Leading Neuroscientist Says Kurzweil Singularity Prediction A “Bunch Of Hot Air”
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Re: Leading Neuroscientist Says Kurzweil Singularity Prediction A “Bunch Of Hot Air”
#2Some of this actually fits perfectly into the framework of Kurzweil's The Singularity in the sense that you could argue that most neuroscientists are too focused to the complexity of the brain and aren't anticipating the progress that may be possible through rapid evolution of tools for looking at the brain.
The said, I think Kurzweil's plan for constructing an intelligence actually oversteps his basic approach. Tools are advancing on multiple fronts. Not only does that give us multiple ways a singularity could happen (from brain-simulation to simplistic-but-massive-ai to clever-ai to bio-computers) but the multiple advancing fronts could go around apart walls (a sufficiently sophisticate computer could make brain processes look less opaque etc).
Personally, I'd say Paul Allen's counter-argument, which I recall as boiling down to the inherent limits of human-produced software, is the most plausible counter-argument.
Re: Leading Neuroscientist Says Kurzweil Singularity Prediction A “Bunch Of Hot Air”
#3INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER
http://filer.case.edu/dts8/thelastq.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Question
Re: Leading Neuroscientist Says Kurzweil Singularity Prediction A “Bunch Of Hot Air”
#4Oh good, a few more years until I'm coerced into uploading my brain into bizarre-o-land by someone's deliberately-create-the-singularity-project gone horribly right.
Re: Leading Neuroscientist Says Kurzweil Singularity Prediction A “Bunch Of Hot Air”
#5>“Fallacy is what people are selling: that human nature can be reduced to [something] that [a] computer algorithm can run! This is a new church!”
Actually, the "new church" is that human nature is something more than physics. Even if Kurzweil is wrong in his predictions, certainly this neuroscientist is also wrong with his metaphysical beliefs that the brain is something more than a mere "machine".
Re: Leading Neuroscientist Says Kurzweil Singularity Prediction A “Bunch Of Hot Air”
#6The part of the article that bothers me here the most is a leading nueroscientist asserting that the brain is not computable. That is demonstrably false: The brain is a quantum system, just like everything else in the universe. All quantum systems containing n qubits can be simulated by 2^n classical bits. It may very well be impractical to compute a decent sized brain, but that's still technically computable, which is a serious problem in his whole "you can't reduce human nature to a computer algorithm" tirade. Yes, you can. It will be impossibly huge and slow, but you can.
Re: Leading Neuroscientist Says Kurzweil Singularity Prediction A “Bunch Of Hot Air”
#7>Addressing fellow scientists, he dismissed the singularity as “a bunch of hot air,” and went on further to declare that “the brain is not computable and no engineering can reproduce it.”
wat.
Re: Leading Neuroscientist Says Kurzweil Singularity Prediction A “Bunch Of Hot Air”
#8There are also people who believe in god and all other sorts of things. Doesn't mean they should be taken seriously.
Re: Leading Neuroscientist Says Kurzweil Singularity Prediction A “Bunch Of Hot Air”
#9>“Fallacy is what people are selling: that human nature can be reduced to [something] that [a] computer algorithm can run! This is a new church!” Actually, the "new church" is that human nature is something more than physics. Even if Kurzweil is wrong in his predictions, certainly this neuroscientist is also wrong with his metaphysical beliefs that the brain is something more than a mere "machine".
Thank you for summing that up so concisely. I'm going to try to remember the "so you think human nature is something more than physics?" argument for the future.
Re: Leading Neuroscientist Says Kurzweil Singularity Prediction A “Bunch Of Hot Air”
#10Another good rebuke of Kurzweil's theory of the mind: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/mar/21/homuncu....