Computer simulation of the brain

Question

I've been hunting on the net periodically for several months for an answer to this with no joy. Grateful if anyone can shed any light..

I'm interested in work that's been done on simulating the human brain. I could of course mean many things by that. Here's what I do mean, followed by what I don't mean:

I AM interested in simulations of how we think and feel. I'm not talking about down to the level of neurons, but more simulation of the larger modules that are involved. For example one might simulate the 'anger' module as a service that measures the degree one has been disrespected (in some system of representation) and outputs an appropriate measure of anger (again in some system of representation).

I am NOT interested in projects like the Blue Brain etc, where accurate models of neuron clusters are being built. I'm interested in models operating at much higher levels of abstraction, on the level of emotional modules, cognitive reasoning systems etc.

I'm also NOT interested in AI projects that take as their inspiration or paradigm human mechanisms, like Belief-Desire-Intention systems, but which are not actually trying to replicate human behavior. Interesting though these systems are, I'm not interested in making effective systems, but effectively modelling human thought and emotion.

I've been searching far and wide, but all I've found are papers from the 60s like this one: Computer Simulation of Human Interaction in Small Groups

It almost appears to me as if psychologists were excited by simulating brains when computers were first available, but now don't do it at all?

Can anyone point me in the direction of more recent research/efforts, if there have been any?

Answer 1

There are a lot of people who've given it some thought, but one of the problems is that as AI research as continued, it seems increasingly that AI leads us to think certain things are actually relatively easy that seemed hard, while the apparently east stuff is what is hard.

Consider, for example, what an expert does in some field of discourse. We used to think, in the 60's or so, that things like medical diagnosis and chess playing were hard. We now know that as far as anyone can tell, they are simple search problems; it just happens that the meat computer does search relatively fast and with a lot of parallelism.

There are a number of people, like Jeff Hawkins, who are taking a different approach, and think simulation of the brain is the only way to get something more like what we mean by "thinking"; if they're right, then you're making a category error by saying those don't interest you.

The worst problem with the whole issue is that it appears increasingly difficult to say what we mean when we say we "think and feel" at all. John Searle, with his "Chinese Room" analogy, would argue that it's actually not possible for a mechanism to "think" or "be conscious". On the other hand, Alan Turing, with the famous Turing Test, proposed a weaker definition: for Turing, if you can't tell the difference between a "really" thinking and feeling being and a computer simulation of one, then you must assume the simulation is a "thinking and feeling" being.

I tend to come down on Turing's side: after all, I don't know that anyone but me is " really" a thinking and feeling being. (To think about that question, look into the idea of a "philosophical zombie", which isn't -- as you might suspect -- a member of the Undead who wonders if there is Meaning in the eating of brains, but instead is a hypothetical entity that isn't conscious, but that perfectly simulates a conscious entity.)

So here's a suggestion: first, think of a way to test, with an effective computation (that is, a halting program or a sequence of tests that is sure to come to a conclusion) if you have really implemented something that can "think and feel"; once you do that, you'll be a long way toward thinking about how to build it.

Answer 2

You might be interested in work on Affective Computing:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affective_computing

http://affect.media.mit.edu/

http://psychometrixassociates.com/bio.htm

Answer 3

you should take a look into neural networks if you haven't already.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_network