Ed Boyden: belief

Transcript context

…Does that mean whole-brain emulation is impossible, then? You basically have to reproduce the body? It’s a good question. One possibility is that, if you are emulating the brain, maybe you can run the simulation for a short period of time. But if you want to integrate all the changes that are due to the rest of the body to encompass more complex things, like long-term emotions or moods, you might call them, or memory or personality, you might have to think about the body as an ecosystem. Then there’s also the concept of extended intelligence, where I’m not just me. If I’m getting out of bed in the morning and getting dressed and having my cup of coffee, that’s one version of me. But then when I get up on a stage to lecture for my class, or if I go and hang out with friends, maybe certain parts of my personality are expressed and other parts are not. I think we all experience this all the time, where we’re part of an ecosystem of people as well. I think what’s going to happen is, we’re going to need to be able to simulate as much of the biology as possible, and then there might be a point where things kind of become unpredictable. What do we need to know next? Do we have to map out the structure of human interactions as well? If I think about memory, is it possible that it’s more than just synapse connections, that there’s some kind of RNA-based calculation supplementing what we normally think of as memory? How well do we understand memory?…

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