Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain

Where did I say it was a trivial problem? I was assuming (perhaps incorrectly according to other commenters) that it's a tractable problem that may someday be solved, like putting a man on the moon was.

You're right.

It's a software problem and a hardware problem. Our hardware is not up to the task, and even if it was we wouldn't know how to program it.

Evolutionary computation and non-von-Neumann architectures such as stochastic data flow architectures might be where to start. We would not write the code. We would build the right kind of architecture and then evolve the code within that architecture.

Myers is wrong, because he overcomplicates. Kurzweil is also wrong, because he oversimplifies (I'm taking Myers's version of argument at face value; I actually suppose the argument was more sophisticated than that).

Firstly where Myers is wrong: the human brain ultimately comes forth from a bunch of information roughly equal to 1 million lines of code. If you could reproduce those 1 million lines and set them loose, allowing them to construct a human being (nothing else: what else could they construct?) and letting that human being live in our world, you would have 'created' intelligence. It's as simple as that and attacking that abstraction is completely the wrong approach to pointing out the problem with Kurzweil's argument.

So, then the two points where Kurzweil is wrong:

1) it's not just any million lines of code. It has to be exactly the million lines of code in our genome, give or take some bits. Considering the enormously complex interactions between these bits of code, this is worse than reverse engineering the largest codebase of spaghetti code you could possiblt imagine. The simple example that Myers gives is enough to show this.

2) The million lines of code cannot just be executed anywhere. It encodes for the construction of a human from raw material and the subsequent operation of that human. Give it different materials or a different living environment and something entirely different, in most variations nothing remotely capable of 'life', appears. And even if you could make it build something from electronic components: slight differences in the perceptive systems can create huge differences in the brain and the concepts in the brain. A machine with a finite pixelized array of visual light receptors would build a completely different conceptual model of the world. Reverse engineering the genome is not only extremely hard: it is very unlikely to produce the result you want.

> Whereas the training data for a neural net is extra information - but in utero, what is the training data that is not a predictable consequence of the genome?

For starters, the mother's chemistry which is a function of her DNA and environment. And the mother's physical environment, diet, health, etc. These are things that have no representation in the genome but can radically change brain structure in a developing mammal.

I'm not claiming the environment magnifies existing information, I'm claiming it's part of the total set and Kurzweil (and you) are vastly underestimating the amount of state that is associated with the exact details of a developing organism. This seems to be the thrust of Myers's point (at least in the beginning): you are simplifying and you are not allowed to do that.

Myers then follows that point by saying that even if we do manage to isolate all that information and understand it, we actually don't have certain critical problems like protein folding solved, or even reliably simulated yet.

Even if you hand-wave all this and assume it's possible, the notion that 10 years is the timeframe for this seems... excessively optimistic.

Actually the information needed for replicating brain is not just limited to the information encoded in DNA. Physics plays a great deal of role in all molecular biology and from physical interactions arise cell-cell interactions which then give rise to complicated organs that you have in the body. (And, of course, all these arose during billions of years of evolution which is encoded not only in DNA but environment also.)

So if you were to simulate the brain, modeling DNA will be A tiny part of it. Encoding the deepest of physics world (yes, quantum effects play many roles in DNA) AND then having enough computational power to model interactions of those particles in real time IS A REALLY BIG DEAL.