As someone interested in seeing WBE become a reality, I have also been disappointed by the lack of progress. I would like to understand the reasons for this better. So I was interested to read this post, but you seem to be conflating two different things. The difficulty of simulating a worm and the difficulty of uploading a worm. There are a few sentences that hint both are unsolved, but they should be clearly separated.
Uploading a worm requires being able to read the synaptic weights, thresholds, and possibly other details from an individual worm. Note that it isn’t accurate to say it must be alive. It would be sufficient to freeze an individual worm and then spend extensive time and effort reading that information. Nevertheless, I can imagine that might be very difficult to do. According to wormbook.org, C. elegans has on the order of 7,000 synapses. I am not sure we know how to read the weight and threshold of a synapse. This strikes me as a task requiring significant technological development that isn’t in line with existing research programs. That is, most research is not attempting to develop the technology to read specific weights and thresholds. So it would require a significant well-funded effort focused specifically on it. I am not surprised this has not been achieved given reports of lack of funding. Furthermore, I am not surprised there is a lack of funding for this.
Simulating a worm should only require an accurate model of the behavior of the worm nervous system and a simulation environment. Given that all C. elegans have the same 302 neurons this seems like it should be feasible. Furthermore, the learning mechanism of individual neurons, operation of synapses, etc. should all be things researchers outside of the worm emulation efforts should be interested in studying. Were I wanting to advance the state of the art, I would focus on making an accurate simulation of a generic worm that was capable of learning. Then simulate it in an environment similar to its native environment and try to demonstrate that it eventually learned behavior matching real C. elegans including under conditions which C. elegans would learn. That is why I was very disappointed to learn that the “simulations are far from realistic because they are not capable of learning.” It seems to me this is where the research effort should focus and I would like to hear more about why this is challenging and hasn’t already been done.
I believe that worm uploading is not needed to make significant steps toward showing the feasibility of WBE. The kind of worm simulation I describe would be more than sufficient. At that point, reading the weights and thresholds of an individual worm becomes only an engineering problem that should be solvable given a sufficient investment or level of technological advancement.
As someone interested in seeing WBE become a reality, I have also been disappointed by the lack of progress. I would like to understand the reasons for this better. So I was interested to read this post, but you seem to be conflating two different things. The difficulty of simulating a worm and the difficulty of uploading a worm. There are a few sentences that hint both are unsolved, but they should be clearly separated.
Uploading a worm requires being able to read the synaptic weights, thresholds, and possibly other details from an individual worm. Note that it isn’t accurate to say it must be alive. It would be sufficient to freeze an individual worm and then spend extensive time and effort reading that information. Nevertheless, I can imagine that might be very difficult to do. According to wormbook.org, C. elegans has on the order of 7,000 synapses. I am not sure we know how to read the weight and threshold of a synapse. This strikes me as a task requiring significant technological development that isn’t in line with existing research programs. That is, most research is not attempting to develop the technology to read specific weights and thresholds. So it would require a significant well-funded effort focused specifically on it. I am not surprised this has not been achieved given reports of lack of funding. Furthermore, I am not surprised there is a lack of funding for this.
Simulating a worm should only require an accurate model of the behavior of the worm nervous system and a simulation environment. Given that all C. elegans have the same 302 neurons this seems like it should be feasible. Furthermore, the learning mechanism of individual neurons, operation of synapses, etc. should all be things researchers outside of the worm emulation efforts should be interested in studying. Were I wanting to advance the state of the art, I would focus on making an accurate simulation of a generic worm that was capable of learning. Then simulate it in an environment similar to its native environment and try to demonstrate that it eventually learned behavior matching real C. elegans including under conditions which C. elegans would learn. That is why I was very disappointed to learn that the “simulations are far from realistic because they are not capable of learning.” It seems to me this is where the research effort should focus and I would like to hear more about why this is challenging and hasn’t already been done.
I believe that worm uploading is not needed to make significant steps toward showing the feasibility of WBE. The kind of worm simulation I describe would be more than sufficient. At that point, reading the weights and thresholds of an individual worm becomes only an engineering problem that should be solvable given a sufficient investment or level of technological advancement.