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Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain

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Re: Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain

#221

Post by bh42 »

yungchin wrote: post #40
bh42 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think his point was that we can't code the fundamentals because those require linear time protein folding. And protein folding is one of those hard CS problems.

Well that's exactly my criticism: most of the author's objections boil down to "it's hard". Note that I don't disagree with him (nor with you), but this just doesn't help to expose the real issues with Kurzweil's estimates. To "protein folding is difficult" one can always reply "but we'll solve it in the next 10 years" - which I think is what the singularity-folks would say. My simpler point is that Kurzweil's not ta…

Well that's exactly my criticism: most of the author's objections boil down to "it's hard"

No, common English use of "it's hard" means something completely different from CS "hard". CS hard means NP-complete which to English translates as impossible. Impossible because of well understood mathematical reasons.

Quantum computers may solve it, indeed real life protein folding may have quantum computer-like properties.

Re: Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain

#222

Post by bh42 »

jasongullickson wrote: post #74
api wrote: post #65

I'm a life-long programmer who presently works in software, but I studied biology in college... mostly because I wanted to learn about learning by studying how living systems do it. Biological systems are nothing like anything we would ever engineer, and to understand them we must remove our "anthropocentric engineer goggles" and look at them for what they are. Analogies between biological systems and computers, soft…

Getting close would take an advancement in computer technology of the magnitude of the transition from vacuum tubes in individual boxes to a 32nm Core i7. ...so about 35 years? ;)

Intel predicted the end of Moore's Law would come with 16 nanometer manufacturing processes and 5 nanometer gates, due to quantum tunnelling.

Re: Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain

#223

Post by 10ren »

jacquesm wrote: post #211
10ren wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it's a bit like a program, with sequences also selecting a different Turing machine? (which determines how that subsequence is interpreted.) Because the Turing machine is selected entirely by the sequence (the protein folding caused by the laws of physics is selected entirely by the sequence), the number of possible results (the number of different shapes that could result) is limited to the number of different se…

> That is, the information in the phenome seems to be limited by the information in the genome. I think that is a very original use of the word 'limited', limited in this case holds enough room for random chance to come up with human beings. For all practical purposes that 'limited' might as well be unlimited.

"Finite" would probably have been a better choice.

I have a micro SD card, smaller than my little-finger nail that holds 4GB - x8 more than the human genome (using the article's figure of 4 billion bits). And that's pretty much the lowest capacity you can buy. Yet, that amount of information is limited/finite: the possible states that that memory can hold is limited/finite.

BTW: I found the absurdist levity in the top 10 comments or so of reddit version of this thread a welcome relief - and also some penetrating insights, concisely put: http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/d24c8/ray_kurzweil_...

Re: Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain

#224

Post by shadowfox »

Elite wrote: post #199
Retric wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The better you understand the way DNA works the less elegant it looks. It's a steaming pile of Hacks on top of Hacks and frighteningly buggy. This encodes protean X, however it only folds up correctly 15% of the time. However, Y bumps things up to 70% and Z get's you to 90%. The other 10% well that depends on the shape some of these are used by Z to do... Why do we know this? Well both Y and Z are defective 2-3 perce…

What you call a bug, with protein's being defective 2-3% of the time, is the most important feature of the biological program. It's more elegant thank you think.

Can you elaborate?

Re: Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain

#225

Post by DrJohnty »

I too have my doubts about reverse engineering the brain. As I see it regardless of whether the Singularity arises or not this century will achieve a rate of progress which is incomparable to anything we have ever seen before. To get this in perspective just consider that in the nineteenth century more technological breakthroughs were made than in all of the nine centuries preceding it. Then in the first twenty years of the twentieth century, we saw more advancement than in all of the nineteenth century combined. In this century we will achieve 1000 times more than we achieved in the whole 20th century which was itself a period of progress never before seen. Whether we reverse engineer the brain or not the merging of human and machine intelligence is an inevitability because you only need to look at how attached we are to our iPhones and Blackberry’s to realise that we will ultimately be unable to resist moving increased processing capability directly inside the body. The consequence of that is massively increased capability whatever way you look at it.

Re: Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain

#226

Post by rsaarelm »

Incidentally, Larry Page used the exact same argument back in 2007:

My theory is that, if you look in your own programming, your DNA, it’s about 600 Megabytes compressed… so it’s smaller than any modern operating system. Smaller than Linux, or Windows, or anything like that, your whole operating system. That includes booting up your brain, right, by definition. And so, your program algorithms probably aren’t that complicated, it’s probably more about the overall computation. That’s my guess.

(http://pimm.wordpress.com/2007/02/20/googles-larry-page-at-t...)

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