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.
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: