This makes a lot of sense to me given our limited progress on simulating even very simple animal brains so far, given the huge amount of compute we have nowadays. The only other viable hypothesis I can think of is that people aren’t trying that hard, which doesn’t seem right to me.
What about the hypothesis that simple animal brains haven’t been simulated because they’re hard to scan—we lack a functional map of the neurons—which ones promote or inhibit one another, and other such relations.
Here’s some supporting evidence for it being hard to map:
In 2016, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity of the United States government launched MICrONS, a five-year, multi-institute project to map one cubic millimeter of rodent visual cortex, as part of the BRAIN Initiative.[33][34] Though only a small volume of biological tissue, this project will yield one of the largest micro-scale connectomics datasets currently in existence.
On the the other hand, progress with OpenWorm has been kind of slow, despite C elegans having only 302 neurons and 959 cells in total. Is mapping the bottleneck here?
If interested, here’s some further evidence that it’s just really hard to map:
An adult [Drosophila fly] whole brain dataset is already publicly available and focussed reconstruction is under way, but its 40× greater volume [than a larva brain] would require ∼500–5000 person-years of manual labour.
This makes a lot of sense to me given our limited progress on simulating even very simple animal brains so far, given the huge amount of compute we have nowadays. The only other viable hypothesis I can think of is that people aren’t trying that hard, which doesn’t seem right to me.
What about the hypothesis that simple animal brains haven’t been simulated because they’re hard to scan—we lack a functional map of the neurons—which ones promote or inhibit one another, and other such relations.
Here’s some supporting evidence for it being hard to map:
A mouse brain is about 500x that.
On the the other hand, progress with OpenWorm has been kind of slow, despite C elegans having only 302 neurons and 959 cells in total. Is mapping the bottleneck here?
If interested, here’s some further evidence that it’s just really hard to map: