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Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain

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Re: Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain

#81

Post by dkarl »

10ren wrote: post #50

I'm not so sure about the simulation, but Ray's right that the brain cannot be more complex than the data that specifies it, speaking information-theoretically. A biologist probably wouldn't get this, because he has too much knowledge of how difficult and complex the actual translation is. It's a mathematical idea, like non-constructive proofs, which freak out sensible folk - and rightfully so. ( EDIT no offence inte…

The only other source of information is the non-genomic environment - extra-nucleur DNA like mitochondria, and the womb (which is arguably already specified in the genome, unless mother nature has done a Ken Thompson http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html at some point.)

That just gives you a newborn baby's brain, which is a pretty poor standard for displaying "human" intelligence. If we didn't get any smarter than that, we'd be pretty dumb by animal standards. To get to "human" intelligence, you have to be able to simulate a rich environment for the brain to learn from. You also have to model the growth of the brain and its response to stimulus -- the physics, chemistry, and biochemistry of the brain. DNA doesn't have to do that, because it runs on a platform with that functionality built-in (i.e., the real world.)

Re: Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain

#82

Post by rsheridan6 »

wcoenen wrote: post #52
rsheridan6 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm ignorant of this theory, but reading the link I don't see that it shows that protein folding can't be modeled.

The physics can be modeled, but according to this article ( http://techglimpse.com/index.php/ibms-blue-gene-exploring-pr... ) a 1 petaflops machine is estimated to take 3 years to crunch through 100 microseconds of simulated time. And that's just for a single protein interacting with itself and a bit of water.

That might just mean they haven't found the right algorithm yet.

Re: Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain

#83

Post by orangecat »

cageface wrote: post #46
rsheridan6 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm ignorant of this theory, but reading the link I don't see that it shows that protein folding can't be modeled.

You'd have to read the papers cited below to get the meat of the theory but the gist of it is that you can't model proteins by looking one level down, i.e. by studying only the properties of the atoms that make them up. Proteins have emergent behaviors not entirely predictable from the behaviors of their constituent atoms. Many still believe in the reductionist idea that a perfect understanding of physics would lead…

Proteins have emergent behaviors not entirely predictable from the behaviors of their constituent atoms.

Define "emergent". I can believe that a protein's behavior is extremely sensitive to the initial configuration of its atoms and that as a practical matter we can't (currently?) get detailed enough measurements to predict exactly what's going to happen. But without exceptionally compelling evidence I'm not going to believe that there are different physical laws for proteins than for their atoms.

Re: Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain

#84

Post by aswanson »

getonit wrote: post #26
rsheridan6 wrote: post #16

I don't find these criticisms convincing. We haven't solved the protein folding problem? So solve it. Is there some reason to believe it won't ever be solved? If you had a sufficiently accurate simulation of a cell or organism (which we don't, but we might someday), you could do experiments on it much cheaper and faster than in a lab. I do agree that there's no freakin' way this will be done in ten years, or in the 6…

> We haven't solved the protein folding problem? So solve it. You sir, are a genius. To make up for my previous lack of initiative, I will do so immediately. Please arrange for the world to be ready for my announcement of the solution at noon tomorrow.

Don't even solve it. Just put it up for bid on elance, along with the P-NP problem.

Re: Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain

#85

Post by api »

jasongullickson wrote: post #74
api wrote: post #65

I'm a life-long programmer who presently works in software, but I studied biology in college... mostly because I wanted to learn about learning by studying how living systems do it. Biological systems are nothing like anything we would ever engineer, and to understand them we must remove our "anthropocentric engineer goggles" and look at them for what they are. Analogies between biological systems and computers, soft…

Getting close would take an advancement in computer technology of the magnitude of the transition from vacuum tubes in individual boxes to a 32nm Core i7. ...so about 35 years? ;)

Maybe, though I am concerned about processing power stagnating.

Advancement is governed by economics as well as technical capability. There must be demand for new technology, or a field stagnates. Witness aviation as an example... utterly stagnant outside of military niche applications.

People seem to no longer want faster and faster computers, and the market seems to be moving toward lighter-weight lower-power portable devices like netbooks, the iPad, etc. Those have slower CPUs than current-generation desktops. I suppose the extreme gamer and server/datacenter markets are still driving performance, but for how long?

One problem is that programmers are not using the capabilities of current-generation processors, partly because the dominant OS (cough Windows cough) makes it horrifically painful to deploy desktop apps. This drives all development to the web and turns desktops into thin clients. In the end this kills demand for performance outside the datacenter market.

Re: Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain

#86

Post by chmike »

cageface wrote: post #30
yungchin wrote: post #4

This rant unfortunately fails to clearly demonstrate how Kurzweil errs. It goes on about complexity and emergence, but why would complex interactions not emerge from a computer simulation just as they do in the real biochemical system? Nevertheless, my gut feeling, too, is that Kurzweil is mistaken. I can't quite put a finger on it yet, but at least one problem I see is this: Kurzweil seems to suggest that the observ…

This rant unfortunately fails to clearly demonstrate how Kurzweil errs. It goes on about complexity and emergence, but why would complex interactions not emerge from a computer simulation just as they do in the real biochemical system? Because so far, despite the best efforts of many geniuses and heroic computing resources, our simulations don't even reliably predict the real-world outcomes of far, far simpler system…

BTW how do you define human intelligence ? What is it that we wouldn't be able to construct ?

Put in another way, what construct would qualify as approaching human intelligence ?

Re: Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain

#87

Post by akeefer »

rsaarelm wrote: post #29

Myers is attacking Kurzweil on the assumption that Kurzweil is actually proposing that the brain's structure should be reverse-engineesed from DNA, which would be intractably hard. Only Kurzweil isn't saying this anywhere. Instead, he seems to be using DNA as a measure for the amount of irreducible complexity that needs to go into a system that will end up with the complexity of a human brain. Basically, we have no i…

The argument Myers is making is that while the DNA might be the input to the system, the total amount of data in the system is that input plus the rules around how that input is interpreted/works. Those rules (for example around protein folding) are currently encoded in biological systems as the laws of physics, more or less, but they're insanely complicated and currently unknown.

So the point is that perhaps if you had a system that simulated all of the laws of physics exactly correctly such that proteins folded and interacted exactly right, only then could you get away with an amount of input equivalent to the amount of information encoded in the part of our DNA related to the brain.

Actually encoding those rules is probably the harder part of the problem, and could easily take several orders of magnitude more work. (10x? 1,000,000x? Who even knows).

Re: Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain

#88

Post by api »

Retric wrote: post #79
api wrote: post #65

I'm a life-long programmer who presently works in software, but I studied biology in college... mostly because I wanted to learn about learning by studying how living systems do it. Biological systems are nothing like anything we would ever engineer, and to understand them we must remove our "anthropocentric engineer goggles" and look at them for what they are. Analogies between biological systems and computers, soft…

I think DNA is actually best described as a 1970's era binary in a running mainframe. It rewrites its own source code depending on outside information. And in order to understand what happens you need to look at a core dump that includes all the interesting bit's floating around and attacking/enveloping the DNA. PS: Don't forget this source code has been hot patched ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patch_(computing)#Ho…

Not too bad, but sort of like trying to describe an elephant as a bunch of balloons and a water hose glued onto a bail of hay on a table.

I also dislike those sorts of analogies because they are loaded with aesthetic value judgements that do not apply. Programming code that looked like that would be ugly. The genetic system is beautiful and elegant.

Re: Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain

#89

Post by rsheridan6 »

cageface wrote: post #46
rsheridan6 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm ignorant of this theory, but reading the link I don't see that it shows that protein folding can't be modeled.

You'd have to read the papers cited below to get the meat of the theory but the gist of it is that you can't model proteins by looking one level down, i.e. by studying only the properties of the atoms that make them up. Proteins have emergent behaviors not entirely predictable from the behaviors of their constituent atoms. Many still believe in the reductionist idea that a perfect understanding of physics would lead…

I'm out of my depth here, but if protein folding is intractable like the halting problem or the traveling salesman problem, as you're making it seem, I find it odd that I haven't read that elsewhere.

Re: Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain

#90

Post by jerf »

dkarl wrote: post #81
10ren wrote: post #50

I'm not so sure about the simulation, but Ray's right that the brain cannot be more complex than the data that specifies it, speaking information-theoretically. A biologist probably wouldn't get this, because he has too much knowledge of how difficult and complex the actual translation is. It's a mathematical idea, like non-constructive proofs, which freak out sensible folk - and rightfully so. ( EDIT no offence inte…

The only other source of information is the non-genomic environment - extra-nucleur DNA like mitochondria, and the womb (which is arguably already specified in the genome, unless mother nature has done a Ken Thompson http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html at some point.) That just gives you a newborn baby's brain, which is a pretty poor standard for displaying "human" intelligence. If we didn't get any smarter th…

Yes, but it gives you the newborn baby's brain in toto, including its ability to grow up into a normal adult human. If you get to newborn's brain you are 99.9% of the way there from the AI side. By the time we get there, feeding it stimulus will be a relatively simple problem by comparison.
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