Whole human brain mapped in 3D

Whole human brain mapped in 3D
nature.com

If possible, this would open a huge ethical can of worms: how can we tell such a simulation is not conscious? Would deleting its runtime data after however many simulation cycles be tantamount to murder?

Edit: I am not saying that the above concerns should stop us from working towards developing human brain simulations since the potential benefits of those are just too great. Rather, it is something we have to have in mind as they get more complex and closer to the real thing.

This will certainly be useful for attempts to recreate the functionality of a brain in silico - big research efforts such as the blue brain project [1] have probably been using even early forms of this data.

Having said that, in some ways it won't provide the useful information that will enable the functionality to be restored to the connections.

heres why.

Current efforts involving simulated brains rely both on older, less precise versions of what this nature article talks about - let's call that the roadmap, as it is a map of where all the neurons sit and where they connect to. This project drastically increases the resolution of this roadmap.

However the additional information needed is what traffic is carried by each road. The brain as we understand it today consists not just of the connections between the neurons but also that each neuron, and each different network of the brain, secretes it's own neurotransmitter. Because some of these neurotransmitters are depolarising and some are inhibitory, and they connect widely across the brain and are much more closely related to the actual information processing, we need to have this information before we will be able to better approximate a brain.

In all likelihood this is information gathering is probably underway right now. From what I understand the 'BigBrain' project aims to do for the human brain what the Allen Brain atlas did for mouse brains, that is not only provide a map of the connections but also stain for gene expression and (from memory) neurotransmitter presence.

With this added information we will be closer to our goal of getting skynet sentient.

[1] http://bluebrain.epfl.ch/

It's not just about mapping the topology of the brain, just having a neural network of 1e10 vertices and 1e12 links will not give you an artificial intelligence. It's just not that simple. The connectome paradigm is not sufficient. It is hip because of computer scientists using artificial neuron networks to achieve awesome stuff. But that doesn't mean that the complexity of the human brain only resides in the number of neurons and interactions. It's not guaranteed that we are getting closer of the goal just by adding billions of neurons and connections.

I find this wannabe holistic approach a bit confusing as it is horizontal whereas I am convinced that what we need is a vertical approach : up from graph topology down to an accurate biophysical understanding of synapses and information transmission, all across multiple scales, from the angström up to microns.

That's the key : multiscale modeling, not single-huge-scale modeling.