It reminds me of some bosses I've had who defined applications and declared them ready for marketing, except for a small matter of programming.
What exactly does a neuron do? Aside from doing a bit of electrochemical switching, we know it alters its behavior in subtle ways in response to the chemistry of the brain. It is certain that chemical changes are an integral part of computation in the brain. They determine what gets remembered and what gets forgotten. They steer solutions to complex problems like what to do about the tiger that is circling you.
Mimicking all this in silicon will be a formidable problem. You would have to copy all the turtles, all the way down.
Obviously, this is purely hypothetical, but I don't see how imagining hypothetical solutions to hypothetical problems is beyond the pale. Every path begins not with the first step, but with someone imagining the journey ;)
Mimicking all this in silicon will be a formidable problem. You would have to copy all the turtles, all the way down.
Well, not exactly. I would suggest that you might be able to obviate all that by treating each neuron as a black box. You don't know what's in there, so there's no point in trying to perfectly replicate each and every aspect of a neuron. Rather, simply emulating how the neuron interacts with the outside world might be enough - I suspect that it's the way the aggregate collection of neurons interacts together that makes you "you", not something about the way each individual piece is made.
By way of an analogy, my quartz watch and my grandmother's hundred-year-old cuckoo clock are radically different from each other on the inside, and yet the core function of both - telling time - is essentially identical as far as everyone else is concerned. If I took out the gears and weights and springs from the inside of the cuckoo clock, and replaced it with silicon and a battery and an electric motor designed to act like a cuckoo clock, would anyone in your house even notice?