The approach was tremendously simple and totally naive, but it was still interesting. At the time a supercomputer could simulate the full brain of a flatworm. We then simply applied a Moore's law-esque approach of assuming simulation capacity can double every 1.5-2 years (I forget the time period we used), and mapped out different animals that we had the capability to simulate on each date. We showed years for a field mouse, a corvid, a chimp, and eventually a human brain. The date we landed on was 2047.
There are so many things wrong with that approach I can't even count, but I'd be kinda smitten if it ended up being correct.
We can't even simulate all of the chemical processes inside a single cell. We don't even know all of the chemical processes. We don't know the function of most proteins.
You might be right, but this is the kind of hubris that is often embarrassing in hindsight. Like when Aristotle thought the brain was a radiator.
As long as it's modern scientific evidence and not a 2,300 year old anecdote, of course.
> Neurons do not work alone. Instead, they depend heavily on non-neuronal or “glia” cells for many important services including access to nutrition and oxygen, waste clearance, and regulation of the ions such as calcium that help them build up or disperse electric charge.
That's exactly what homeostatisis is but we don't simulate astrocyte mitochondria to understand what effect they have on another neuron's activation. They are independent. Otherwise, biochemistry wouldn't function at all.
> they showed in live, behaving animals that they could enhance the response of visual cortex neurons to visual stimulation by directly controlling the activity of astrocytes.
Perhaps we're talking past each other, but I thought you were implying that since some function supports homeostasis, we can assume it doesn't matter to a larger computation, and don't need to model it. That's not true with astrocytes, and I wouldn't be surprised if we eventually find out that other biological functions (like "junk DNA") fall into that category as well.
I was only referring to the internal processes of a cell. We don't need to simulate 90+% of the biochemical processes in a neuron to get an accurate simulation of that neuron - if we did it'd pretty much fuck up our understanding of every other cell because most cells share the same metabolic machinery.
The characteristics of the larger network and which cells are involved is an open question in neuroscience and it's largely an intractable problem as of this time.