LINK: Nematode brain uploaded with success

When you think about it, the brain is really nothing more than a collection of electrical signals.

Statements like this make me want to bang my head against a wall. No, it is not. Brain is a collection of neural and glial cells, the role of which we only partially understand. Most of the neurons are connected through various types of chemical synapses, and ignoring their chemical nature would fail to explain the effects of most psychoactive drugs and even hormones. Some of the neurons are linked directly. Some of them are myelinated, while others are not, and this is kinda big deal, since there's no clocking in the nervous system, and the entire outcome of the processing depends on how long it takes for the action potential to propagate through the axon. And how long it takes for the synapse to react. And how long the depolarization persists in the receiving neuron. And all of that is regulated by the chemistry of regulating gene expression patterns. And we're not even talking about learning and forming long-term memories, which are due to neuroplasticity, entirely controlled by gene expression patterns. It's enough to suppress RNA synthesis to cause anterograde amnesia - although it will also cause some retrograde amnesia too., since apparently merely using neurons causes them to change.

Also, C. elegans doesn't even have a brain; it has ganglia.

Look, I understand that this is some interesting research, but calling it "brain uploading" is like comparing the launch of a firework to interstellar travel: essentially, they're the same, but there are couple of nuances.

This is not uploading. We've known the connectome of C. elegans for a while: that means we know what the neurons are, what the connections are, and whether they are inhibitory or excitatory. What we don't know, and have no way to read off an existing worm, are the weights for these connections. For this project they assumed every connection has a weight of 1, which does turn out to be enough to do interesting things. But when a C. elegans learns that a given temperature is associated with food it doesn't grow new neurons or connections, it changes its weights. Their model can't do this, so it can't learn.

When we can teach a worm to do X, scan it, run it, and observe that the running worm does X when ones not taught to do X don't, then we've uploaded the worm.

EDIT: expanded this into a post.

http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/lah/link_simulating_c_elegans/

It's cool, but I doubt as impressive as it looks. If you connect the inputs and outputs the right way, I bet you could make a car out of a toaster oven controller.

Do you know how much processing power is required to run it in real-time?

I discussed this with a professor of neuroscience on Facebook.

Good news: immortality has been achieved. Bad news: only works on worms for now.

I wonder if this has been open-sourced? Wouldn't it be cool to play a game with worms where the worms are controlled by their actual brain patterns? (Forgetting about the problem with torturing computer uploads for now, of course.)