Artificial Brains and Understanding Consciousness

AI research is advancing at a staggering rate. Mapping the brain of rats and other mammals down to individual neuron level is happening and it could be a key step to understanding the great mystery that is the human consciousness. So we are not only building artificial brains but also trying to better them by reverse engineering real ones.

Earlier this year, a team of researchers at Caltech used monkeys to gain insight on how facial recognition works in our brains and discovered that it only takes 200 neurons to encode a complete face and completely reverse engineered the process.

Please also take the time to watch this fascinating talk by David Cox, which inspired this blog post: