Blue Brain: When Tinkerers Promise.

The promise of the conscious computer is just too much to resist. In order for the vaunted "singularity" to occur, someone will have to come up with that, or something close. The singularity is defined as that moment when computing power will surpass the human's ability to, well, to think. At the singularity, computers would have developed the ability to redesign themselves beyond any human's ability to compehend. Computers would be superhuman.

Enter the Blue Brain, described in a recent article in SEED. At Lausanne, Switzerland, 8,000 microprocessors are being incorporated into a simulation of a brain, each processor being a neuron. At a predicted processing rate of 22.8 trillion operations per second, the overall performance should really haul....shouldn't it?

Henry Markram is a neurological researcher who feels that reductionism in research is at a dead-end, drowning in data, with no firm theory emerging. The complexity of just two neorons interacting is too much for current models to handle. Blue brain is intended to be thenext and ultimate model, a self-organizing, neural simulation for describing the brain in the future.

"The simulation is getting to the point," Schürmann says, "where it gives us better results than an actual experiment. We get the same data, but with less noise and human error." The model, in other words, has exceeded its own inputs. The virtual neurons are more real than reality.

The ulimate intent of the Blue Brain is not just modeling neural function, it is to model consciousness and experience itself.

"There is nothing inherently mysterious about the mind or anything it makes," Markram says. "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." At moments like this, Markram takes on the deflating air of a magician exposing his own magic tricks. He seems to relish the idea of "debunking consciousness," showing that it's no more metaphysical than any other property of the mind. Consciousness is a binary code; the self is a loop of electricity. A ghost will emerge from the machine once the machine is built right.

These researchers have seen the model self-boot into a supposedly functional model of a baby rat's neocortical column. Their full color simulations of the inteconnection diagram is impressive, beautiful even. But it remains to be seen whether the internal experience of the model rat is valid, or if there even is one. After all their accomplishments so far are very deterministic, where developing neural pathways seek to connect themselves according to rules input by the programmers. The promise of nondeterministic behavior - in their proposed robot rat - remains to be accomplished, much less a transparent window into the robot's internal experience. Can determinism result in non-determinism? Can this model even prove that?

The faith in technology sustains, however. The promises of technical multiplication through Moore's law makes them believe that they can reduce the complexity of a human brain model from the current required size of "several football fields", consuming an estimated $3 billion in annual power intake, to a single chip in 10 years.

If this succeeds, is the singularity imminently upon us? And if it fails, does it falsify the possibility of ever knowing ourselves? Or could it be both, as we turn over to machines the too-complex-for-us task of comprehending the human brain? The unasked question is: why would we do that? Probably too metaphysical for technicians to consider.