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Well, that‘ s what he tries to describe (Minsky) in his book, The Society of Mind, I think. .. Anyway, interesting topic. I am just reading a SF book by Greg Egan, Permutation city, where in some near future people will revive a model-of-a-brain gained from detailed brain scan, so that people’s “copies” can gain a sort of immortality after their biological original is dead. The point is, the model is not generated from a molecular DNA or even atomic basis (obeying certain classes of cellular automaton rules to unfold higher levels of organization), the scan goes “only” to the level of individual neurons and the strength of the interconnected synapses (not even that, it can be proven that some approximation to the level of neuronal regions can statistically provide a right output). Therefore, if you want to have a model-of-a-brain running on a computer, the challenge is to interpret functions of the specialized neuronal regions and construct algorithms that run it in a brain-like model. As if a 1000 $ computer can run such an algorithm over such a huge and complex neuronal structure? My answer is yes, possibly, but prolly with a significant time lag for a copy leaving a one minute subjective time for a copy pass several days of our biological brains “real time” processing the data. And in this I have replied to the question if a computer using a Turing machine model can emulate such a model. Yes, since, I believe it has been proven that a Turing machine is a universal computer i.e. it can produce a behaviour that is in a sence arbitraly complex (S. Wolfram et.al). All universal computer models (including Wolfram’s universal cellular automaton) should have this property. It is only a matter of instructions and language used of how the rules to produce desired behavior are executed on such a universal system.

Matus