Building a brain?

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Today Spiegel Online International posted an article entitled Researchers Hope to Build a Brain. The article discusses the efforts of the Blue Brain Project team (the article wrongly states that the team's name is Human Brain Project). The problem is that the article as well as the people involved with this project use the terms simulation and building almost  interchangeably, which is wrong. To build a brain means to actually construct something that will function as a brain, while simulating means that the team will write software that will function similar to bran. I can imagine that such a simulation could be implemented in an object-oriented way, where each neuron will be simulated by a very complex object. Obviously, all these objects would form a network. Now, how will they respond to external stimuli? Moreover, what will count as an external stimulus? All in all, even the simulation of the brain is a very ambitious project and I don't think we are ready to implement it. 

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A comment on a comment

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Recently, "someone" posted a review of my book on hypercomputation on the Brains site. The reviewer argues that This area is full of problems, some of which are physico/mathematical and some of which are conceptual. Unfortunately, from a quick sample, Syropolous's book does not avoid common mistakes and confusions—some of which I've been trying to correct in my own work. First of all, I have to admit that back in 2004 I read a paper by this reviewer, but at that time I did not considered it interesting. However, after I read this review of my book, I read The Physical Church-Turing Thesis: Modest or Bold? , the reviewer's latest manuscript, in order to see what he meant by common mistakes and confusions and how he was trying to solve them. In this manuscript, the reviewer puts forth a number of criteria that every machine has to satisfy in order to be ``useful for physical computing.'' These criteria are: Readable Inputs and Outputs Process-Independ...
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Is the Universe a Quantum Computer?

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 The idea that the Universe (whatever we may mean by this) is a some sort of a computer is a recurring theme. Recently, Nature published an article by David L. Chandler that is entitled Could the Universe be a giant quantum computer? This article is actually a tribute to Edward Fredkin, who passed away last June. The main contribution of Fredkin to the philosophy of science is his "digital philosophy" that advocates the idea that the universe is a computer and everything in our universe is discrete. I would not like to argue against the validity of these ideas (I have done so in Hypercomputation: Computing Beyond the Church-Turing Barrier and in Demystifying Computation: A Hands-On Introduction ) . However, I would like to point out that if the Universe is not a computing device, in general, then it cannot be a quantum computer, in particular. Also, what I did not like with Chandler's article is that it takes it for granted that the Universe is a computer. He did not e...
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