Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ray Kurzweil's Dubious New Theory of Mind

newyorker.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 78 posts

Re: Ray Kurzweil's Dubious New Theory of Mind

#61

Post by rpm4321 »

Osmium wrote: post #6
confluence wrote: post #2

Let's get this straight: Ray Kurzweil is just a few ticks off crazy. Outside of Moore's law graphs (which he didn't discover), his predictions quickly veer off course into crazy land, especially in the case of diets and theories on intelligence (which others have routinely criticized him for - see everywhere). But here's the problem I have with Ray Kurzweil and other people like him - you can't just ignore them, you…

I wouldn't put Elon Musk in that list. I think you're mixing up two distinct types of people there. There's a difference between a person having an unconventional idea, e.g. for a business, and an unconventional theory, which they claim has a sound scientific basis. These unconventional theories are often stated with an unjustifiable certainty by people like Kurzweil and I think that's what irritates people.

I don't think that's a very fair assessment of Kurzweil's role in technology.

He was on the ground getting his hands dirty with the first commercial applications of AI. He made quite a bit of money selling his various companies and technologies, and was awarded the presidential Medal of Technology from Clinton.

As I was growing up, there was a series of "Oh wow!" moments I had, associated with computers and what they were now capable of.

"Oh wow, computers can read printed documents and recognize the characters!"

"Oh wow, computers can read written text aloud!"

"Oh wow, computers can recognize speech!"

"Oh wow, computer synthesizers can sound just like pianos now!"

I didn't realize until much later that Kurzweil was heavily involved with all of those breakthroughs.

Re: Ray Kurzweil's Dubious New Theory of Mind

#62

Post by nitrogen »

confluence wrote: post #7
NathanKP wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious what it is about Elon Musk in particular you consider to be "off kilter".

Please note that he's probably the least off kilter and by far the most rational/works more from first principles than analogy of the bunch. He quit a PhD in physics at Stanford to go chase the internet with ~$2K in his bank account. He then invested the $20 million (all in) he got from Zip2 straight back into X.com which later became PayPal through what can only be described as a series of random accidents that lead…

Which reminds me - the best investors are mentally damaged in some way, especially in terms of emotion (a distinct lack of empathy and emotion).

I wonder if this relates to the discovery that the two systems in the brain responsible for empathy and reason are mutually exclusive (that is, in the study I read about but can no longer find, activating one system always deactivated the other).

Re: Ray Kurzweil's Dubious New Theory of Mind

#63

Post by RivieraKid »

orangecat wrote: post #52
RivieraKid wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not the author of the comment you'replying to but I'm pretty sure that consciousness is more than atoms. Feeling pain can't be explained as an interaction of physical particles. You could describe the chemical processes in the brain accompanying pain to very high detail. But at no point you can't explain why does it hurt so much when the atoms in the brain are in a specific state.

Feeling pain can't be explained as an interaction of physical particles. Because no such explanation can exist, or because we don't have a sufficient understanding yet? See "God of the gaps".

Because physics doesn't even have the language to describe the feeling of pain. Similarly, physics doesn't have a language to describe how "green" looks, it can only describe the frequency of green etc.

Also have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia, it's basically what I'm talking about.

Re: Ray Kurzweil's Dubious New Theory of Mind

#64

Post by RivieraKid »

skyhook_mockups wrote: post #54
RivieraKid wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not the author of the comment you'replying to but I'm pretty sure that consciousness is more than atoms. Feeling pain can't be explained as an interaction of physical particles. You could describe the chemical processes in the brain accompanying pain to very high detail. But at no point you can't explain why does it hurt so much when the atoms in the brain are in a specific state.

Feeling pain can't be explained as an interaction of physical particles Do you mean physical or emotional pain? I imagine that physical pain is very well understood and can be explained in (maybe) all of its entirety as a purely material (as in atoms) phenomenon. I personally don't see any reason why emotional pain can't be explained in the same way i.e. without requiring a metaphysical component.

Both, it doesn't really matter, basically any state of consciousness. Physical processes in brain accompanying physical pain may be understood very well. But we don't understand the mechanism that translates the physical state of brain matter to the hurting feeling. Why does it hurt, when we arrange brain's atoms in a specific way?

Re: Ray Kurzweil's Dubious New Theory of Mind

#65

Post by RivieraKid »

thirdtruck wrote: post #42
RivieraKid wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not the author of the comment you'replying to but I'm pretty sure that consciousness is more than atoms. Feeling pain can't be explained as an interaction of physical particles. You could describe the chemical processes in the brain accompanying pain to very high detail. But at no point you can't explain why does it hurt so much when the atoms in the brain are in a specific state.

Why can't we explain why it hurts so much? We can describe the entirety of an operating system down to its individual ones and zeroes. Do you posit that some irreducible "Tuxness" state exists that computer scientists just refuse to acknowledge?

The unpleasant feeling of pain is a very real phenomenon, unlike tuxness. It can't be reduced to smaller parts. All that we can do is say "When we arrange brain's atoms like this, it hurts."

We could construct robots, that react to pain exactly like humans (screaming, sweating, ...) without feeling anything. Why aren't we like that?

Re: Ray Kurzweil's Dubious New Theory of Mind

#66

Post by andreasvc »

skyhook_mockups wrote: post #55
btilly wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You missed the point of that well-put criticism. Kurzweil can identify the basic components that make up a working human brain, and concludes that if you put together a similar assemblage of components, what you'll get is going to be a working human brain. The problem is that we're not sure we have all of the right components, we're not sure of how those components need to interact, we're not sure of what subtle patt…

You make a great argument, and I agree with you that it is very unlikely that a model which can only ever be an approximation of a human brain will ever exhibit intelligence. My gut tells me that we'll have more success building an exact 1:1 copy of a brain, but from digital components rather than wetware. The discovery of memristors[1], and other yet to be discovered building blocks, may lead to just these types of…

Making a 1:1 copy of the brain without understanding its mechanisms is pointless, because there's no way to bracket the problem. You don't know how low-level you have to go: if there's only a single crucial quantum interaction, you have to model that level as well, increasing the complexity many orders of magnitude (if you have to model quantums or atoms, the simulation wouldn't even fit on earth I'm afraid). Similarly for the higher levels: it's obvious that brain development depends crucially on a stimulating environment (and meaningful interaction with it), so are you going to simulate a complete environment and upbringing? Reminds me of the Sagan quote "if you want to make apple pie, you first have to invent the universe."

In a similar vein, we have succeeded in copying (digitizing) the full human genome. But, to actually do something with that requires an even greater tasks of understanding what all those genes in it actually mean (what the proteins they express do). For the brain we haven't done the former, let alone the latter. I believe there's more point in trying to understand the working of the brain or mind on a more abstract level.

Re: Ray Kurzweil's Dubious New Theory of Mind

#67

Post by daivd »

confluence wrote: post #2

Let's get this straight: Ray Kurzweil is just a few ticks off crazy. Outside of Moore's law graphs (which he didn't discover), his predictions quickly veer off course into crazy land, especially in the case of diets and theories on intelligence (which others have routinely criticized him for - see everywhere). But here's the problem I have with Ray Kurzweil and other people like him - you can't just ignore them, you…

His diet suggestions seem to be the opposite of crazy. He was very early with "more fat, less carbs, no sugar" which seems to be more or less common wisdom now. That coupled with generally few calories (CR must be the most well studied diet there is) and vegetables is basically what he recommends dietwise. His early and seemingly correct conclusions on diet allowed him to cure his diabetes type 2. That you would suggest those as crazy makes you seem poorly researched and makes me less likely to believe your other statements.

Re: Ray Kurzweil's Dubious New Theory of Mind

#68

Post by gstar »

confluence wrote: post #10
Florin_Andrei wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You kinda lost me a little at Kurzweil's diets (which are okay, regardless of whether or not they confer "immortality"), but you irrevocably lost me at Elon Musk. You might have strong opinions, but you have no idea what you're talking about.

Perhaps. That is always a distinct possibility. I cannot preclude the possibility that I have no idea what I'm talking about and as per the Dunning-Kruger effect, I might not be aware of how little I know. However, it should be known - I'm long TSLA and have been since the IPO - so don't think I don't know anything. I also know Musk's background inside and out (due diligence and all). But why do you know who Elon Mus…

GFC, I believe, is a term used in the Australian to mean "Global Financial Crisis".

Re: Ray Kurzweil's Dubious New Theory of Mind

#69

Post by andolanra »

skyhook_mockups wrote: post #53
andolanra wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect the argument is more along the lines of, "The human brain does not obey the superposition principle." A sentence is just letters, but that doesn't mean that thorough examination of each letter provides you with the knowledge necessary to understand the sentence. Anyway, saying "It's just atoms" is also misleading, because one also must content with the laws of physics which drive the atoms. Those laws are n…

Thanks for your answer, its given me something to think about. A few things immediately come to mind though: A sentence is just letters, but that doesn't mean that thorough examination of each letter provides you with the knowledge necessary to understand the sentence I see what you're saying here, but consider this example: Give someone a box of clock components and a clock from which to draw inspiration, and withou…

I was primarily making an argument the other way around: I said that understanding the subcomponents (i.e. the letters) did not guarantee understanding of the whole (i.e. the sentence), while you're giving an example in which someone builds a whole, presumably by understanding and replicating the connections of major components, but does not understand the parts. More analogous to my point would be attempting to understand the workings of a clock by examining each gear.

Also, I don't know that your thought experiment holds water. I can certainly conceive of a universe in which a person never makes the logical leap from holding a clock and parts—or even having a thorough understanding of the workings of the subcomponents of a clock—to building their own. The pre-Columbian New World civilizations, for example, had all the resources to build wheeled vehicles, and certainly understood the principle behind them enough to build wheeled toys or use rolling logs to transport large objects, and the Inca Empire even had a sprawling complex of roads—but never in their long history did the notion of a wheeled cart occur to any of them. Which is to say: the search space of ideas is vast, and one can't reasonably be expected to exhaust them all even with help.

Re: Ray Kurzweil's Dubious New Theory of Mind

#70

Post by ChuckMcM »

confluence wrote: post #7
NathanKP wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious what it is about Elon Musk in particular you consider to be "off kilter".

Please note that he's probably the least off kilter and by far the most rational/works more from first principles than analogy of the bunch. He quit a PhD in physics at Stanford to go chase the internet with ~$2K in his bank account. He then invested the $20 million (all in) he got from Zip2 straight back into X.com which later became PayPal through what can only be described as a series of random accidents that lead…

I don't suppose you have ever sat at a craps table in Vegas with a couple of hundred thousand dollars on the 'pass' line?

One of the weird things that happened to me when I was living in Las Vegas as a young man was that it really warped my sense of 'money'. People would roll into Vegas, lose a few hundred thousand and drive out with a 'see you next year' attitude. People would walk into a casino with a couple of hundred dollars and walk out with several thousand. Basically "money you had" was completely disassociated from "your work product" because if you won or lost was just random chance. So there was no confusion about having "worked" for this money, or "scrimped and saved" this money, it was just "Oh look, here is a bag of money where no money was before."

If you were living off a modest to low burn rate (like practically nothing) then you knew you could 'lose it all' and not a whole lot would change in your life. So betting everything you had on the next roll of the dice wasn't crazy, it was fun, either you'd keep playing or your fun was over for the night.

A number of people in the early days of the dot.com explosion were stunned at how 'easy' it was to 'make' a ton of money. There was even a cartoon about it where the CEO of some startup says "And the police never show up?" and the VC/Investor is saying "That's the beauty of it, its all totally legit!" When you're in that mode, and you've made your first few million, I could see thinking "Doesn't matter if I lose it all, I'll just make more. It's not that hard." When the music stopped if you were currently 'up' by a large margin you did a double take perhaps.

Having known people who are that agnostic to 'money', it just doesn't mean that much to them, it doesn't present like sociopathic behavior. The sociopaths I've known have always had some sort of 'score' system running as a way of evaluating whether or not they were 'winning' and money is a very attractive scoring system.

Post reply on HN