds plausible upon hearing it. Thanks for mentioning this “off topic” idea :D
Here's a talk by Denis Nobel, physiologist who compiled all the various evidence into an argument