Map of an Insect’s Brain

"With 3,016 neurons and 548,000 connections, called synapses, the result is by far the most complex map of a whole brain ever made."

"Researchers have also mapped 25,000 neurons and 20 million synapses in the brain of an adult fruit fly, but this is still just a partial [map]"

"Human brains have an estimated 86 billion neurons and hundreds of trillions of synapses"

The scales at play here are hard to imagine. This is very interesting but it seems the most interesting facet is the completeness, and not just the absolute scale.

i intuitively think that there is something similar in kind between a fruit fly brain and a human brain regardless of the scale, and that cracking the smaller case will somehow lead to cracking the larger one. However, rather than hope, it leads me to a negative conclusion. That is, even at orders of magnitude smaller scales, and with full knowledge of how all the gross bits are connected, we still won't be able to understand what actually happens and why it works.

I suspect this will be the case because the old microscopic will become the new macroscopic and we will realise that there is yet orders of magnitude more details to make sense of.

if you map every single neuron, at what point is it no longer just a 'model' of reality, and is reality. How do we know that the computer model of neurons does not have the same internal awareness as the real neurons?

>Is it simulated to the level where you could give it some visual stimulus and observe the actions it is trying to take?

No way.

First, this mapping doesn't tell us how the synapses are regulated - if we could 'run' this the weights would stay fixed forever and that's not how a brain works.

Second, there must be some neurons dedicated to chemical management, and they'd go haywire unless you found a way to deal with them. It's possible the hardware/software is so intertwined it can't be separated. Or maybe it's just complex, regardless the mapping is of limited use here.

Third, you're assuming that the synapses/axons are the only thing that matters. It may well be this is true, but having other processes being involved has not yet been entirely ruled out. If they are, the mapping is incomplete.

Lastly, we don't have the computational ability just yet to simulate even the mapping itself.

That would require knowledge of how detailed you have to get before going deeper stops altering the performance. I suspect there is no magic line that becomes sapience once you cross it; there's just a smooth slope upwards. Someday we'll have to decide standards of measurement that separate the living from the dead.