The brain is a multilevel control organ, with specific areas for different functions. eg Motor reflex - spinal cord, Motor control hind brain, emotion midbrain, thinking consciousness forebrain etc.
Duplicating it fully would be unnecessary. Since all the simple autonomic processes can currently be easily modeled in electronics, the key goal would be to mimic thought, memory and consciousness. This does not necessarily require the assembly of an exact instantaneous MRI synaptic scan and reconstuction of an entire human brain ie trying to duplicate the biological snapshot.
When I was studying biochemistry, the concept that one could change DNA amazed me. The problem was that inorder to do this one would have to alter the DNA of the fertilized egg at conception to address the "down the track"problem in the adult. It seem theoretically feasible but it would not help me, as I was well past the bastula stage. Some time later the Plasmid was found to be an amazing tool that allowed us to insert New DNA into many mature cells and achieve this type of change.
What appeared way out of reach 10 years earlier had suddenly become almost mundane.
Like wise, if a model was developed that is even as sophisticated as a snail brain (3 ganglia of about 100 neurons), then that would be a first step.
I believe that would be easily achievable with today's technology. As we move up the evolutionary ladder the brain gains more complexity, however the basic subunits are relatively simple but the number and type of interconnections is very large and complex.
This complexity eventually leads as one possible outcome, consciousness.
I would suggest a neurone is basically an on/off switch, like a transistor whose on or off state is controlled by a signal input. In a transistor there is generally only one input, a neuron may have ten thousand from other neuronal axons. More than a simple switch a neuron is a smart switch. It can sum up and assess all its inputs before it decides to fire up its axon.
I would therefore suggest an analogous model to any brain, maybe the internet where the home PC represents an individual neuron and the internet is the complex connections equivalent to the axons and dendrites of the neuronal mass. This again is achievable today and is a technique of parallel computing used by groups such as SETI, where PCs across the world are working together to solve complex data problems, helping search the universe for intelligent signals in an ocean of natural noise.
So by connecting vast numbers of computers with complex interconnections to millions of other computers. The tools are in place today, and getting faster and more powerful by the hour. The tricky bit now is to create the software that kicks it off.This may be deliberately written, legitaimately or by a hacker, or perhaps a virus, or just a gliche in the code. The point is like evolution we can have a lot of experiments happen very quickly.
This means the system is now in a situation to rapidly try many combinations and permutations until some thing turns up. Having the components in place and an evolutionary software process, so it is not necessarily required to perfectly replicate a brain in its entirety, to prove the point. Now I am not saying this will happen. It may never happen, but with SETI type parallel processing already going on then I believe there is a REAL possibility and an inevitability of an analogous machine consciousness awareness.
So it may never happen but it is very feasible in my opinion.
Cheers
