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INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER http://filer.case.edu/dts8/thelastq.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Question
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'm not the parent poster, but I'd like a citation re: experimental results. What are you saying exactly?
If you assume this is true then the brain is a physical entity which cannot be constructed by mechanisms that manipulate physical objects.
The question arises "why is a body growing a brain not a feat of engineering? What did the body do that similarly sophisticated machines cannot?"
>“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".
There's nothing new about that belief.
When Newton came up with his universal law of gravitation, he also made an interesting observation. He had no idea why gravity worked the way it did, he could only model its behavior numerically. 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…
There is nothing to say that evolution has arrived at the perfect method.
There are also people who believe in god and all other sorts of things. Doesn't mean they should be taken seriously.
That this further devolves into meandering about consciousness just says to me that even at the point where Kurzweil's singularity has already happened, he wouldn't call it AI. Yes - if you take it as an axiom that humans have special sauce that you can't reproduce with an algorithm, AI is impossible.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It actually IS demonstrably true that the brain is made of atoms. That makes it a quantum system, which our modern physics tells us how to simulate. The use of the term "impractical" here refers to the fact that we don't have quantum computers and that we don't have the computing power required to simulate such a large quantum system. I'd say dismissing thousands of years of philosophy here is relevant, since it was…
>“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 may seem paradoxical that a deterministic phenomenon is inherently unpredictable, but in systems that exhibit chaotic behavior, small uncertainties are amplified over time by the nonlinear interaction of a few elements. The upshot is that behavior that is predictable in the short run becomes intrinsically unpredictable in the long term. As a result, physiologists cannot make strict causal inferences from the level of individual neurons to that of neural mass actions, nor from the level of receptor activity to internal dynamics. The causal connection between past and future is cut.
http://sulcus.berkeley.edu/freemanwww/manuscripts/IC13/90.ht...
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…