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Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain

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Re: Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain

#181

Post by borisk »

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…

So much nonsense in one place ...

>>Biological systems are nothing like anything we would ever engineer

You really believe, you can predict what human technology will look like in 50, 100, 10000000 years?

>>DNA is not a program

A hard disk platter is not a program.

>>Nature has had billions of years, and it is way ahead of us.

That's why birds are so much faster than planes.

>>Cells are not machines..."stochastic quantum probability field device."

All modern computers are quantum machines.

>>Biology is quantum-scale nanotechnology

And so is today electronics.

Re: Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain

#183

Post by Retric »

api wrote: post #142
sliverstorm wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The genetic system is beautiful and elegant. Only because you don't have to maintain it

That's what's so beautiful and elegant about it. When "executed" it evolves, so it maintains itself.

The better you understand the way DNA works the less elegant it looks. It's a steaming pile of Hacks on top of Hacks and frighteningly buggy.

This encodes protean X, however it only folds up correctly 15% of the time. However, Y bumps things up to 70% and Z get's you to 90%. The other 10% well that depends on the shape some of these are used by Z to do... Why do we know this? Well both Y and Z are defective 2-3 percent of the time resulting in... etc.

PS: Don't get me wrong the happy path works well most of the time and when it fails early it's just a non viable embryo so no problem. However, saying it's elegant is like saying all airplanes in the sky must be easy to maintain because you never see anyone outside fixing them.

Re: Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain

#184

Post by 10ren »

jacquesm wrote: post #132
jasongullickson wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? ;)

Or 500, or 10,000, who is to know. The problem is that the way the brain seems to be organized is around very simple (at face value) processing components that operate at a ridiculously low frequency in a massive parallel manner that we programmers can only dream of, at a power budget that would make Ebenhaezer Scrooge look very happy indeed. If 35 years (according to Henry Makram, linked below it's only a decade) wa…

The "simulate at reduced speed" theory appeals to me, but I think the actual numbers make it implausible. Assuming Moore's Law, 30 years is a 1,000,000 speed up, plus let's say 4.5 years for 3 more doublings, giving us 8,000,000. To simulate 1 second would take 3 months. Debugging would be frustrating. (assuming 35 years from now; seems an arbitrary figure.)

Re: Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain

#185

Post by DougBTX »

api wrote: post #160
bsaunder wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No a Java program requires an environment to run, so does a brain . It's just that a brain alters it's behavior and structure as a result of processing inputs (development). We don't (normally) write Java programs to change their behavior as they process information from their environment during execution.

You're confusing literal translation with development. Here's a very loose conceptual analogy: Translation: translating Lord of the Rings into Chinese. Development: hearing a short plot synopsis of Lord of the Rings and writing your own fantasy novel based on the same theme. Development really does do something analogous to that. It takes a collection of proteins and rules and, through embodiment within the laws of p…

Hand waving: the adult brain is the output of running a program stored in DNA for twenty years on a runtime (the physical universe) we can barley understand. To produce a brain from the data stored in DNA, we would need to simulate the runtime environment. To do that without simulating the whole universe, we would need to work out which subset of the universe to simulate. We are far away from knowing what shape that subset takes, let alone what the minimal number of bytes required to simulate it is.

Re: Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain

#186

Post by ewjordan »

akeefer wrote: post #134
ewjordan wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) An estimate of complexity is what it is - an estimate of complexity. It's not a claim that the way to achieve AI is to figure out the details of the particular encoding that nature ended up using, so the precise nature of those rules is not something we care about. 2) While it's true that those runtime rules (which we can kind of consider as the "interpreter" for our DNA) are extremely complex, this has almost zer…

I think the article's original point (and mine as well) was that considering the size of the code (i.e. the DNA) as a measure of the complexity of the task is totally disingenuous when you don't have (to use your analogy) the web server, the libraries you're calling, the parser/compiler/linker for the language, the operating system for the server along with its drivers/TCP stack/etc., the processor it runs on, the mo…

It's only 10,000 lines of code! How hard can that be? All we have to do is write the code, plus the frameworks, programming language, and operating system, plus do all the hardware design.

Except that DNA doesn't even come close to being a high level language, since the low level details were not specifically designed for compressibility of the code (in fact, the low level details, the "bare metal ops", are pretty much fixed by the for-all-intents-and-purposes random laws of physics, which means we shouldn't assume that they enable any particularly high compressibility ratios for anything).

So a more apt comparison would be if we saw an assembly language program in some strange incomprehensible assembly language and said "It's only 10,000 lines of operations on the bare metal! Now all we have to do is figure out how the hell the system this runs on works, and how we can translate that code into a more sensible (and probably vastly more compact) form."

...which might even be a harder problem, to be fair.

Kurzweil's essentially proposed evidence of existence of an algorithm of length N that does whatever it is we mean by intelligence. Which is fine, and I think is probably correct (IMO, even his estimate about the minimal amount of code it would take is probably too high, though that's another story).

But he's overlooking the fact that the mere existence of such a compact algorithm doesn't help us find it at all, and I think a lot of the complaints others have made about his statements are more aimed at that leap of logic, not the existence claim itself. I completely agree that even brain scanning tech might not help us simulate the important bits very well, even if we did have access to that tech and computers fast enough to run the sims.

Re: Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain

#187

Post by Aegean »

The article has a point that Ray Kurzweil's claims are nonsense, but lets not focus on his claims on genome-to-protein-to-brain cells mechanism. What's rather more important is how the brain does what it does and how that compares with today's computers.

There are 50 to 100 billion neurons in the human brain and the power of the brain comes from the fact that you can create many orders of magnitude more neural circuit combinations with those neurons. Each cell may be part of many circuits, and learning involves the forming of these circuits. Now, lets compare that phenomenal power with the power of the computer. It becomes especially laughable when you say its 50MB worth of information.

Re: Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain

#188

Post by yters »

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…

Your post is remarkably obtuse. By your same logic I can say a program is not executing code, it is a series of electrons moving down different circuit paths. Also true, but such behavior can be described at a higher level as "executing code."

Take another example, your post could be considered a message, or it could just be considered electrons emanating from an LCD monitor and getting received by a brain, which in turn generates certain behaviors in a large meat machine. Also true, but your post can also be described as a message about the need for thinking about reality literally instead of abstractly in order to understand truth.

However, if we can only access truth by talking about the world literally, then no one, ever, has access to truth. Even today we cannot describe the world literally, at all. An electron is merely an abstract representation of even more fundamental quantum physic dynamics. And, who's to claim quantum physics is really at the bottom of the reality stack? For instance, we have no idea why waveforms collapse to their particular determinate. There is something even more fundamental behind this phenomena we currently have no clue about. Therefore, by your criterion for truth, everything discussed and thought about throughout history has been nothing but gibberish, including your own post.

So, clearly you do not even agree with your own claim, since you seem to think you are communicating something to us.

I call BS.

Re: Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain

#189

Post by extension »

api wrote: post #142
sliverstorm wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The genetic system is beautiful and elegant. Only because you don't have to maintain it

That's what's so beautiful and elegant about it. When "executed" it evolves, so it maintains itself.

Your code would evolve and maintain itself too, if you could afford to wait millions of years and let it randomly break for a large portion of your users.
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