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[return to "Cubic millimetre of brain mapped at nanoscale resolution"]
1. posnet+r5[view] [source] 2024-05-09 22:22:39
>>geox+(OP)
1.4 PB/mm^3 (petabytes per millimeter cubed)×1260 cm^3 (cubic centimeters, large human brain) = 1.76×10^21 bytes = 1.76 ZB (zetabytes)
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2. gary17+29[view] [source] 2024-05-09 22:53:25
>>posnet+r5
[AI] "Frontier [supercomputer]: the storage capacity is reported to be up to 700 petabytes (PB)" (0.0007 ZB).

[AI] "The installed base of global data storage capacity [is] expected to increase to around 16 zettabytes in 2025".

Thus, even the largest supercomputer on Earth cannot store more than 4 percent of state of a single human brain. Even all the servers on the entire Internet could store state of only 9 human brains.

Astonishing.

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3. falcor+9b[view] [source] 2024-05-09 23:18:06
>>gary17+29
I appreciate you're running the numbers to extrapolate this approach, but just wanted to note that this particular figure isn't an upper bound nor a longer bound for actually storing the "state of a single human brain". Assuming the intent would be to store the amount of information needed to essentially "upload" the mind onto a computer emulation, we might not yet have all the details we need in this kind of scanning, but once we do, we may likely discover that a huge portion of it is redundant.

In any case, it seems likely that we're on track to have both the computational ability and the actual neurological data needed to create an "uploaded intelligences" sometime over the next decade. Lena [0] tells of the first successfully uploaded scan taking place in 2031, and I'm concerned that reality won't be far off.

[0] https://qntm.org/mmacevedo

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4. RaftPe+yb2[view] [source] 2024-05-10 17:32:40
>>falcor+9b
> In any case, it seems likely that we're on track to have both the computational ability and the actual neurological data needed to create an "uploaded intelligences" sometime over the next decade.

They don't even know how a single neuron works yet. There is complexity and computation at many scales and distributed throughout the neuron and other types of cells (e.g. astrocytes) and they are discovering more relentlessly.

They just recently (last few years) found that dendrites have local spiking and non-linear computation prior to forwarding the signal to the soma. They couldn't tell that was happening previously because the equipment couldn't detected the activity.

They discovered that astrocytes don't just have local calcium wave signaling (local=within the extensions of the cell), they also forward calcium waves to the soma which integrates that information just like a neuron soma does with electricity.

Single dendrites can detect patterns of synaptic activity and respond with calcium and electrical signaling (i.e. when synapse fires in a particular timing sequence, the a signal is forwarded to the soma).

It's really amazing how much computationally relevant complexity there is, and how much they keep adding to their knowledge each year. (I have a file of notes with about 2,000 lines of these types of interesting factoids I've been accumulating as I read).

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