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Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain

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Re: Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain

#51

Post by tokenadult »

wihon wrote: post #31

His last comment, The media will not end their infatuation with this pseudo-scientific dingbat chimes with the large majority of bold scientific claims that appear in the press. For example, not that long ago the press jumped on Craig Venter's ( http://bit.ly/uEC5 ) 'artificial cell' ( http://bit.ly/c27AL5 ), hailing it as the beginning of man-made organisms and making bold predictions about the future of life itself…

The media will not end their infatuation with this pseudo-scientific dingbat

This is one reason that many, many times on HN when there is a link to a blog post about some news story on a science discovery, I post the link to Peter Norvig's article on how to evaluate research,

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

as it seems to be that most readers need more practice in critical reading of statements about science. PZ is one of the few bloggers who knows most of those points already, but he frequently writes about other people who forget them, so here in this thread too I'll remind HN readers about Norvig's advice on how to read about science.

Re: Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain

#52

Post by wcoenen »

rsheridan6 wrote: post #35
cageface wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is Nobel-prize winning theory that shows that you won't ever truly solve this problem by studying the underlying atomic physics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Prigogine#Dissipative_stru...

I'm ignorant of this theory, but reading the link I don't see that it shows that protein folding can't be modeled.

The physics can be modeled, but according to this article (http://techglimpse.com/index.php/ibms-blue-gene-exploring-pr...) a 1 petaflops machine is estimated to take 3 years to crunch through 100 microseconds of simulated time. And that's just for a single protein interacting with itself and a bit of water.

Re: Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain

#53

Post by dhs »

rsheridan6 wrote: post #16

I don't find these criticisms convincing. We haven't solved the protein folding problem? So solve it. Is there some reason to believe it won't ever be solved? If you had a sufficiently accurate simulation of a cell or organism (which we don't, but we might someday), you could do experiments on it much cheaper and faster than in a lab. I do agree that there's no freakin' way this will be done in ten years, or in the 6…

Protein folding is suspected to be an NP-complete problem http://www.liebertonline.com/doi/abs/10.1089/cmb.1998.5.27 >, so it seems to me that having reason to believe it will someday be solved equals having reason to believe that someday NP-complete problems can be computed in polynomial time. Alternatively, you might hope for a domain-specific approximative algorithm, but this seems tricky, too, since mis-folded proteins can end up as really bad stuff, e.g. prions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion >.

Re: Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain

#54

Post by phreeza »

10ren wrote: post #50

I'm not so sure about the simulation, but Ray's right that the brain cannot be more complex than the data that specifies it, speaking information-theoretically. A biologist probably wouldn't get this, because he has too much knowledge of how difficult and complex the actual translation is. It's a mathematical idea, like non-constructive proofs, which freak out sensible folk - and rightfully so. ( EDIT no offence inte…

I see it as an upper bound for the Kolmogorov Complexity of the brains structure. I am very dubious that the first successful attempts at doing this will be as efficient as the genetic code though...

Re: Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain

#55

Post by ugh »

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, this article addresses a specific point which Kurzweil is making and says that what Kurzweil said is simply wrong, not just hard.

Re: Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain

#56

Post by masterponomo »

Kurzweil has written enough by now that anyone hearing his interviews should be able to put his ideas in the context of his predictions about the Singularity. I have always thought Kurzweil hedges his bets quite well, and he makes it quite clear that the capabilities about which he writes depend on future gains in computing power. Kurzweil is only human, of course, and it is well known that he is trying to extend his own life so that he will be here for the Singularity. He very much wants the things he predicts to happen in his lifetime, but I don't hear or read him as asserting that that will absolutely be the case. Myers' unnecessary "refutation" (and insulting) of Kurzweil reminds me of the reactions to the Segway. Kamen predicted that it would revolutionize transportation; naysayers then piled on, ridiculing him and saying that the Segway wouldn't work for commuting long distances on American super highways. Well, no, but that's not what he meant by revolutionizing transportation. I'm sure Myers is probably good at what he does, and he is very much concerned with the now and the practical. We need people like him, and we also need visionaries like Kurzweil and Kamen who look ahead decades or centuries.

Re: Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain

#57

Post by wihon »

tokenadult wrote: post #51
wihon wrote: post #31

His last comment, The media will not end their infatuation with this pseudo-scientific dingbat chimes with the large majority of bold scientific claims that appear in the press. For example, not that long ago the press jumped on Craig Venter's ( http://bit.ly/uEC5 ) 'artificial cell' ( http://bit.ly/c27AL5 ), hailing it as the beginning of man-made organisms and making bold predictions about the future of life itself…

The media will not end their infatuation with this pseudo-scientific dingbat This is one reason that many, many times on HN when there is a link to a blog post about some news story on a science discovery, I post the link to Peter Norvig's article on how to evaluate research, http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html as it seems to be that most readers need more practice in critical reading of statements about science…

@tokenadult that's some good shit. :)

This is slightly off-topic, but here goes anyway. I've long had an issue with the huge disparity between what humanities/arts people (including the large majority of the press) know about science, and what scientists know about the arts and humanities. Most scientists I know are more than able to hold their own in a conversation about, say, a good book, but 99% of everyone else I've ever met doesn't know/want to know the second law of thermodynamics.

I'm not pointing fingers here, I just think there's a serious lack of communication between arts and sciences. I think it's partly this lack of general scientific knowledge that makes the humanities/arts dominated world of the press believe pretty much anything a scientist says. And then, to make a good story into a great one, it's blown out of proportion. Ho hum.

Re: Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain

#58

Post by roadnottaken »

10ren wrote: post #50

I'm not so sure about the simulation, but Ray's right that the brain cannot be more complex than the data that specifies it, speaking information-theoretically. A biologist probably wouldn't get this, because he has too much knowledge of how difficult and complex the actual translation is. It's a mathematical idea, like non-constructive proofs, which freak out sensible folk - and rightfully so. ( EDIT no offence inte…

This strikes me as very similar to a Mandelbrot fractal. The fractal is overwhelmingly complex and intricate, but wholly mathematically described by a very simple formula. The complexity of the brain is similar: A few simple cells and proteins can interact in extraordinarily complex ways.

Some biologists understand this just fine, thank you very much.

Re: Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain

#59

Post by flatline »

sprout wrote: post #20

Kurzweil is a brilliant scientist. Calling him a Deepak Chopra is just stupid. He's out of his depth is all. Also, I wouldn't bet against him building an AI that for all intents and purposes appears to be conscious. Full-human simulation is another thing, but with that we are all out of our depth, and it's pretty likely that a conscious computer would be quite capable of understanding it better than us.

"Calling him a Deepak Chopra is just stupid"

That's not much of an argument. He plays on the standard things that all religions play on: the promise of some form of immortality, which instinctively plays on the fear of death; claims that the near future will be radically different than the present; etc. His extrapolations of exponential growth are not entirely unfounded but he applies the same logic to everything that suits his fancy without taking into account that science and technology have made large but halting steps forward throughout history, and the fundamentals of scientific insight and discovery haven't changed. He talks and sounds like an evangelical to me. No doubt he is a brilliant scientist but that doesn't warrant the cult of personality that has grown up around him, which I perceive as a dangerous thing contrary to the aims of science.

Re: Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain

#60

Post by aswanson »

10ren wrote: post #50

I'm not so sure about the simulation, but Ray's right that the brain cannot be more complex than the data that specifies it, speaking information-theoretically. A biologist probably wouldn't get this, because he has too much knowledge of how difficult and complex the actual translation is. It's a mathematical idea, like non-constructive proofs, which freak out sensible folk - and rightfully so. ( EDIT no offence inte…

But even looking at it in an information-theoretic way, what is being stated is that the instruction set is far more powerful than the binary analogy Kurzweil is using. The instruction I give: "Cure Cancer" has 11 bytes. But that instruction implies a ridiculously complicated set of sequences that we haven't figured out yet.

In this situation, look at the genome as the instruction set for protein construction and folding, an ongoing problem in research we have just begun to investigate. The information contained in the genome is combinatorially descriptive and therefore not as simple as made out to be, if you define information as the amount of "surprise" in the outcome.

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