Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the fact that it's chunks of exist and work plugged together is what makes it so impressive to me in the sense that it means that we're actually building somewhat reusable modular architecture for doing this that people can actually repeat and build on separately and so on. And thanks for the future, I think. Also, I have to say, excellent article.
Thanks very much indeed! There is a level where the criticisms of the neuroscientists are both entirely legitimate and at the same time probably not really valid. Again, to go to an SF reference, the Australian hard-SF writer and mathematician Greg Egan has gone into this at some depth. I can't call which story to mind now, but he imagined a scenario in one of his where the tech is available to do a full whole-body i…
I think there's another layer to this too, which is that — if you've already scanned and uploaded a person's mind, the original person is presumably dead, or at least a completely separate person from the one in the simulation. Moreover, really, no matter how much versimilitude you pour into your simulation, it's never really going to be exactly the same. Hence, if we're being clear-eyed about this, presumably the point of doing a brain upload like that isn't to get immortality for a particular person or something, its just to get a much more advanced and human-like form of artificial intelligence.
At which point, if we don't need a perfectly accurate neurological and physical simulation to get something that mostly "walks," talks and acts like a human, or something very similar, why would we bother doing it at all?
And yeah, although you could obviously assume that perfect simulation of all of the physical and chemical and neurological processes is necessary to get something to even slightly functions, considering the fact that people can function with 90% of their brain entirely gone, I'm not sure how accurate that is.