Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Human Brain Project

humanbrainproject.eu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 45 posts

Re: The Human Brain Project

#21

Post by dalai »

neuroguy wrote: post #16
jacquesm wrote: post #13

That's one billion Euros taxpayer money and you will not be reading the results in an open access journal any time soon.

From the website: http://www.humanbrainproject.eu/ict_platform.html Neuroinformatics Platform, Brain Simulation Platform, Medical Informatics Platform Extremely useful platforms that should be open. In addition to which I agree with you that they should allow access to their papers.

According to the work plan (not public as far as I know), all the platforms will be open to researchers not just from Europe but from anywhere in the world.

Re: The Human Brain Project

#22

Post by a-priori »

jpwagner wrote: post #11

I don't necessarily doubt the scientists' competence here, but they're just playing the fundraising game when they talk about "disease" in this context.

I agree that the word "disease" is certainly overused these days, there are still some things that should rightfully use the word.

Besides, whether you call them "diseases" or "disorders" or another term, there are many ways that our neurology can fail us. The "Classification" section of this Wikipedia article lists several major ones, but there's countless more:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurological_disorder#Classific...

Re: The Human Brain Project

#23

Post by vannevar »

nnq wrote: post #18

At what resolution would you have to simulate the brain to get "human like" properties like consciousness? (quantum/subatomic? molecular? cellular? biologically inspired mathematical abstractions of neurons? simplest computationally useful mathematical abstractions of neurons - like current artificial nns?) - this is the question I find most interesting ..instead of unrealistic goals like predicting drug effects in-s…

I agree. To simulate the effects of a drug, you would need to simulate not only the neurons, but the circulatory system, the blood-brain barrier, perhaps even the immune system, and all of their respective interactions. Give the state of our knowledge, a massive publicly-funded project seems premature, like setting out to do the moon landing in 1870.

Re: The Human Brain Project

#24

Post by dalai »

DanBC wrote: post #5

> Modern computing technology has brought these goals within sight. Haven't we been saying this since we had vacuum tubes and early chess programs? We thought machine vision would be easy and that turned out pretty tricky. > ICT is ready to give us a completely new understanding of the brain and its diseases; understanding the brain will lead inevitably to radical innovation in computing. I can't help feeling this is…

> I can't help feeling this is backwards.

What they are trying to say is that we can put a lot more data into our simulations and run them at different abstraction levels, which will help us improve our understanding of the brain. This improved understanding can be used for innovation in computing, e.g. through neuromorphic processors, see http://www.kip.uni-heidelberg.de/cms/groups/vision/projects/... which is one of the project partners.

Re: The Human Brain Project

#25

Post by jacquesm »

a-priori wrote: post #19
[deleted] wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

Google Scholar lists about 855 papers mentioning the term "blue brain project", the Human Brain Project's predecessor: http://scholar.google.ca/scholar?q=%22blue+brain+project%22&... And even though the project has just launched, there are already about 1,980 papers mentioning the term "human brain project": http://scholar.google.ca/scholar?q=%22human+brain+project%22...

'already'? This has been going since 1989, that's a funny definition of already that you are using!

Re: The Human Brain Project

#26

Post by dalai »

vannevar wrote: post #23
nnq wrote: post #18

At what resolution would you have to simulate the brain to get "human like" properties like consciousness? (quantum/subatomic? molecular? cellular? biologically inspired mathematical abstractions of neurons? simplest computationally useful mathematical abstractions of neurons - like current artificial nns?) - this is the question I find most interesting ..instead of unrealistic goals like predicting drug effects in-s…

I agree. To simulate the effects of a drug, you would need to simulate not only the neurons, but the circulatory system, the blood-brain barrier, perhaps even the immune system, and all of their respective interactions . Give the state of our knowledge, a massive publicly-funded project seems premature, like setting out to do the moon landing in 1870.

I don't know about that part of the project, but you could for example simulate the effect of the local interaction between a molecule and a neuron. The mechanisms to put the molecule there could be investigated separately.

> Give the state of our knowledge, a massive publicly-funded project seems premature

One billion might sound like bucket loads of money, but it is not. There are close to 90 institutions involved and a huge percentage of the funding will need to go to the platforms that need to built. This is more about building the necessary infrastructure to do higher-impact research.

Re: The Human Brain Project

#27

Post by dalai »

jacquesm wrote: post #17
[deleted] wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

Yes, but one day they will have - hopefully - results. And a commitment to publish in open access journals should have been part and parcel of a funding round like this. A billion is not exactly pocket change.

The EU already encourages open access for FP7 (the current funding programme) and it will become even better for the new one called Horizon2020 starting next year. http://blogs.nature.com/news/2012/07/european-commission-emb...

Re: The Human Brain Project

#29

Post by yk »

furbo wrote: post #4

If that simulation would be conscious, wouldn't it be just as bad (if not worse) as performing experiments on animals ? and if it wouldn't be conscious, wouldn't it conflict with the beliefs of most scientists on the origin of consciousness ?

If the HBP is really a success and the simulation is conscious, then the simulation should probably get similar rights and protections as a human. ( Whatever freedom of movement means for a supercomputer is a rather interesting additional question. ) And this would likely mean, that the possible experiments on such a simulation need to be severely restrained. On the other hand, if a sufficiently advanced simulation of the human brain would not be conscious, then we run into trouble regarding the purely physical nature of human brains.

However, I tend to think that a more rigid definition of consciousness is needed ( and may well be one of the major results of the HBP). I think this, because I am thinking about similar complex programs as a full brain simulation, which demonstrate complex behavior, but no consciousness. ( For example very detailed simulations of super nova explosions.)

Re: The Human Brain Project

#30

Post by [deleted] »

jacquesm wrote: post #25
a-priori wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Scholar lists about 855 papers mentioning the term "blue brain project", the Human Brain Project's predecessor: http://scholar.google.ca/scholar?q=%22blue+brain+project%22&... And even though the project has just launched, there are already about 1,980 papers mentioning the term "human brain project": http://scholar.google.ca/scholar?q=%22human+brain+project%22...

'already'? This has been going since 1989, that's a funny definition of already that you are using!

[deleted]
Post reply on HN