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This is: Whole Brain Emulation: No Progress on C. elgans After 10 Years, published by niconiconi on the LessWrong.
Since the early 21st century, some transhumanist proponents and futuristic researchers claim that Whole Brain Emulation (WBE) is not merely science fiction - although still hypothetical, it's said to be a potentially viable technology in the near future. Such beliefs attracted significant fanfare in tech communities such as LessWrong.
In 2011 at LessWrong, jefftk did a literature review on the emulation of a worm, C. elegans, as an indicator of WBE research progress.
Because the human brain is so large, and we are so far from having the technical capacity to scan or emulate it, it's difficult to evaluate progress. Some other organisms, however, have much smaller brains: the nematode C. elegans has only 302 cells in its entire nervous system. It is extremely well studied and well understood, having gone through heavy use as a research animal for decades. Since at least 1986 we've known the full neural connectivity of C. elegans, something that would take decades and a huge amount of work to get for humans. At 302 neurons, simulation has been within our computational capacity for at least that long. With 25 years to work on it, shouldn't we be able to 'upload' a nematode by now?
There were three research projects from the 1990s to the 2000s, but all are dead-ends that were unable to reach the full research goals, giving a rather pessimistic vision of WBE. However, immediately after the initial publication of that post, LW readers Stephen Larson (slarson) & David Dalrymple (davidad) pointed out in the comments that they were working on it, the two ongoing new projects of their own made the future look promising again.
The first was the OpenWorm project, coordinated by slarson. Its goal is to create a complete model and simulation of C. elegans, and to release all tools and data as free and open source software. Implementing a structural model of all 302 C. elegans neurons in the NeuroML description language was an early task completed by the project.
The next was another research effort at MIT by davidad. David explained that the OpenWorm project focused on anatomical data from dead worms, but very little data exists from living animals' cells. They can't tell scientists about the relative importance of connections between neurons within the worm's neural system, only that a connection exists.
The "connectome" of C. elegans is not actually very helpful information for emulating it. Contrary to popular belief, connectomes are not the biological equivalent of circuit schematics. Connectomes are the biological equivalent of what you'd get if you removed all the component symbols from a circuit schematic and left only the wires. Good luck trying to reproduce the original functionality from that data.
What you actually need is to functionally characterize the system's dynamics by performing thousands of perturbations to individual neurons and recording the results on the network, in a fast feedback loop with a very very good statistical modeling framework which decides what perturbation to try next.
With optogenetic techniques, we are just at the point where it's not an outrageous proposal to reach for the capability to read and write to anywhere in a living C. elegans nervous system, using a high-throughput automated system. It has some pretty handy properties, like being transparent, essentially clonal, and easily transformed. It also has less handy properties, like being a cylindrical lens, being three-dimensional at all, and having minimal symmetry in its nervous system. However, I am optimistic that all these problems can be overcome by suitably clever optical and computational tricks.
In a year or two, he believed an automated device can be built to gather such dat...
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