(January 29, 2015 at 12:07 am)AFTT47 Wrote: I wonder how far our current technology can take this. Suppose you did this with a higher animal like a mouse. Would you then have a conscious machine?
Just thinking about the memory space needed for the mapping.
Human brain has ~100 billion neurons with each neuron makes over 1000 connections.
A mouse's brain is ~0.03% smaller in mass than a human brain.
If we assume the neurons between mouse and human are rougly the same, then a mouse will have 30 million neurons and 30 billion connections in total. You would need a 64bit integer to give each neuron a unique id. You will also need 64bit integers for each connection. So that is 64*(30 million + 30 billion) ~ 240 GB of memory just to store the map. This doesn't included other variables (like activation thresholds) for processing.
Back to your question, we have 1 TB drives now. So we probably can do the same thing with a mouse as with the worm with our current technology.