For those interested in whether the mind is solely a product of the brain or something beyond, here is an article of interest.

http://singularityhub.com/2013/08/11/darpa-ibm-neurosynaptic-chip-and-programming-language-mimic-the-brain/

Interesting stuff. Although they say we shouldn't ever trust a computer that you can't throw out the window or they might go all terminator on our asses.

Watching the TV series Hannibal which I find very interesting, it talks a lot about the mind. One analogy that they made was that if the mind is a projected image, then the brain is the projector.

The question about whether or not conscience is exclusively local is certainly a curious one for me. But if we evolved from simple bacteria at some point along the line, species came about that had brains and as time went on, brains got bigger and more complex. Somewhere in there, consciousness arose, albeit perhaps very simple at first and gradually arriving at where we are today for humans. I wonder how it might be possible, that at some point along that evolutionary journey, that conscience became non-local, being that we are merely the product of billions of years of evolution. It seems to me that at some point in the future, artificial intelligence and computers that are self aware will exist, and they will be the product of some advanced engineering. And their intelligence will be a system of neurons and synapses just like with human brains. So it's conceivable that consciousness one day will be understood and mapped, and maybe even artificially replicated.

Thanks for this.

This article is very sketchy, but it appears to be a kind of prototype connectionist network "model" built from a parallel "Von Neumann" type digital architecture. So, at the get go, this is not a realistic brain simulation, since the brain is clearly not a Von Neumann computer. The claimed "100 trillion simulated synapses" undoubtedly represents information, or storage, capacity, not actual functionally active synapses.

That said, I think the enterprise is interesting. Now, let's assume that they create a model with a high level of sophistication, but it fails to pass the Turing test for consciousness (or any other such "test"). Will all of the AI materialists then assume that consciousness arises from a source outside the brain? Or will they just say, "Damn, it is just not sophisticated enough."

The point is that as a study in consciousness, its relevance will only emerge if consciousness arises from the simulation, which would suggest a functionalist (AI) theory of consciousness. Such theories have long since been abandoned, except by the most ardent AI adherents. The reason is simple: The brain is not a digital computer.

Reread the article. It says that this new architecture is specifically not of the von Neumann persuasion.

I'm all for such studies, especially when done under no illusions:

“Any simulation in some sense is always a cartoon of the reality, because the reality is very complex,” Modha says, “But just like a cartoon can capture the essence of a situation, we hope that our simulation can capture, in a very tasteful fashion, the essence of how the brain gives rise to the mind.”

Trying to get beyond von Neumann architecture and thus gain in complexity and efficiency is very worthwhile, both in itself and economically.


A question for Materialists, already anticipated by Bemis: is there a point with these kinds of pursuits, if failing to produce consciousness, when Mind is reevaluated as perhaps something more than (or even other than) arising from the brain alone?

The larger question I'm asking is, what would falsify the materialist assumptions about mind?

In the same way that the fossil record could potentially falsify some elements of our understanding of evolution, what could potentially falsify materialist assumptions about our Mind and the Cosmos we live in?

Given that good science seeks to falsify, what today is being done to falsify materialist assumptions?

Etc.

Human

The article is very vague, but from this...

"Early on, programmers had to code individual neurosynaptic cores, but the language now includes 150 “corelets,” or groups of cores with similar functionality (eg., sound perception, edge detection, or color identification). Developers only need to know the general function of a corelet to integrate it into an application."

...it sounds a little like an object-oriented library hard coded into the circuitry of this chip. That would be cool. You could build software just by assembling a bunch of these "corelets" into an application. But it's hard to tell from the article.

Does this mean we will be sending our computers to the shrink instead of going ourselves?

"True North is built on a network of “neurosynaptic cores” that place memory, processing, and communication close to one another so they can operate in parallel, much as they do in the brain."

"Just as von Neumann computing required a specialized programming language (Fortran), Modha says SyNAPSE’s new architecture needed the same—so his researchers wrote a new language from the ground up, and began organizing and simplifying it for future scientists and software developers."

"Early on, programmers had to code individual neurosynaptic cores, but the language now includes 150 “corelets,” or groups of cores with similar functionality (eg., sound perception, edge detection, or color identification). Developers only need to know the general function of a corelet to integrate it into an application."

I noted the implied claim that the model in question involved something more than a standard "Von Neumann" computer. But it appeared that the distinction was only that of parallelism, and not truely connectionist. In short, we still have a Von Neumann computer modeling a connectionist architecture. At least, that is what it appears. What raises my doubts is that the brain is not digital, thereas computers are.

Here is a quote from connectionist, and AI advocate, Patricia Churchland:

"Pushing at the bounds of the simulation paradigm are ambitions to go beyond simulation of a neural circuit to construction of a synthetic neural circuit--for example in a chip. Applying this to a specific instance, we are referring to the difference between contructing a device that can respond to real, as opposed to simulated, light; . . . The contrast we have in mind between a simulated retina and a synthetic retina is roughly this: in a simulated retina the input will be numerical values corresponding to properties of light such as wavelength and intensity, and the output will be numerical values corresponding to information carried by the ganglion cells. In a synthetic retina, the input is real light, and the output consists of electrical signals carried not in spike trains but in current pulses. Following this line, the constructive problem concerns how to go from simulating in a computer to making synthetic retinas, nuclei, spinal cords, cortices--in short, how to make synthetic brains."

(Churchland and Sejnowski, THe Computational Brain.)

What we have here is apparently still a classical computer simulation. But I could be wrong about this.

From "Terminator 2" and "the Matrix."

Once "they" are self aware; we are royally boned.