Brains – aside

Scientists will dismember the consciousness and take out the soul

Alfiya Yenikeeva, RIA Novosti

You can delay death by uploading a person's consciousness into a computer or by connecting the brain to an artificial neural network during life. Scientists have been struggling with this task for ten years. Right now, the foundation is being created for the development of technologies that in the future will allow human consciousness to exist outside the biological body.

Memories of snails

Last fall, an experiment was conducted at the University of California, Los Angeles. Scientists have formed a protective reflex in the snail Aplysia (Aplysia californica): in response to even a light touch, it strongly retracted the siphon. When RNA from the nerve nodes of this mollusk was injected into the nervous system of an untrained individual, she began to respond to irritating stimuli in a similar way.

So scientists have proved that RNA transplantation is actually equivalent to memory transfer. This is one of the first cases in science when the memories of one organism were introduced into another, but it has not yet been possible to fully download the mental processes of an animal, including a human, to an external medium (be it a living being or a computer).

The brain and supercomputers

It's easier to experiment with snails: the Aplysia californica nervous system consists of only a few thousand large neurons that are easy to isolate. That is why scientists consider it the optimal model for studying the brain and memory. Humans have about 86 billion neurons, with 150 trillion synapses between them.

Each synapse has about a thousand molecular triggers. If you imagine the brain as a computer, then it would have 150 quadrillion transistors. Such a machine does not exist, said Sergey Markov, a machine learning specialist, speaking at Geek Picnic. The latest-generation Summit supercomputer, launched in the US in June this year, has only 21 billion transistors. However, we still do not know how to scan and map information from the human brain.

According to futurologist Anders Sandberg and philosopher Nick Bostrom, a supercomputer of the required power will appear no earlier than 2111. The famous inventor Ray Kurzweil is more optimistic. In the book "The Singularity is already close," he writes that a computer capable of simulating the human brain in full will be created by 2025.

In pursuit of artificial intelligence

Today, two major projects are being implemented in the world, whose main goal is a functioning computer model of the brain. As part of the first – Brain Blue Gene, launched back in 2005, researchers created an artificial analogue of the rat neocortex (part of the cerebral cortex of the cerebral hemispheres), consisting of 31 thousand neurons. It took ten years and the entire computing power of the Blue Gene supercomputer (209 teraflops), developed by IBM specifically for this project, to simulate a small section of the rat brain (with a volume of only 0.29 cubic millimeters) and simulate its operation.

Thanks to this model, neurophysiologists have found out that connections between neurons are formed both randomly and with the help of special chemicals secreted by nerve cells into the intercellular fluid. In addition, it became clear that in order to accurately predict the occurrence of neural connections, it is not necessary to know the specific location of a nerve cell inside a particular layer of the cortex. It is enough to place neurons of a certain type in the appropriate layers, taking into account the density of their placement and the required number. This will greatly facilitate the creation of a computer model of the human brain in the future.

Analog of the human brain

Scientists from the international Human Brain Project, founded five years ago, are developing such a model. The core of the research team consists of specialists from Brain Blue Gene, who demonstrated a computer simulation of the rat neocortex in 2015. It is planned that the current model of the human brain will be ready by 2023.

Now researchers from the Human Brain Project are trying to reconstruct parts of the rat brain (hippocampus, cerebellum, sensorimotor cortex, basal ganglia) and are working on a "real-time mode" in which one second of brain functioning would be simulated by processors in one second too. Based on the results obtained, the researchers hope to recreate the entire brain of a rodent, and subsequently a human.

Neurophysiologist Henry Markram, who heads both the Brain Blue Gene and the Human Brain Project, in an article published last year suggested abandoning "attempts to calculate the time for which we will be able to recreate the brain with accuracy to each of its molecules." The main reason is still the same – insufficient computing power of modern supercomputers.

In order to simulate the activity of the human brain in such detail, yottaflops of power of 10 to the 24th degree of operations per second are needed, and the capabilities of current machines, measured in hundreds of petaflops (10 to the 15th degree of operations per second), are enough only for a rough simulation of the nervous system of the Rotifera worm, consisting of the supragloteal ganglion and several nerve trunks.

Eternal life of consciousness

An accurate computer simulation of the human brain will allow scientists to better understand the principles by which it operates and understand the mechanisms of development of mental disorders. In addition, an artificial analogue will be an ideal object for testing new methods of treatment and medicines. It will probably even be possible to completely abandon animal experiments.

The creation of postneocortex technologies is not far off, Markov believes. A huge neural network can be connected to the human neocortex, surpassing the natural neural network of the brain in size, number of cells and synapses. Human consciousness in this case will be based on a combined substrate consisting of a biological brain and an artificial neural network. After the death of his biological part, the artificial one will continue to exist without serious losses for the personality. Probably, this way people will be able to delay the imminent death.

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