Everyone is an expert on AI and the human brain today I see.
Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain
191–200 of 227 posts
Re: Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're comparing two very different things here though. One bucket of water is substantially like another just as one brain is like another. A brain and a computer model of a brain are two very, very different things, with completely different meta-properties.
Yes, but what I'm pointing out is that what you are complaining computers fail to have, other physical systems also fail to have! Even a second bucket of water can't predict the first bucket of water! Thus, the fact that a computer can't either is sort of insubstantial to the question of a simulation's utility, no?
The essential point is that you can't model the behavior of a non-equilibrium system by modeling its constituent elements, which is what Kurzweil claims.
That no two non-equilibrium systems are exactly alike seems to me a different question.
Re: Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 organ…
Oh, I meant that DNA methylation (resp. phosphorylation, acetylation, etc.) wasn't preserved through the uploading / "DNA printing" process. (And I don't think the cells in question had histones.) You're right that there is potential epigenetic variation in other parts of the cell as well, but I was thinking specifically of DNA methylation.
I don't actually know much about how position-specific current transgenic techniques are, so I could be wrong about that.
Re: Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain
#194Hmmm. Sejnowski says he agrees with Kurzweil's assessment that about a million lines of code may be enough to simulate the human brain. A million lines of code is hardly enough to run a car, for goodness sake.
Re: Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
And by 'large portion' we are referring to 99.999999% of them
Re: Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain
#196Earlier 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? ;)
well, if you're going to use that as a baseline you should also factor in that the rate of advancement is exponential. so maybe 10?
That probably helps more if the problem complexity is increasing linearly. If it's going up exponentially with problem size, especially if complexity increases at a faster rate than technology, then you're not going to make much progress.
ie, if emulating a human brain is only N times as hard as emulating a flatworm, Moore's Law might do the trick.
But if emulating a human brain is more like (flatworm complexity)^(number of cells in human brain - number of cells in flatworm brain) then Moore's Law is unlikely to help for a very long time indeed.
Re: Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Sure, and a shag rug has a much higher Kolmogorov complexity than the instructions for how to weave it. If measured carefully enough you'd find every individual strand of yarn in it has a unique length, orientation, curvature, amount of twist and amount of fraying that can be measured to an arbitrary degree of precision. So if you wanted to reproduce or store a description of that exact rug, you couldn't do it. That doesn't mean you can't make another rug that's just like it or close enough to serve the same purpose and be recognizable as a shag rug.
Like that rug, the brain contains oodles of complexity that doesn't matter at all for our purposes.
Re: Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain
#198I'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 recommend reading "The Singularity Is Near".
Sure, maybe Kurzweil doesn't understand the brain on any deep level and indeed maybe even those who understand the better than him don't understand it well enough at this point.
But Kurzweil's basic argument really isn't about that, it's about the exponential advance of tools and technologies and understanding on multiple level. Will the blue brain project succeed? Will some lesser known project succeed? Will the process take twenty instead of ten years? All unknown but not crucial to the implications of exponential change. When you have tool that are improve exponentially, what you can do tends to improve also. And then the whole process builds on itself. Do I know where this will go? No but I don't you do either.
Re: Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 perce…
What you call a bug, with protein's being defective 2-3% of the time, is the most important feature of the biological program.
It's more elegant thank you think.
Re: Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, but what I'm pointing out is that what you are complaining computers fail to have, other physical systems also fail to have! Even a second bucket of water can't predict the first bucket of water! Thus, the fact that a computer can't either is sort of insubstantial to the question of a simulation's utility, no?
The essential point is that you can't model the behavior of a non-equilibrium system by modeling its constituent elements, which is what Kurzweil claims. That no two non-equilibrium systems are exactly alike seems to me a different question.
I do computational fluid dynamics for a living. I assure you, we model non-equilibrium systems all the time.