Ciro Santilli invented this term, derived from "hardware in the loop" to refer to simulations in which both the brain and the body and physical world of organism models are modelled.

E.g. just imagine running:

Ciro Santilli invented this term, it refers to mechanisms in which you put an animal in a virtual world that the animal can control, and where you can measure the animal's outputs.

A Drosophila melanogaster has about 135k neurons, and we only managed to reconstruct its connectome in 2023.

The human brain has 86 billion neurons, about 1 million times more. Therefore, it is obvious that we are very very far away from a full connectome.

Instead however, we could look at larger scales of connectome, and then try from that to extract modules, and then reverse engineer things module by module.

This is likely how we are going to "understand how the human brain works".

Some notable connectomes:

Besides the libertarian argument that one has the right to transfer their property to anyone they want, including their family, note that children have been raised and molded by the parent from birth, knowing that they will inherit the family business. As weird as it might seem, simply consider them a continuation of the dead parent; they will now continue administering the business. Then the same arguments as above for respecting private property apply.

This is the most plausible way of obtaining a full connectome looking from 2020 forward. Then you'd observe the slices with an electron microscope + appropriate Staining. Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom (2014) really opened Ciro Santilli's eyes to this possibility.

Once this is done for a human, it will be one of the greatest milestone of humanities, coparable perhaps to the Human Genome Project. BUt of course, privacy issues are incrediby pressing in this case, even more than in the human genome project, as we would essentially be able to read the brain of the person after their death.

As of 2022, the Drosophila connectome had been almost fully extracted.

This is also a possible path towards post-mortem brain reading.

There are several ways to make a profit, life would be pretty boring otherwise. Examples include:

But none of these factors are so powerful that a company in a free market can extract exorbitant profits from a customer unwillingly paying with no better choice. Note that intellectual property would not exist in a libertarian system. Of course, people sometimes buy products/services without doing their due diligence or simply not caring enough about ease of quitting, ease of repair, control, etc., and later face difficulties, but that is simply the consequence of their own decisions.