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Why the Human Brain Project Went Wrong and How to Fix It

scientificamerican.com

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Re: Why the Human Brain Project Went Wrong and How to Fix It

#31

Post by Rangi42 »

steve19 wrote: post #29
marvy wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you so sure mice aren't conscious? Insects probably are not, I have no strong opinion on mice, but dolphins almost definitely are.

Do you believe mice ask themselves "why do I exist?" or whether it is better "to be, or not to be"? I am genuinely interested in your perspective. I adore my dog. He shows a wide range of what I believe to be genuine emotions. But I do not think he is self-aware, and by self-aware I mean able to contemplate his own existence (and therefor lack of existence). For that matter, I don't think he ever contemplates the lac…

What would observe differently about your dog if he were self-aware? Self-awareness wouldn't automatically let dogs speak their minds or write philosophical treatises on existence. When a dog is just sitting still, I have no idea if they're being self-reflective or not.

Re: Why the Human Brain Project Went Wrong and How to Fix It

#32

Post by plonh »

joe_the_user wrote: post #21
freshhawk wrote: post #10

This passage really distills it down to the essence of what happened: "Despite skepticism in the neuroscience community, Markram won over the people who really mattered: funders at the European Commission, who seem to have looked less closely at the proposal's scientific feasibility than at its potential economic and political payoff."

Given the limited understanding of neuroscience and the problems of Markram's vision, the whole affair had the earmarks of a doomed project. One can see similar problems in smaller effort by Palm Founder Jeff Hawkin's efforts to jump-start algorithmically oriented neuroscience research with his book On Intelligence and his company Numenta. With all the failures pretty visible now, I'd like to say I think there's some…

It is interesting that after Numenta's flop we have Google Brain and the academic neural net community deploying amazing successes.

Re: Why the Human Brain Project Went Wrong and How to Fix It

#33

Post by plonh »

streptomycin wrote: post #8
gohrt wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason was obviously hubris combined with marketing spice appeal. http://nemaload.davidad.org/

Interesting link, but no update since 2013? Is it dead? There's also http://www.openworm.org/

It was Dalrymple's site. His work was open source and collaborated with OpenWorm researchers. Looks like Dalrymple gave up to go work for Twitter. I guess he found a way to leverage his expertise in studying very small brains. Sigh. Greatest minds of our generation, yadda yadda.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Dalrymple_(computer_sc...

Re: Why the Human Brain Project Went Wrong and How to Fix It

#34

Post by lern_too_spel »

Frondo wrote: post #22
Animats wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. OpenWorm [1] is trying to do exactly that, emulate C. elegans, with all of 302 neurons. It doesn't work yet, but they;'re plugging along. When that problem is totally solved, and the neural model is working right, it's time to move up in complexity. Probably to lizards or birds. About two decades ago, I heard Rod Brooks talking about building a human brain. He'd done some good artificial insects and was big…

I'm curious--did the Human Brain Project ever produce any noteworthy science, or did it actually blow through a billion bucks with nothing to show? Because, as far as I'm concerned, if we got a billion dollars worth of science out of it, who cares if they hit the mark? That could still be a lot of good science!

GP is incorrect. HBP has only blown through 200 million dollars. It is planned to blow through a billion Euros over the course of a decade.

Re: Why the Human Brain Project Went Wrong and How to Fix It

#35

Post by davelope911 »

steve19 wrote: post #29
marvy wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you so sure mice aren't conscious? Insects probably are not, I have no strong opinion on mice, but dolphins almost definitely are.

Do you believe mice ask themselves "why do I exist?" or whether it is better "to be, or not to be"? I am genuinely interested in your perspective. I adore my dog. He shows a wide range of what I believe to be genuine emotions. But I do not think he is self-aware, and by self-aware I mean able to contemplate his own existence (and therefor lack of existence). For that matter, I don't think he ever contemplates the lac…

Reminds me of the Vonnegut quote from Cat's Cradle:

“Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly; Man got to sit and wonder 'why, why, why?' Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land; Man got to tell himself he understand.”

Re: Why the Human Brain Project Went Wrong and How to Fix It

#36

Post by Animats »

noselfrighteous wrote: post #20
Animats wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. OpenWorm [1] is trying to do exactly that, emulate C. elegans, with all of 302 neurons. It doesn't work yet, but they;'re plugging along. When that problem is totally solved, and the neural model is working right, it's time to move up in complexity. Probably to lizards or birds. About two decades ago, I heard Rod Brooks talking about building a human brain. He'd done some good artificial insects and was big…

It's not clear at all that Mouse->Human is simply a scaling problem. It would appear that there is some emergent phenomenon (consciousness) somewhere on the scale between mouse and human. This phenomenon may be triggered by a surplus of "computational resource" with respect to "body to be controlled", which I personally think is unlikely. It may be triggered by a matching of computational resource to controllable com…

Humans have 92% DNA commonality with mice, and 98% commonality with chimpanzees. There's a lot of handwaving about how special humans are, but it's not showing up at the genetic level.

Re: Why the Human Brain Project Went Wrong and How to Fix It

#37

Post by danschuller »

steve19 wrote: post #29
marvy wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you so sure mice aren't conscious? Insects probably are not, I have no strong opinion on mice, but dolphins almost definitely are.

Do you believe mice ask themselves "why do I exist?" or whether it is better "to be, or not to be"? I am genuinely interested in your perspective. I adore my dog. He shows a wide range of what I believe to be genuine emotions. But I do not think he is self-aware, and by self-aware I mean able to contemplate his own existence (and therefor lack of existence). For that matter, I don't think he ever contemplates the lac…

I think conscious isn't a binary yes/no kind of property. It's more a range, where you can put humans arbitrarily at 1.0 and then a mouse might be 0.05 or something like that. It certainly has self-awareness of somekind, even basic biological homeostasis requires self-awareness of a limited kind.

Other animals then present more consciousness, like chimps, dolphins, elephants etc and would place somewhere between the mouse and humans.

Re: Why the Human Brain Project Went Wrong and How to Fix It

#38

Post by steve19 »

Rangi42 wrote: post #31
steve19 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you believe mice ask themselves "why do I exist?" or whether it is better "to be, or not to be"? I am genuinely interested in your perspective. I adore my dog. He shows a wide range of what I believe to be genuine emotions. But I do not think he is self-aware, and by self-aware I mean able to contemplate his own existence (and therefor lack of existence). For that matter, I don't think he ever contemplates the lac…

What would observe differently about your dog if he were self-aware? Self-awareness wouldn't automatically let dogs speak their minds or write philosophical treatises on existence. When a dog is just sitting still, I have no idea if they're being self-reflective or not.

Good question.

I would expect him to exhibit less reliably to stimuli. His behaviour is closer to a large switch(stimulus){} statement than the emergent behavior of human reaction to situations and stimuli.

One example: he was stepped on when a small puppy by a very old man from that point on and to this day, many years later, he has a major dislike of old people that he does not know well.

If the same thing happened to a child, I would expect the child to slowly, over time, question why they disliked all other old people when the old people they do know are kind to them. This would result in a change of behavior without someone explicitly teaching them.

Re: Why the Human Brain Project Went Wrong and How to Fix It

#39

Post by p1esk »

plonh wrote: post #32
joe_the_user wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the limited understanding of neuroscience and the problems of Markram's vision, the whole affair had the earmarks of a doomed project. One can see similar problems in smaller effort by Palm Founder Jeff Hawkin's efforts to jump-start algorithmically oriented neuroscience research with his book On Intelligence and his company Numenta. With all the failures pretty visible now, I'd like to say I think there's some…

It is interesting that after Numenta's flop we have Google Brain and the academic neural net community deploying amazing successes.

Actually, Numenta is doing well. They keep working towards understanding how a human neocortex works. It took academic neural net community more than 50 years to achieve "amazing successes". Compared to that timeline, Numenta is moving pretty fast.

Re: Why the Human Brain Project Went Wrong and How to Fix It

#40

Post by ethbro »

Rangi42 wrote: post #31
steve19 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you believe mice ask themselves "why do I exist?" or whether it is better "to be, or not to be"? I am genuinely interested in your perspective. I adore my dog. He shows a wide range of what I believe to be genuine emotions. But I do not think he is self-aware, and by self-aware I mean able to contemplate his own existence (and therefor lack of existence). For that matter, I don't think he ever contemplates the lac…

What would observe differently about your dog if he were self-aware? Self-awareness wouldn't automatically let dogs speak their minds or write philosophical treatises on existence. When a dog is just sitting still, I have no idea if they're being self-reflective or not.

There are places to start.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_test

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