MIND-controlling implants, plug-in memory chips for people, artificial brains made entirely of silicon: it is no accident that such inventions have become staples of science fiction. In one way or another, they all offer a handy way to raise impossibly big questions about the nature of consciousness, free will, individual identity and what it means to be human.
At first glance, the news that scientists in California have built a silicon-chip replica of the brain’s hippocampus seems to raise similar questions, except that this device is real (see “The world’s first brain prosthesis”). The project’s highly respectable, if ambitious,…
