Should We Shred Whole-Brain Emulation?

The key paper: Whole Brain Emulations: a Roadmap

I am opening this thread to test the hypothesis that SuperIntelligence is plausible but that Whole-Brain Emulations would most likely become obsolete before they were even possible.

I'm not sure of what you're claiming here. Are you hypothesizing that a path to Superintelligence which requires WBE will likely be slower than a path which does not? Or something else, like that brain-based computation with good APIs will hold a relative advantage over WBE indefinitely?

Further, given the ability to do so, entities which were near to being Whole-Brain Emulations would rapidly choose to cease to be near Whole-Brain Emulations and move on to become something else.

Again, this could be clearer. Are you implying that a WBE in the process of being constructed will opt not to be completed before beginning to self-improve (i.e. become a neuromorph)?

For the next few years and possibly decades, the development of brain emulation technology will occur alongside the development of neuromorphic technology.

Some teams will be primarily focused on achieving extremely accurate renditions of sections of actual brain tissue, as well as increasingly accurate neural maps which are sometimes based on high-throughput scans of actual brain tissue. These teams will wish to based their work on individual neurons and glia that are very much like actual cells.

However, Henry Markram, director of Europe's Human Brain Initiative, has asserted that we need not model anything like the full complexity of gene expression and protein formation in human neurons in order to accurately represent firing patterns. Those pursuing the path toward WBEs will be willing to compromise on the issue of the level of detail at which individual cells are modeled, to varying degrees. Perhaps some will discover ways to measure whether these simplifications generate a statistically significant difference in how the simulated brain might react to stimulus.

Other teams will be more concerned with using models of groups of neurons as a calculation tool may be less concerned with whether they accurately represent individual neurons. "Neural net" technology was not intended to accurately model the brain, and the individual elements in a neural net are nothing like cells.

Nonetheless, these teams will learn everything they can from those who are trying to simulate actual brain function, and some of the same people will work in both sub-disciplines and different points in their careers.

If people from the simulation and human connectome camps develop an understanding of some new aspect of brain function, those who are just trying to find new AI methods to build into software will be able to take advantage of the results. However, they may be able to shave a lot of compute cycles out by utilizing abstractions of the newly-realized insight about structure and function to idealized neurons and glia that do not really try to approximate the function of living tissue much at all.

We cannot entirely predict whether extremely detailed models of individual cells are necessary for neuromorphic AI. However, I am interested in whatever evidence is available.

Engineers attempting to improve either a WBE or a piece of neuromorphic tissue would have considerable advantages that are unavailable to medical teams working with actual brains and nerves.

Medical teams who work to repair spinal injuries are able to stimulate nerve fibers and trace the nerves into the brain. However, a vast set of experimental tools would be available to WBE or Neuromorphic Engineers.

These engineers would be able to write program which cause any specific neuron or group of neurons to fire at any time. They would be able to select the firing pattern for each, and the relative timing of a group of neurons.

They would be able to configure neurotransmitter output at will, and, importantly, they would also be able to set the number of neurotransmitter receptors on cell surfaces.

Altering the concentration of cell surface receptors would, for example, allow the neuromorphic tissue engineers to greatly influence what stimuli are pleasurable. They would be able to set patterns for these cell surface receptors which never occur in the natural course of gene expression in the brain.

We have already done a fair amount of mapping of the neural basis of pain and pleasure. Forthcoming in the next ten years, we will also have results from NIH's human connectome project. Neuromorphic tisssue engineers will begin their work with vast resources of data on the generation of pain and pleasure, the purpose and use of these sensations.

If they had either a WBE, or a differently-configured piece of neural tissue available to them, seemingly they would have a strong ability to re-wire what causes pain and pleasure in order to suit their needs.

Such techniques alone could allow a WBE to cross the line from an accurate representation of a human mind to something fundamentally different.

Apparently, an advantage of creating a thread with a controversial and heterodox first entry is that for a time you get to write all of it yourself! :) That's OK, because I have a fair amount of brain dumping to do on this subject.

The future of AI will come out very differently if sections of neural tissue cannot be made to function usefully, separately from from a WBE.

Similarly, the future of AI will come out very differently if removing parts of the brain from an emulation causes the brain to become non-functional.

We know from studies of stroke and other forms of brain damage that brain function does not immediately degrade if a small section of brain is injured. Therefore, removing sections from a WBE might reduce the functionality of the WBE, but would not diminish it entirely.

There is no precedent for adding sections of brain matter to an existing brain. If such operations were performed on a WBE, however, the changes would be very different than they would be to actual brain tissue.

AABoyles also begins to address another important and much-discussed question:

Can the emulation interface with:

Sensory inputs unavailable to the human brain?

Reasoning, calculation, memory modules and other minds in more direct ways?

Rather than inputting data into computers and observing the outputs of computers and sensory devices as we do today.

Just laying some more groundwork... One distinction the discussion requires:

Who is in control of the components and the environment of the emulation?

Possibilities:

An outside entity, attempting to gain economic or other value by using the emulation to complete information processing tasks. (I'll call this "The Boss.")

-The environment was established to maintain the emulation, which is not "given a job," but was created for scientific observation by outsiders.

-The emulation is not given a job, but environment was created by outsiders as a platform for experimentation on emulations.

-Perhaps the emulation was created as an "upload" of a person, or as their designed child or progeny.

-The emulation has a greater or lesser degree of control over its own environment or composition.

Example of lesser degree of control: It can decide to select some of the content it sees and listens to.

Example of greater degree of control: It can directly alter one of its emotions by "twisting a knob."

Another aspect of malleability: How much can the structure and activity of the brain be influenced using means that we presently considered external or environmental? These influences would include sensory inputs and inputs through the blood.

One aspect of malleability: At a specific point in the forecast timeline, how easy or difficult is it to create an emulation with a replacement subsystem or component that is functional, but functions differently? Does the emulation continue to work if these sub-systems are replaced or altered to a lesser or greater degree?

One aspect of what I call "fidelity" is the degree to which the emulation incorporates various aspects of neurophysiology.

For example, the emulation might or might not incorporate:

-Good models of fluid flow within the brain, and between the brain, the blood and the cerebrospinal fluid.

-Good models of the components of the blood itself, and how these components would influence brain activity.

Future timelines could assume that a great deal of additional knowledge about structure and function of components of the brain is developed before functional WBEs are developed.

Or, perhaps scanning technology improves rapidly, allowing for higher and higher levels of fidelity, but our knowledge of how the brain actually works does not advance as rapidly.

We could imagine a timeline where extremely high fidelity emulations that function are created without functional, low-fidelity emulations being created first.

Or, we could imagine a stepwise process where lower-fidelity emulations that function are created first, then these are "improved" to the point that they represent the workings of the human mind more and more accurately.

Another distinction:

Many people have worked to reason about the level of "fidelity" of WBEs. That is to say, how near is a WBE to being and accurate representation of a human brain-what does it leave in, and what does it leave out.

In order to analyze the future of brain emulations further, I want to begin to add some distinctions:

The level of "malleability" of an emulation represents the degree to which its progress through time can be influenced by specific attempts to change it or control its environment.

The precision of this distinction needs to be increased, and people can comment about that here.

I presume you mean whole-brain emulations of humans? Even if these can only arise under circumstances that make them obsolete, this is not necessarily true for emulations of simpler nervous systems.