Q&A: The Blue Brain Project — What’s Going On with It?
The Blue Brain Project — What’s Going On with It?
Question
About 12 years ago I saw lectures in the media about the “Blue Brain Project,” which also received enormous funding.
My understanding was that, broadly speaking, the goal is to create a model/computer of a brain with consciousness and learning ability like a human being’s. (I have no idea how they would prove that it has consciousness, but that’s already their problem.) a0
I went to their website, and it’s not exactly clear to me what’s going on with this project — what exactly they have so far relative to the goals they originally declared. I also saw a few lectures by Professor Idan Segev from the past year, but there too it wasn’t clear what was happening with the project. a0
As someone interested in the field of neuroscience, do you happen to know what the status of this project is? a0 a0
This is Professor Segev’s interview from 12 years ago: a0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0AR1cUlhTk
Answer
As far as I remember, this project was controversial from the outset — whether it would succeed, and whether it was important enough to justify the investment. I have no idea what’s going on with it today.
Discussion on Answer
I didn’t know it was controversial.
Professor Segev talks about it confidently, as something certain, and it was also budgeted at an astronomical sum.
In any case, in the first YouTube link I brought, Professor Segev says it must have consciousness.
In another YouTube video that came out a few years later, he sounds much, much less sure, and he says he doesn’t know whether it will have consciousness.
And as I mentioned, they won’t be able to prove at all that it has consciousness.
Interesting what it means if they’re stuck.
Ten years ago Professor Segev didn’t know at all what consciousness is.
Maybe since then someone has taught him something.
https://www.epfl.ch/research/domains/bluebrain/
They’ve pretty much gotten stuck at a mouse brain; the computational power required is too great.