Death can be delayed by uploading a person's consciousness to 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 aplasia snail (Aplysia californica): in response to even a light touch, it pulls in the siphon strongly. When RNA from the nerve nodes of this mollusk was injected into the nervous system of an untrained individual, it began to respond to irritating stimuli in a similar way.
So scientists have proven 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 person, onto an external medium (be it a living being or a computer).
Aplysia californica became the first living creature with transplanted memories.
Brain and supercomputers
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Snails are easier to experiment with: the nervous system of Aplysia californica consists of only a few thousand large neurons that are easy to isolate. That is why scientists consider it the best model for studying the brain and memory. A person has about 86 billion neurons, and between them - 150 trillion synapses.
Each synapse has about a thousand molecular triggers. If you think of 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 supercomputer Summit, launched in the US in June this year, has just 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 not appear until 2111. Renowned inventor Ray Kurzweil is more optimistic. In his book "The Singularity is Near," he writes that a computer capable of simulating the human brain in full will be created by 2025.
The pursuit of artificial intelligence
Today, two large projects are being implemented in the world, the main goal of which is a functioning computer model of the brain. As part of the first - Brain Blue Gene, launched back in 2005, researchers have created an artificial analogue of the rat's neocortex (part of the cerebral cortex), consisting of 31 thousand neurons. It took ten years and all the computing power of the Blue Gene supercomputer (209 teraflops), developed by IBM specifically for this project, to model a small area of a rat brain (only 0.29 cubic millimeters in volume) and simulate its work.
Thanks to this model, neurophysiologists have found that connections between neurons are formed both in a random order 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 within a particular layer of the cortex. It is enough to place neurons of a certain type in the appropriate layers, taking into account their density and the required number. This will greatly facilitate the creation of a computer model of the human brain in the future.
Simulation of electrical activity in a virtual slice of a part of a rat brain.
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. A working model of the human brain is slated to 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. Based on the results obtained, the researchers hope to recreate the entire brain of a rodent, and subsequently a person.
The neurophysiologist Henry Markram, who heads both the Brain Blue Gene and the Human Brain Project, in an article published last year suggested that "trying to calculate how long it will take us to recreate the brain down to every molecule" was proposed in an article published last year. The main reason is still the same - insufficient computing power of modern supercomputers.
To simulate the activity of the human brain in such detail, you need iottaflops of power 10 to the 24th power of operations per second, and the capabilities of current machines, measured in hundreds of petaflops (10 to the 15th power of operations per second), are enough only for a rough simulation of the worm's nervous system Rotifera, consisting of the epopharyngeal ganglion and several nerve trunks.
Eternal life of consciousness
Accurate computer simulations of the human brain will allow scientists to better understand the principles by which it operates and to understand the mechanisms of development of mental disorders. In addition, the artificial analog will be an ideal subject for testing new therapies and drugs. It will probably even be possible to completely abandon animal testing.
The creation of postneocortex technologies is not far off, Markov believes. A huge neocortex can be connected to the human neocortex, surpassing the natural neocortex in the brain in size, the number of cells and synapses. In this case, human consciousness will be based on a combined substrate consisting of a biological brain and an artificial neural network. After the death of its biological part, the artificial one will continue to exist without serious losses to the personality. Probably, so people will be able to postpone the inevitable death.
Alfiya Enikeeva
