Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain • Hacker News Board

Re: Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain

#161

Post by zoomzoom » Tue, Aug 17, 2010, 7:44 PM UTC

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…

Look - all the talk of the brain as a "quantum computer" seems to be more full of "bull" than the talk of mind uploading and 700 year lifespans. Quantum interactions happen in all matter that we observe, so they happen in the brain. There is not that much more to it. Neural computation depends on neurons and synapses, communicating with hormones and electrical impulses. If we can model the significant algorithms and feedback loops that determine these interactions, we can model the brain. No quantum computing is needed.

Kurzweil himself would admit that we do not know the details of how all of our technology works. Humans at this point understand very little about atomic physics (we still account for the majority of mass by calling it dark matter and hiding it in a formula constant) yet we can produce atomic explosions. I think that one thing alot of people are missing here is that you only need very little theory before you can apply it. Understanding WHY the theory works is a much harder problem, unfortunately.

Re: Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain

#162

Post by Estragon » Tue, Aug 17, 2010, 7:50 PM UTC

zoomzoom wrote: post #161

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…

Look - all the talk of the brain as a "quantum computer" seems to be more full of "bull" than the talk of mind uploading and 700 year lifespans. Quantum interactions happen in all matter that we observe, so they happen in the brain. There is not that much more to it. Neural computation depends on neurons and synapses, communicating with hormones and electrical impulses. If we can model the significant algorithms and…

As far as I know, Roger Penrose first proposed the idea that quantum effects on neural processes will make computational modeling of said processes impossible. It is highly speculative, and the strongest evidence it's got going for it is that an eminent physicist wrote a book based on it (The Emperor's New Mind.)

Re: Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain

#163

Post by ewjordan » Tue, Aug 17, 2010, 7:53 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #154

ewjordan wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely, I never said that I think modeling the brain would be easy (I don't) or that building it up from DNA is anywhere near the best way to attempt AI (IMO it's not). I simply don't buy the argument that the algorithms of cognition inherit any substantial amount of functionality from their physical implementation, and hence, I see Kurzweil's complexity estimate as somewhat reasonable.

> I simply don't buy the argument that the algorithms of cognition inherit any substantial amount of functionality from their physical implementation I'm somewhere in the middle on that. I wish for things biological to be clear-cut and deterministic enough that we can fully understand them the way we understand mechanical systems. But precisely because the brain is encoded in precious little DNA there is some evidenc…

FWIW, I'm not too far away from you on this - I don't think we are going to find a very simple algorithm to do whatever general pattern recognition the brain does. All indications suggest that while there may be such an algorithm programmed in and repeated (a lot more times in humans than other animals), it's far too complex for us to simply read off or guess at.

But it does suggest that we should be considering the functions that such higher level units might have, such that they become more intelligent as we compose them. Easier said than done,of course, especially since it's very difficult to actually observe brain dynamics in any detail.

Re: Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain

#164

Post by zoomzoom » Tue, Aug 17, 2010, 7:55 PM UTC

Estragon wrote: post #162

zoomzoom wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look - all the talk of the brain as a "quantum computer" seems to be more full of "bull" than the talk of mind uploading and 700 year lifespans. Quantum interactions happen in all matter that we observe, so they happen in the brain. There is not that much more to it. Neural computation depends on neurons and synapses, communicating with hormones and electrical impulses. If we can model the significant algorithms and…

As far as I know, Roger Penrose first proposed the idea that quantum effects on neural processes will make computational modeling of said processes impossible. It is highly speculative, and the strongest evidence it's got going for it is that an eminent physicist wrote a book based on it ( The Emperor's New Mind. )

Penrose certainly popularized the idea. Kurzweil addresses this issue in his book "The Singularity is Near."

Re: Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain

#165

Post by btilly » Tue, Aug 17, 2010, 7:56 PM UTC

api wrote: post #152

barmstrong wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly what I was thinking. Actually, if that last shift took 35 years, the next one of that magnitude will be even faster. This is Kurtzweil's fundamental insight: exponential growth is faster than people realize. We consistently underestimate it because our brains are pre-disposed to think linearly. If it takes you 1 year to solve 1% of a problem, your brain feels like you're 99 years away. In reality, you…

Where that falls down is that it fails to consider limits. Exponential growth cannot continue forever. At some point, something will limit it. It may be a physical limit, a supply-side resource limit, or an economic demand limit, but there will be a limit somewhere. Without limits, a single bacterium could fill the entire universe in a few years. Sometimes things do grow like that for a while, but Kurzweil's attempt…

True. However decades long periods of exponential improvement in technology is the norm, not the exception. The most spectacular example is Moore's law, but it is hardly alone. If you read The Innovator's Dilemma you will find plenty of other examples, ranging from the maximum range of a steam ship to the volume of dirt a backhoe can scoop per hour.

The interesting questions are how much computing power you need to perform equivalent tasks to a human brain, and whether current technology will reach that before it plateau's out.

Re: Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain

#166

Post by wihon » Tue, Aug 17, 2010, 7:58 PM UTC

kragen wrote: post #158

wihon wrote: post #31

His last comment, The media will not end their infatuation with this pseudo-scientific dingbat chimes with the large majority of bold scientific claims that appear in the press. For example, not that long ago the press jumped on Craig Venter's ( http://bit.ly/uEC5 ) 'artificial cell' ( http://bit.ly/c27AL5 ), hailing it as the beginning of man-made organisms and making bold predictions about the future of life itself…

The artificial-cell experiment was pretty interesting. It demonstrated that epigenetic information is not necessary for a viable cell. More than that, though, it's a "hello, world" — although the cell itself didn't do anything useful, now we have the compiler working, albeit expensively. Now we can do experiments like the following: - removing introns entirely to see if that damages viability; - inserting the gene yo…

It was definitely interesting, but it wasn't the breakthrough it was hyped-up to be. Seeing it as a 'hello world' is a cool idea, though. The hardware of the cell was ready and waiting. So Venter and his team rewrote an old program and gave it a spin. Nice.

This is more likely a lack of understanding on my part, but I'm not sure where epigenetics comes into it? The majority of the cell components - i.e. all the organelles, chemicals, etc - were already present and arranged in the 'surrogate' cell. So all the 'epigenetic' stuff was already in place. But please correct me if I'm wrong.

Not so sure about the random splicing part, either. Food manufacturers have been inserting genes into specific places on bacterial plasmids for a long a time, using directors like codon relationships and ionic interactions. Again - if I'm outta line... :)

Re: Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain

#167

Post by pjscott » Tue, Aug 17, 2010, 8:00 PM UTC

aswanson wrote: post #120

ewjordan wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DNA is not a program-- it is a molecule, and one that may very well do things at the quantum level that are biologically important. Sure, but Kurzweil's claim is merely that if DNA can encode everything the brain does with N bits of information, then regardless of how the DNA behaves, we have at least a loose estimate of the level of complexity in the brain. I don't necessarily think that he's right that AI will firs…

if DNA can encode everything the brain does with N bits of information, then regardless of how the DNA behaves, we have at least a loose estimate of the level of complexity in the brain Non sequitur. Solution to unified field theory. That's about 32 bytes of information, uncompressed. There, since that statement is so low in information content, it must be easy to find. We have a loose estimate of it's complexity wit…

The problem here is that an adult brain has a much higher Kolmogorov complexity than the DNA that codes for its parts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity

Re: Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain

#168

Post by api » Tue, Aug 17, 2010, 8:08 PM UTC

zoomzoom wrote: post #161

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…

Look - all the talk of the brain as a "quantum computer" seems to be more full of "bull" than the talk of mind uploading and 700 year lifespans. Quantum interactions happen in all matter that we observe, so they happen in the brain. There is not that much more to it. Neural computation depends on neurons and synapses, communicating with hormones and electrical impulses. If we can model the significant algorithms and…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

What if the background stuff that you neglect from your model is where all the interesting stuff happens?

Some people see the philosophical zombie as an argument against consciousness being material at all. I don't really see that, but I do see it as an argument against the idea that you can achieve sentience by emulating a coarse-grained approximation of the brain. I think you would have to either really totally understand the brain or harness evolution and let it build you a sentient being whose structure captures the essence of organic life within whatever its embodiment happens to be. You might end up with something that looks nothing like the brain superficially, but that embodies what the brain does somehow.

Re: Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain

#169

Post by pjscott » Tue, Aug 17, 2010, 8:33 PM UTC

yungchin wrote: post #33

mechanical_fish wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why would complex interactions not emerge from a computer simulation One answer is "They will, and surprisingly quickly. But they will be a completely different set of complex interactions than are observed in the real world, because of some roundoff error in the binary representation of the N th digit of some apparently unimportant constant. Unfortunately, because the system is complex, you'll probably spend the res…

As for the first answer: we all have to learn to deal with roundoff error. That's not by principle an obstacle. The other answer contains an implicit assumption that's not obviously correct: you suggest that complexity only arises when you enumerate every possible dimension of phase space. But physical simulations have been very successful at reproducing complex behaviour from simple rules, without taking into accoun…

Biological systems are approximate. I would assume that they can deal with a little rounding error.

Re: Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain

#170

Post by pjscott » Tue, Aug 17, 2010, 8:39 PM UTC

cryptoz wrote: post #9

tiles wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard him give the same talk at several different conferences, several of them unrelated (Entrepreneurship conferences, Blackberry conferences, etc.) Talk about exponential progress, Singularity U, mind uploading, and his belief he'll survive to be 700 years old. He's a bag of fantastic claims and an excellent speaker, and it embodies a lot of the best hopes of technology of the present age, as well as our colle…

> and population growth doesn't slow. Population growth is slowing. Dramatically. There's tons of evidence that as women are educated, they will have fewer children. And women are starting to get better educations all around the world. There's absolutely no doubt that population growth will slow (slash, is already slowing down) a bunch in the coming decades. Second, I'm confused about the 700 number. Where does that…

As you decrease your chances of dying from old age, disease, etc., then injury will become the limiting factor on longevity. Even someone who never ages and never becomes sick will have trouble surviving a fall off a cliff, or being shot in the head.