Some people are inclined to think that computers are ‘incredibly powerful’. This isn’t precisely wrong, per se, but we should bear in mind that accurately simulating the activities of a single cell in our bodies (~37.2 trillion cells) is effectively impossible and would require (for one nanosecond) more computing power than our species has ever produced.
This puts the lie to the idea that we can ‘upload our consciousness’ into a machine… because whatever our consciousness is… it cannot be merely the structure of our bodies and its infinite relationships (nearly all of which are impossible for machines to participate in)… and it certainly cannot be ‘only that which is held within the structure of our brains’. Yet even if this was so, the difference between an organism and a computer is akin to the difference between a galaxy and a sketch of a charred matchstick.
It goes without saying that if we cannot «simulate (and this is not to instance, but merely to represent in a machine) the activities of a single cell… it is absolutely absurd to imagine we can instance »consciousness in a machine… or create a system that would allow us to “upload our minds” (which are not merely our brains or bodies) into some kind of machine.
“Two types of problems appear when one wants to model cellular functions at the atomic scale: practical and theoretical. Let’s evacuate the practical ones, because I think they are insurmountable and therefore less interesting. As of spring 2008, the largest molecular dynamic simulation I heard of involved ~1 million atoms during 50 nanoseconds (molecular dynamics of tobacco mosaic virus capside). Even this simulation used massive power, (>30 years of a desktop CPU). With much smaller systems (10 000 atoms), people succeded to go up to half a millisecond (as of 2008). In terms of spatial size, we are very far from even the smallest cells. The simulation of an E coli sized cell would require to simulate roughly 1 000 000 000 000 atomes, that is 1 million times what we do today. But the problem is that molecular dynamics does not scale linearly. Even with space discretisation, long-range interactions (e.g. electrostatic) mean we would need far more than 1 million times more power, several orders of magnitude more. In addition, we are talking about 50 nanosecond here. To model a simple cellular behaviour, we need to reach the second time scale. So in summary, we are talking about an increase of several orders of magnitude more than 10 to the power of 14. Even if the corrected Moore law (doubling every 2 years) stayed valid, we would be talking of more than a century here, not a couple of decades!”
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