Brain-building

March 3, 2007

Reports keep coming on the efforts of some of our smartest people to reverse engineer the brain – the so-called Human Cognome Project. This one in Wired describes a Silicon Valley entrepreneur’s project to rebuild it from the bottom up. There is little doubt that the results of these ventures will present us humans with our biggest challenges ever – if only we can begin to frame the questions we need to start answering. It doesn’t help that there is seemingly no-one at the highest level in public life who is taking them seriously. If the human brain is going to save itself from being copied and “improved” by machine intelligence it is going to have to get much more focused on the policy dimensions of cognitive science.