When it Comes to Understanding Human-Level Intelligence and Consciousness, the Blue Brain Project is a Prodigious Waste of Time
You've probably seen at least snippets in the media about BBP, a joint research venture by Switzerland's Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) and IBM Research. From a business perspective, BBP is for IBM a win-win venture. [Despite the fact that the grand goals of the project are -- as I shall explain -- provably unreachable, technological spinoffs will be myriad, and from a marketing standpoint Big Blue's research arm continues to be, well, just simply cool -- especially when you consider that another project (which I believe *will* succeed in revealing aspects of human-level intelligence) is underway: "Watson" (http://www.research.ibm.com/deepqa) .] But from the perspective of human-level intelligence and consciousness, BBP is irrelevant -- which is to say: it will shed no light on, let alone support the robust digital simulation or replication of, these phenomena. Why? There are many reasons; three are discussed in this presentation: (1) Human-level intelligence consists in no small part in (sometimes infinitary) abstract thought the nature of which is not reducible to the behavior of small physical objects (like molecules and cells). (2) Human-level consciousness is not reducible to *any* physical process, period. (3) A cluster of highly relevant theorems spells bad news for BBP. The import of this cluster is that studying the computations of a computing machine is insufficient to determine what functions this machine is computing.