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Ray Kurzweil's Dubious New Theory of Mind

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Re: Ray Kurzweil's Dubious New Theory of Mind

#51

Post by ansible »

confluence wrote: post #10
Florin_Andrei wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You kinda lost me a little at Kurzweil's diets (which are okay, regardless of whether or not they confer "immortality"), but you irrevocably lost me at Elon Musk. You might have strong opinions, but you have no idea what you're talking about.

Perhaps. That is always a distinct possibility. I cannot preclude the possibility that I have no idea what I'm talking about and as per the Dunning-Kruger effect, I might not be aware of how little I know. However, it should be known - I'm long TSLA and have been since the IPO - so don't think I don't know anything. I also know Musk's background inside and out (due diligence and all). But why do you know who Elon Mus…

Let's talk about SpaceX for a moment.

Of all the launcher designs I've seen over the years, the Falcon / Dragon program is one of the most sensible ever. Every aspect of the design that I've seen fulfills the twin goals of reliability and low operational cost. They didn't try to create an awesome/cool system with unproven concepts (space plane, scramjet, rotors for re-entry, etc.). Instead, they took the best exisiting and well proven concepts, wrapped them in a nice package, tested it well, and made it work.

The existing large players like LockMart optimize for performance and their own profit; the small players all seem to be trying unproven (and in most cases rather dubious) concepts. Compared to how the orbital launch industry normally works, SpaceX is a refreshing dose of sanity. I salute their hard work and engineering prowess, and I wish them much success and profits.

Re: Ray Kurzweil's Dubious New Theory of Mind

#52

Post by orangecat »

RivieraKid wrote: post #31
skyhook_mockups wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, not sure if I'm understanding you correctly. Are you arguing that there is more to consciousness than just the atoms in our brains? If so what is your reason for thinking this?

I'm not the author of the comment you'replying to but I'm pretty sure that consciousness is more than atoms. Feeling pain can't be explained as an interaction of physical particles. You could describe the chemical processes in the brain accompanying pain to very high detail. But at no point you can't explain why does it hurt so much when the atoms in the brain are in a specific state.

Feeling pain can't be explained as an interaction of physical particles.

Because no such explanation can exist, or because we don't have a sufficient understanding yet? See "God of the gaps".

Re: Ray Kurzweil's Dubious New Theory of Mind

#53

Post by skyhook_mockups »

andolanra wrote: post #32
skyhook_mockups wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, not sure if I'm understanding you correctly. Are you arguing that there is more to consciousness than just the atoms in our brains? If so what is your reason for thinking this?

I suspect the argument is more along the lines of, "The human brain does not obey the superposition principle." A sentence is just letters, but that doesn't mean that thorough examination of each letter provides you with the knowledge necessary to understand the sentence. Anyway, saying "It's just atoms" is also misleading, because one also must content with the laws of physics which drive the atoms. Those laws are n…

Thanks for your answer, its given me something to think about.

A few things immediately come to mind though:

A sentence is just letters, but that doesn't mean that thorough examination of each letter provides you with the knowledge necessary to understand the sentence

I see what you're saying here, but consider this example:

Give someone a box of clock components and a clock from which to draw inspiration, and without any understanding of how a clock works or how the cogs and springs are manufactured etc, they will, given enough perseverance build a working clock.

This simple analogy illustrates that understanding exactly the functioning of each sub-component of a system is not necessary to be able to exploit its usefulness.

Re: Ray Kurzweil's Dubious New Theory of Mind

#54

Post by skyhook_mockups »

RivieraKid wrote: post #31
skyhook_mockups wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, not sure if I'm understanding you correctly. Are you arguing that there is more to consciousness than just the atoms in our brains? If so what is your reason for thinking this?

I'm not the author of the comment you'replying to but I'm pretty sure that consciousness is more than atoms. Feeling pain can't be explained as an interaction of physical particles. You could describe the chemical processes in the brain accompanying pain to very high detail. But at no point you can't explain why does it hurt so much when the atoms in the brain are in a specific state.

Feeling pain can't be explained as an interaction of physical particles

Do you mean physical or emotional pain? I imagine that physical pain is very well understood and can be explained in (maybe) all of its entirety as a purely material (as in atoms) phenomenon.

I personally don't see any reason why emotional pain can't be explained in the same way i.e. without requiring a metaphysical component.

Re: Ray Kurzweil's Dubious New Theory of Mind

#55

Post by skyhook_mockups »

btilly wrote: post #30
skyhook_mockups wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, not sure if I'm understanding you correctly. Are you arguing that there is more to consciousness than just the atoms in our brains? If so what is your reason for thinking this?

You missed the point of that well-put criticism. Kurzweil can identify the basic components that make up a working human brain, and concludes that if you put together a similar assemblage of components, what you'll get is going to be a working human brain. The problem is that we're not sure we have all of the right components, we're not sure of how those components need to interact, we're not sure of what subtle patt…

You make a great argument, and I agree with you that it is very unlikely that a model which can only ever be an approximation of a human brain will ever exhibit intelligence.

My gut tells me that we'll have more success building an exact 1:1 copy of a brain, but from digital components rather than wetware. The discovery of memristors[1], and other yet to be discovered building blocks, may lead to just these types of advances.

If consciousness still doesn't emerge in such a 1:1 copy then that would be spooky.

[1] - http://www.frost.com/prod/servlet/cpo/205104793.htm

Re: Ray Kurzweil's Dubious New Theory of Mind

#56

Post by briggers »

jacquesm wrote: post #47
briggers wrote: post #33

> Hierarchical Temporary Memory Temporal. It's such a jarring mistake that it looks more like misunderstanding than a typo. He dismisses the concept of immortality out of hand, which is frustrating. Where I live the life expectancy has increased by 20 years over the last 50. I'll bet glide ratios were also improving before powered-flight happened. He is also somehow unaware of the advances in the last decade in machi…

> Where I live the life expectancy has increased by 20 years over the last 50. But maximum life expectancy has been stuck at 130 or so for as long as there have been people. The fact that more people live longer does not mean that suddenly we'll all live forever. Forever is a long long time, besides having to define forever (presumably as something > 130), the whole rapture of the nerds thing is more driven by a fear…

The maximum life expectancy point is good, note that actually it's changed a bit.

"The maximum (recorded) life span for humans has increased from 103 in 1798 to 110 years in 1898, 115 years in 1990, and 122.45 years since Calment's death in 1997" - Wikipedia

And "as long as there have been people" is going way too far. Your point that there seems to be some intrinsic limit stands, until medical science disproves it.

Living forever is as ridiculous as 100% uptime, but eliminating preventable deaths remains a good goal.

Re: Ray Kurzweil's Dubious New Theory of Mind

#57

Post by rpm4321 »

unoti wrote: post #16

I'm not sure why there's so much vitriol about Kurzweil. Maybe it's disappointment that we don't have our brain uploads ready yet, just like we were pissed about no flying cars twenty years ago. He doesn't have to be right all the time to be worth at least considering his ideas without getting so angry. "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." - Aristotle Maybe the…

Yeah, I don't get the recent backlash with Kurzweil on HN. I understand being critical of some of his conclusions, but he's had a pretty impressive career before becoming an author, and quite frankly he has the best track record out there on predicting the future.

It's amazing how accurate his Age of Spiritual Machines predictions became, even if some of them were a year or two late. Google's self-driving car, ipads, Siri, Watson, Google Glass, etc. He seems to always get technological capability correct, but sometimes misses the mark on technological adoption.

Even if a few of his more outlandish predictions like immortality are a few decades - or even generations - off, I think the road map of technological progress he outlines seems pretty inevitable, yet still awe inspiring.

Re: Ray Kurzweil's Dubious New Theory of Mind

#58

Post by bloaf »

ashcairo wrote: post #48

I love this part: "Google built the largest pattern recognizer of them all, a system running on sixteen thousand processor cores that analyzed ten million YouTube videos and managed to learn, all by itself, to recognize cats and faces" with 15.8 percent accuracy.

Its interesting and all, but compare it to a human baby. It takes them several months of data processing to learn things like object permanence. While 16 thousand processor cores may seem like a lot, I seriously doubt it even approached 1/10th of the power of a babies brain. Indeed, I doubt it was even 1/10th of the power of the region of the babies brain dedicated to recognizing objects.

Re: Ray Kurzweil's Dubious New Theory of Mind

#59

Post by rpm4321 »

1053r wrote: post #35
confluence wrote: post #2

Let's get this straight: Ray Kurzweil is just a few ticks off crazy. Outside of Moore's law graphs (which he didn't discover), his predictions quickly veer off course into crazy land, especially in the case of diets and theories on intelligence (which others have routinely criticized him for - see everywhere). But here's the problem I have with Ray Kurzweil and other people like him - you can't just ignore them, you…

> Outside of Moore's law graphs (which he didn't discover), his predictions quickly veer off course into crazy land I think Ray Kurzweil would agree with you. That's why he uses language like "the intuitive linear view" and "the historical exponential view" [1] The whole POINT is that the predictions sound crazy. But the reason why he gathers such a following is because, unlike most "futurists", who make bold predict…

Yeah, I mentioned below reading his predictions for 2009 only a couple of years before they were supposed to come about (which he wrote in the late 90s), and many seemed kind of far fetched - and then all of a sudden the iPhone, iPad, Google self-driving car, Siri, Google Glass, and Watson come out, and he's pretty much batting a thousand.

Some of those predictions were a year or two late, in 2010 or 2011, but does a couple of years really matter in the grand scheme of things?

Predicting that self-driving cars would occur in ten years in the late 90s is pretty extraordinary, especially if you go to youtube and load up a commercial for Windows 98 and get a flashback of how primitive the tech environment actually was back then.

Kurzweil seems to always get technological capabilities right. Where he sometimes falls flat is in technological adoption - how actual consumers are willing to interact with technology, especially where bureaucracies are involved- see his predictions on the adoption of elearning in the classroom, or using speech recognition as an interface in an office environment.

Re: Ray Kurzweil's Dubious New Theory of Mind

#60

Post by btilly »

cb18 wrote: post #46
btilly wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You missed the point of that well-put criticism. Kurzweil can identify the basic components that make up a working human brain, and concludes that if you put together a similar assemblage of components, what you'll get is going to be a working human brain. The problem is that we're not sure we have all of the right components, we're not sure of how those components need to interact, we're not sure of what subtle patt…

Well, here we have an interesting demonstration of a quirk in the human mind. I guess you could call it a misattribution of word memory. Your description of "FOXPRO2" interested me enough that I searched wikipedia for it after reading your comment, then found out FoxPro2 is a programming language and database management system, ha, a fitting misattribution for this crowd. Then using google's implementation of a colle…

D'oh!

You're right, of course.

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