- The channel debated how much “visual appearance” of brain tissue (mis-termed “visual phenotype”) actually matters for whole-brain emulation, concluding that static images alone are insufficient; functional data such as synapse-level connectivity graphs, electrophysiological weights, and timing/​latency parameters are essential.  
- Participants noted that despite the above caveat, simulations of visual and auditory cortex based on anatomical and physiological data have successfully reproduced observed neural behavior, suggesting limited but real predictive value of structural scans.  
- Multi-patch-clamp electrophysiology was highlighted as a currently available technique that can map functional connectivity by stimulating one neuron and recording responses across a patch-clamped network, providing higher-resolution data than static imaging.  
- A call was made for a technology roadmap analogous to Whole-Brain Emulation (WBE) but focused on building and gradually replacing biological neurons with artificial ones, emphasizing that preparatory work could begin now and would overlap heavily with WBE research.  
- Practical computational limits were discussed: brute-force physics simulation of an entire brain was deemed infeasible on foreseeable hardware, and participants recommended studying Kurzweil’s estimates and writing simple physics simulators (e.g., a ray-tracer) to grasp scaling issues.  
- Links shared included the Tor Project’s 2015 status update on hidden-service proposals and a Hacker News thread on constraint programming, with side notes that SAT solvers and related techniques are relevant to cryptographic program analysis.