Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston

The fly-like behavior the viewer sees is a product of the body model, not the brain.

The digitized connectome may be producing meaningful internal dynamics, but this demo cannot tell us whether it is.

Heading.

What would actually count as uploading a fly?

So if what Eon built isn't an upload, what would be?

The word upload carries a claim that a model and simulation do not.

When one says they've modeled or simulated a fly, they're saying they've captured some elements of the original insect's behavior, but with significant simplifications and assumptions.

If instead they say they've uploaded a fly, they're making a claim about the fly itself.

That its identity has been faithfully transferred into a new medium, that the thing in the computer in some sense is the fly, just running on a different substrate.

When you upload a photo, the file on your computer is the photo.

Nobody says I've partially uploaded this photo to mean I've made a rough sketch inspired by it.

An uploaded fly, then, should be able to do everything the original fly could do.

It should be playable forward in time indefinitely, responding to novel situations as the original would have.

It should serve as a faithful proxy for the real thing.

So much so that a neuroscientist could peer inside, observe realistic equivalents of neurophysiology, and run experiments that would be impractical or impossible on a biological fly, with confidence that the results would generalize back.

The leading proposal for how to actually achieve this is whole-brain emulation.

Faithfully recreating the brain's causal mechanisms at whatever level of detail turns out to be necessary so that the digital system behaves identically to the original.

This is what distinguishes emulation from simulation.

A weather simulation is useful, it can predict next week's temperature with reasonable accuracy, but it breaks down when pushed further out because its approximations are coarser than the actual atmospheric processes of real weather.

In contrast, one can run an emulation of the Nintendo 64 game Banjo-Kazooie on a laptop, and because the emulator faithfully recreates the logic of the N64's hardware, the processor, the memory, the graphics pipeline, the game will never fail to behave as it would have on the original console.