Thank you for this post, it makes things clearer. When I first saw Eon’s post on X, I was uncertain whether a complete connectomic map was enough to generate faithful physical simulations of any living organism. To me, at first, it seemed that it would essentially require a list of the basic computational rules (like ring attractor dynamics) in addition to the connectomics to generate any meaningful behaviour that has not been programmatically hardcoded. But in my opinion, even when those basic computational rules are known, a significant gap to ‘upload’ the fly to a machine might remain, as these rules and meta-rules are themselves governed by physical world interactions between millions of components. To bridge this gap, simulations at different levels of biophysics would be required. For instance, even a relatively simple computation in vision, “opponency”, requires the knowledge of biophysical phenonemon from the synaptic dynamics to receptor-level activity.
At last, this I think, essentially relates to the debate of biological reductionism: how deep do we have to go to write the equation of life?
Thank you for this post, it makes things clearer. When I first saw Eon’s post on X, I was uncertain whether a complete connectomic map was enough to generate faithful physical simulations of any living organism. To me, at first, it seemed that it would essentially require a list of the basic computational rules (like ring attractor dynamics) in addition to the connectomics to generate any meaningful behaviour that has not been programmatically hardcoded. But in my opinion, even when those basic computational rules are known, a significant gap to ‘upload’ the fly to a machine might remain, as these rules and meta-rules are themselves governed by physical world interactions between millions of components. To bridge this gap, simulations at different levels of biophysics would be required. For instance, even a relatively simple computation in vision, “opponency”, requires the knowledge of biophysical phenonemon from the synaptic dynamics to receptor-level activity.
At last, this I think, essentially relates to the debate of biological reductionism: how deep do we have to go to write the equation of life?