Technological progress is many orders of magnitudes faster than evolutionary change; assuming the 'magic' of the brain is indeed in the neural circuity, hardware is expected to be powerful enough to simulate that on a timescale of O(100) years in the future instead of O(10e9).
Of course, it's not a given that simulating connected neurons with action potentials or whatever is sufficient to capture the relevant features of the brain (perhaps long-distance em interactions are relevant? quantum magic? do we need to drop to the molecular level?) - but without proof to the contrary, we'll just have to wait and see.
This is a well-balanced take. Maybe we will see emergent properties at that scale. If that were the case, then we could catch enough of a glimpse of what is really happening...
But another part of me says that is silly. We had an expectation of what the Higgs was before we found it. Here, we are shooting in the dark.
We had an expectation of what the Higgs was before we found it.
However, the standard model (which formed the basis for the prediction of the Higgs boson) was created to bring order to the chaos of unexpected experimentally discovered particles. In the words of I.I. Rabi on the discovery of the muon, "who ordered that?"
Of course, it's not a given that simulating connected neurons with action potentials or whatever is sufficient to capture the relevant features of the brain (perhaps long-distance em interactions are relevant? quantum magic? do we need to drop to the molecular level?) - but without proof to the contrary, we'll just have to wait and see.