You must have been very surprised by the progress pattern of the Human Genome Project, then. It’s as if 90% of the real work was about developing the right methods rather than simply plugging along at the initial slow pace.
I’m not sure what you’re responding to. I wasn’t trying to say that the human brain was only 100x the size or complexity of a nematode’s brain-like-thing. It’s far larger and more complex than that. I was saying that even once we have a nematode simulated, we still have done only ~1% of the “real work” of developing the right methods.
(In short, biophysicists have known where the neurons are located for a long time, but they’ve only just recently developed the ability to analyze the way they affect one another, and so there’s fresh hope of “solving” the worm’s brain. The new methods are also pretty awesome.)
My intuition is that most of the difficulty comes from the complexity of the individual cells- we don’t understand nearly all of the relevant things they do that affect neural firing. This is basically independent of how many neurons there are or how they’re wired, so I expect that correctly emulating a nematode brain would only happen when we’re quite close to emulating larger brains.
If the “complicated wiring” problem were the biggest hurdle, then you’d expect a long gap between emulating a nematode and emulating a human.
You must have been very surprised by the progress pattern of the Human Genome Project, then. It’s as if 90% of the real work was about developing the right methods rather than simply plugging along at the initial slow pace.
I’m not sure what you’re responding to. I wasn’t trying to say that the human brain was only 100x the size or complexity of a nematode’s brain-like-thing. It’s far larger and more complex than that. I was saying that even once we have a nematode simulated, we still have done only ~1% of the “real work” of developing the right methods.
I understand that this is your intuition, but I haven’t seen any good evidence for it.
The evidence I have that the methods developed for the nematode are dramatically insufficient to apply to people:
nematodes are transparent
they’re thin and so easy to get chemicals to all of them at once
their inputs and outputs are small enough to fully characterize
their neural structure doesn’t change at runtime
while they do learn, they don’t learn very much
It’s not strong evidence, I agree. I’d like to get a better estimate here.
This lecture on uploading C. elegans is very relevant.
(In short, biophysicists have known where the neurons are located for a long time, but they’ve only just recently developed the ability to analyze the way they affect one another, and so there’s fresh hope of “solving” the worm’s brain. The new methods are also pretty awesome.)
My intuition is that most of the difficulty comes from the complexity of the individual cells- we don’t understand nearly all of the relevant things they do that affect neural firing. This is basically independent of how many neurons there are or how they’re wired, so I expect that correctly emulating a nematode brain would only happen when we’re quite close to emulating larger brains.
If the “complicated wiring” problem were the biggest hurdle, then you’d expect a long gap between emulating a nematode and emulating a human.