What are you going to simulate? [Pharyngula]

The EU is sinking €1.2bn (and the US is proposing to spend more, $3 billion) into a colossal project to build a supercomputer simulation of the human brain. To which I say, “What the hell? We aren’t even close to building such a thing for a fruit fly brain, and you want to do that for an even more massive and poorly mapped structure? Madness!” It turns out that I’m not the only one thinking this way: European scientists are exasperated with the project.

"The main apparent goal of building the capacity to construct a larger-scale simulation of the human brain is radically premature," Peter Dayan, director of the computational neuroscience unit at UCL, told the Guardian.

"We are left with a project that can’t but fail from a scientific perspective. It is a waste of money, it will suck out funds from valuable neuroscience research, and would leave the public, who fund this work, justifiably upset," he said.

There is a place for Big Science. I’d suggest that when you’re at the preliminary exploratory stage, as we are with human brain function, it’s better to fund many small exploratory parties to map out the terrain, rather than launching a huge invasion with charts that are made out of speculation. We know a computer simulation is going to fail, because we don’t know what it’s going to simulate. So why are they doing this? Maybe it’s a question of who “they” are.

Alexandre Pouget, a signatory of the letter at Geneva University, said that while simulations were valuable, they would not be enough to explain how the brain works. "There is a danger that Europe thinks it is investing in a big neuroscience project here, but it’s not. It’s an IT project," he said. "They need to widen the scope and take advantage of the expertise we have in neuroscience. It’s not too late. We can fix it. It’s up to Europe to make the right decision."

I’ve noticed this, that a lot of gung-ho futurists and computer scientist types have this very naive vision of how the brain works — it’s just another computer. We can build those. Build a big enough computer, and it’ll be just like the brain. Nope. That’s operating on ignorance. And handing ignorant people billions of dollars to implement a glorious model of their ignorance is an exercise in futility.