Editor and writer Jonah Lehrer, recently posted an interesting article in Seed Magazine titled “Out of the Blue, Can a thinking, remembering, decision-making, biologically accurate brain be built from a supercomputer?” In the article there is much talk of: patch clamp technique, eavesdropping on neurological interactions, neuroscience looking to physics, mind modeling, and dizzying sums of data. Blue Brain, a concentration of 8,000 IBM microchips programmed to replicate real neurons and cellular activity inside the brain, was designed and constructed from the bottom up by neuroscientist Henry Markram, director of the Blue Brain project at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. I especially dug the probable outcome of the Blue Brain project mentioned early in the article:

The Blue Brain project is now at a crucial juncture. The first phase of the project—”the feasibility phase”—is coming to a close. The skeptics, for the most part, have been proven wrong. It took less than two years for the Blue Brain supercomputer to accurately simulate a neocortical column, which is a tiny slice of brain containing approximately 10,000 neurons, with about 30 million synaptic connections between them. “The column has been built and it runs,” Markram says. “Now we just have to scale it up.” Blue Brain scientists are confident that, at some point in the next few years, they will be able to start simulating an entire brain. “If we build this brain right, it will do everything,” Markram says. I ask him if that includes selfconsciousness: Is it really possible to put a ghost into a machine? “When I say everything, I mean everything,” he says, and a mischievous smile spreads across his face.

Interesting is Markram’s implication of machine self-consciousness and its apparent feasibility so soon. Granted a number of important considerations like scaling issues, the epistemological dead end argument, transforming or transcending turning cells into experience, and simulated brain experience will likely provide ample obstacles, it’s exciting to consider the realization of machine intelligence, or at least a comprehensive neural model so nearly at hand. It is certain Markram is epic when one hears remarks such as:

There is nothing inherently mysterious about the mind or anything it makes, consciousness is just a massive amount of information being exchanged by trillions of brain cells. If you can precisely model that information, then I don’t know why you wouldn’t be able to generate a conscious mind.

If you dig Jonahs article, peep his book Proust Was A Neuroscientist. Certainly worth a couple times going over if interested in neuroscience or luminaries such as Cézanne, Gertrude Stein, or Walt Whitman.

Images courtesy of BBP/EPFL