Wednesday, January 30, 2013
$1.6 Billion Supercomputer simulate human brain
An international group of researchers have secured $1.6 billion dollars to fund the Human Brain Project. Over the next 10 years scientists from various disciplines will seek to understand and map the networks of over a hundred billion neuronal connections that illicit emotions, volitional thought and even consciousness itself. The Scientists will be using a scaled up multi-layered simulation running on a super computer. The team will consist of more then 200 individual in 80 different institutions across the globe. The project will be based in Lausanne, Switzerland. The project looks to build new platforms for "neuromorphic computing" and "neurorobotics," allowing the scientists to develop new computing systems and robots based on the architecture and circuitry of the brain. They will also attempt to reconstruct the human brain piece by piece and install these into a overarching supercomputer.
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I think this is pretty amazing, especially given how hard it must be to build something like this. Hopefully this will give us a better understanding towards solving diseases like Parkinson's disease.
ReplyDeleteI'm really interested to see how big of an impact this project will make on the world when it is completed. I feel like this is a really crucial step in the right direction for understanding the human brain/body and I hope it does not run into any unforeseen obstacles.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if we see any potential social, moral, or political issues arising with this technology. What kinds of uses could we imagine this technology being put to? For instance, can you imagine researchers making some kind of "discovery" being with this machine only to turn that discovery into a form of public policy, perhaps controlling the violent, the suicidal, or the prone-to-obesity? Interestingly, this development just as some people, like the philosopher Thomas Nagel, are questioning the materialistic interpretation of mind: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/feb/07/awaiting-new-darwin/
ReplyDeleteI find this project to be very arguable. Not having a full understanding of the brain and then attempting this complete map of the brain sounds like we might be getting a little ahead of ourselves. But if we were to map the whole brain I also fear a form of restriction being a potential outcome. To the extent of being able to persecute a certain factors of the brain that we could identify really scares me. With out going into great specifics the one thing that stands among the rest, at least for me, is that no one has the same exact brain. So I find it hard to believe that we will be able to set and healthy standard for brains if we start to classify them.
ReplyDeleteI like what Sean is pointing to when he writes, "But if we were to map the whole brain I also fear a form of restriction being a potential outcome. To the extent of being able to persecute a certain factors of the brain that we could identify really scares me." We see that different political groups and different policies have varied views for how human beings work. Philosophical liberalism presumes that humans are basically rational and capable of self-direction. Conservatism assumes that people are basically bad and in need of authority (or tradition). But many social policies in the US from around 1900 to the present were based on social scientific/psychological ideas of the day. SO, if this computer creates an image of the human being and if we build that conception into our policies, what should we do if the image later turns out to be wrong? How can we be sure it is right in the first place? (Most people in STS would say that we can't, I think.)
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