11–20 of 70 posts
>“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".
It is an open question whether the physical processes of the brain can be simulated by a computer, and it is even an open question whether the physical processes of the brain account for the full range of human conscious experience. I look forward to seeing this field evolve during my lifetime, but significant progress may continue to elude us.
The 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…
You're writing off thousands of years of philosophy and dozens of years of experimental results in maybe a paragraph, if I'm being generous.
it may be more accurate to say "parts of the brain of an average human may be computable". Ofcourse I have no data to prove either way. There are incredible human beings who lived in the past and living in the present, who brain is faster than the fastest computers put together. But simulating super humans like ramanujan, is it even possible?
Some 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. Too…
I often wonder if the ultimate end counter argument may be that the same things that make us "intelligent" are also those that give us our human flaws - exactly the same things that we were trying to avoid in the first place by using computers. Perhaps we can't have human-like intelligence without also being forgetful, inaccurate, selfish, lazy, irrational, greedy, angry, sad etc. If someone did invent a computer with all those attributes, would it be useful?
It's been over 300 years and we're still trying to figure out exactly how gravity works. But in a way it doesn't matter: his law has given humanity tremendous abilities it didn't have before.
When Deep Blue won the Jeopardy contest a couple of years ago, it was obvious that it wasn't intelligence in the sense that we commonly understood it. Yet it was able to beat the human champions. Deep Blue wasn't a model of a human player, but it didn't matter because for the purposes of its construction it performed just as well as one.
My money says the singularity happens the exact same way -- we are able to "fake" more and more things that look exactly like intelligence until one day we're able to fake intelligence to a degree that it's virtually indistinguishable from our own. We're eventually able to do something that looks like moving our sentience into a computer even though it "won't really" be doing it.
My guess is that we're hundreds of years away from that date, but whether it happens or not, the fact that an expert right now in the complexity of the underlying physical system has an opinion on the computational problem that probably won't be solved until after 2100 doesn't seem to me to be very relevant. Of course it's complicated. Of course we don't understand it. And of course we can't duplicate the structure of things we don't understand. I believe for any layman in the field all of that goes without saying?
>“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".
The 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…
What you're saying is merely postulation, it's not "demonstrably" true, not to mention your use of the term "impractical" is probably the most misleading use of that word I've read today. You're writing off thousands of years of philosophy and dozens of years of experimental results in maybe a paragraph, if I'm being generous.
I'd say dismissing thousands of years of philosophy here is relevant, since it was likely produced before we had the tools to understand what we're dealing with. All experimental physics points towards an understanding of how quantum systems work, and that's all we need to model any quantum system. The brain is not any different because it's a brain.
The 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…
What you're saying is merely postulation, it's not "demonstrably" true, not to mention your use of the term "impractical" is probably the most misleading use of that word I've read today. You're writing off thousands of years of philosophy and dozens of years of experimental results in maybe a paragraph, if I'm being generous.
I don't think the parent disagrees with you. The question of whether or not something is _computable_ in the technical sense of the word does not need any sort of demonstration or experimental results.