[MURG] new Road Map draft

[cat13 at illrepute.org]

"king-yin yan" <y.k.y at lycos.com> writes:

> >It might be possible that our current understanding of the brain is
> >comprehensive enough to allow MU (that's what, ahem, the worm project
> >would answer),  IFF we consider solely sudden replacement as opposed to
> >gradual replacement.  If we're talking about gradual replacement, how
> >can we replace parts of the brain without a much stronger understanding
> >of them and how they work than we currently have?  How can we replace
> >a single part of the brain without understanding it?
> 
> I'm surprised by your question -- I think it's been answered in
> the FAQ and is actually fundamental to MU. We don't need to
> understand the brain in too much details (although more
> knowledge won't hurt). Understanding the brain is unlikely to
> reduce the amount of computational power required for WBE.

I agree that we don't need to understand the brain in order to replace it
as a whole.  What I'm less sure about is the claim that we don't need to
understand, say, the hippocampus in order to replace the hippocampus.
To replace brain part FOO, we need to know what it's connected to, how
it's connected, and what outputs it will give in every state for every
input.  The third requirement we can hopefully figure out just by mimicing
its structure on a cellular level, but the first two we need to understand
for every area we replace.