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But isn't that the wrong premise? Our brains emerged without a designer or an undertanding of how the brain works (I assume you don't believe in god) from simp

But isn't that the wrong premise? Our brains emerged without a designer or an undertanding of how the brain works (I assume you don't believe in god) from simple principles and through the evolutionary process. Why do we need to understand the brain for brain simulation to happen? I don't know how long it will take but I don't understand any claims about how long it will take. It can be forever or it can be in a couple of years depending on what we uncover. For all we know our giant network of computers and sensor are already kind of a brain simulation.

akiselev 10y ago
The evolutionary process took billions of years (hundreds of millions for the mammalian brain to be specific) so even though we're intelligent designers we don't quite have a precise concept of what intelligence is let alone know how to implement it. We don't know what data structures or processes make true human intelligence so while it's possible we stumble on our own version, working with what we already have as a baseline seems far more practical.
- ThomPete 10y ago
  Only if what you set it as criteria to understand the brain you are simulating, it might be that the brain can be simulated without us knowing how. The evolutionary process can be simulated or replicated in digital space and go through iterations much faster no?
  - unabst 10y ago
    To engineer anything, we need to understand it. The options you are weighing are between understanding the brain so we can write programs that run on robots that would exhibit human-like behavior, and understanding the nature of organic evolution to the point where we could simulate every organism's survival and death that lead to the autonomous design and formation of the human brain. To estimate engineer-ability requires understanding also, but I think we understand enough to know simulating the whole of evolution is not an easier problem.
    - ThomPete 10y ago
      The brain wasn't built, it emerged. The question really is what he have to engineer. My belief is that it's not the brain we need to build but the environment it can emerge in.
      - Retra 10y ago
        A single human brain is far simpler and smaller than the billions of years of history and the trillions of non-human brains that you're suggesting be reproduced. The human brain did not evolve in isolation. It evolved to fill a niche that was created by a massive amount of history and circumstance.
      - dkersten 10y ago
        If we can wait hundreds of millions of (simulated) years, then sure. But if we don't want to simulate the environment in the hopes that it will eventually emerge, eg, because we want it sooner rather than later, then we need to engineer it to be so and for that we need some level of understanding.
        ThomPete 10y ago
        Of course we need understanding, the point is whether we need to understand it all. I don't believe that's the case.
        dkersten 10y ago
        Ah, I agree then.
  - pas 10y ago
    Sure, that's the (supervised or unsupervised) learning process in Machine Learning stuff (which is what AI is nowadays, the rest is just rule engines, expert systems, and so on). But as the complexity grows computational requirements grow much faster. So, a brute force approach needs super-duper-exponentially more computation. And so far we are not at that level.
    - ThomPete 10y ago
      Depends on what you mean with bruteforce. I am not talking about blindly randomizing until luck strikes us. Evolution works by incremental change in any given environment no?
      - akiselev 10y ago
        Evolution is blindly randomized mutations except passed through a fitness function. It behaves like a script kiddy using Jack the Ripper to crack a password the size of Hamlet, except natural selection actually does have billion of years and trillions of computational nodes to achieve its end goal (survival, for which intelligence is just another tool).
        ThomPete 10y ago
        My point is that the difference between each iteration being completely random and then each iteration building on the previous means that we we going to need far less computing power than one might think.
        pas 10y ago
        Even if it's not completely random, if we don't have a good model (that is, a not too simple yet very efficient representation of the problem), the complexity instantly leaves us dead in the water. Whole brain simulation is the holy grail, because it's brutally computationally intensive, yet gives us nothing, because it's a black box. (Or a white box, but so white, you can't infer anything from it. It's just a big neural network that just works, things ripple back and forth, and it's sort of watching a busy beaver Turing machine do its work.)
Balgair 10y ago
>>(I assume you don't believe in god) Probably not a good assumption to make, irregardless of my own beliefs or possible lack thereof. 79-89% of Americans do believe in God as of June [0] and '~1/3rd of scientists' (very nebulous here) believe [1]. I would not say that our brains 'emerged... from simple principles' in any way. Maybe in jellyfish in the pre-cambrian, but not in mammals today. A very large amount of your genome is dedicated to neural development and 'proper' patterning (I think is ~2%, but can't find the citation) and that ballet of in utero development is fascinatingly complex, even in a zebrafish. But, on to your question. No, I agree with you, we do not need to understand the brain to let a simulation happen. However, to properly simulate the brain, we do have to know. Otherwise, how would we know that we have properly simulated it? I know that is a cop-out answer, but it stands. Look at physics. We can set boundaries for the experiment, calculate noise floors, have a 5-sigma threshold, etc. We would have to do that with a brain simulation in order for it to have any real meaning. Yes, we could inadvertently simulate a brain, but then we would not be able to definitively say we have done so without understanding it. This discussion is much more complicated and nuanced and really hinges on the definition of the word 'understand', an argument that has been going on since Plato and before that even. Speaking as a person working deeply in the neuro field, it is going to be a long time, not 'a couple of years'. Yes, surprises happen, and history is littered with paradigm shifters. But is is precisely because those events are so novel and rare that we celebrate them. Most science is very long hard work and consists of experiments that just set ever smaller limits to more and more nuanced phenomena. Take it from me, neuro has a very very long way to go before we have even a passing understanding of the brain. Still, you are correct, our current internet may already be a super-brain, a silicon demi-god. If that is so, then it is behaving just like the one that many people in the US believe in: taciturn and quiet. [0]http://www.gallup.com/poll/193271/americans-believe-god.aspx http://www.gallup.com/poll/193271/americans-believe-god.aspx [1]http://www.livescience.com/379-scientists-belief-god-varies-starkly-discipline.html http://www.livescience.com/379-scientists-belief-god-varies-...
SilasX 10y ago
You don't need to understand how birds fly to build something that flies. Heck, you don't even need a good understanding of aerodynamic lift (or rocketry topics). But it really, really helps. You can simulate the brain by simply increasing the precision of your measurements of it, and throwing more nodes at your simulation. But it really helps to know which parts are functionally relevant so you can focus on simulating those parts rather than e.g. the ion channels that implement the spiking (if those details turn out to be irrelevant). (For that matter, even if you did simulate the human brain well, it will probably only be good for mimicking things that evolution selected humans for in human contexts, like emotion identification; when it comes to general inference, the human brain structure is not optimal.)
- danblick 10y ago
  In his book "Antifragile" Nassim Taleb has a long rant about "teaching birds to fly" and the fact that practice usually precedes theory rather than deriving from it. He mentions jet engines as a case where the technology developed without any theory of how it worked...
- ThomPete 10y ago
  Another way to look at that is to say that we didn't need to engineer gravity and air. I.e. there might be simple rules that we can apply which in combination with the environment we are in (or create) allow for awareness.
deegles 10y ago
A good analogy I heard is that we're able to design airplanes because we have fundamental concepts like Bernoulli's Law, mechanical engineering, etc. We can't (yet) 'design' an intelligence because we don't have a fundamental 'law' of consciousness to build from.
- ThomPete 10y ago
  Another way to look at that is to say that we didn't need to engineer gravity and air.

akiselev 10y ago

The evolutionary process took billions of years (hundreds of millions for the mammalian brain to be specific) so even though we're intelligent designers we don't quite have a precise concept of what intelligence is let alone know how to implement it. We don't know what data structures or processes make true human intelligence so while it's possible we stumble on our own version, working with what we already have as a baseline seems far more practical.

ThomPete 10y ago
Only if what you set it as criteria to understand the brain you are simulating, it might be that the brain can be simulated without us knowing how. The evolutionary process can be simulated or replicated in digital space and go through iterations much faster no?
- unabst 10y ago
  To engineer anything, we need to understand it. The options you are weighing are between understanding the brain so we can write programs that run on robots that would exhibit human-like behavior, and understanding the nature of organic evolution to the point where we could simulate every organism's survival and death that lead to the autonomous design and formation of the human brain. To estimate engineer-ability requires understanding also, but I think we understand enough to know simulating the whole of evolution is not an easier problem.
  - ThomPete 10y ago
    The brain wasn't built, it emerged. The question really is what he have to engineer. My belief is that it's not the brain we need to build but the environment it can emerge in.
    - Retra 10y ago
      A single human brain is far simpler and smaller than the billions of years of history and the trillions of non-human brains that you're suggesting be reproduced. The human brain did not evolve in isolation. It evolved to fill a niche that was created by a massive amount of history and circumstance.
    - dkersten 10y ago
      If we can wait hundreds of millions of (simulated) years, then sure. But if we don't want to simulate the environment in the hopes that it will eventually emerge, eg, because we want it sooner rather than later, then we need to engineer it to be so and for that we need some level of understanding.
      - ThomPete 10y ago
        Of course we need understanding, the point is whether we need to understand it all. I don't believe that's the case.
        dkersten 10y ago
        Ah, I agree then.
- pas 10y ago
  Sure, that's the (supervised or unsupervised) learning process in Machine Learning stuff (which is what AI is nowadays, the rest is just rule engines, expert systems, and so on). But as the complexity grows computational requirements grow much faster. So, a brute force approach needs super-duper-exponentially more computation. And so far we are not at that level.
  - ThomPete 10y ago
    Depends on what you mean with bruteforce. I am not talking about blindly randomizing until luck strikes us. Evolution works by incremental change in any given environment no?
    - akiselev 10y ago
      Evolution is blindly randomized mutations except passed through a fitness function. It behaves like a script kiddy using Jack the Ripper to crack a password the size of Hamlet, except natural selection actually does have billion of years and trillions of computational nodes to achieve its end goal (survival, for which intelligence is just another tool).
      - ThomPete 10y ago
        My point is that the difference between each iteration being completely random and then each iteration building on the previous means that we we going to need far less computing power than one might think.
        pas 10y ago
        Even if it's not completely random, if we don't have a good model (that is, a not too simple yet very efficient representation of the problem), the complexity instantly leaves us dead in the water. Whole brain simulation is the holy grail, because it's brutally computationally intensive, yet gives us nothing, because it's a black box. (Or a white box, but so white, you can't infer anything from it. It's just a big neural network that just works, things ripple back and forth, and it's sort of watching a busy beaver Turing machine do its work.)

Balgair 10y ago

>>(I assume you don't believe in god) Probably not a good assumption to make, irregardless of my own beliefs or possible lack thereof. 79-89% of Americans do believe in God as of June [0] and '~1/3rd of scientists' (very nebulous here) believe [1]. I would not say that our brains 'emerged... from simple principles' in any way. Maybe in jellyfish in the pre-cambrian, but not in mammals today. A very large amount of your genome is dedicated to neural development and 'proper' patterning (I think is ~2%, but can't find the citation) and that ballet of in utero development is fascinatingly complex, even in a zebrafish. But, on to your question. No, I agree with you, we do not need to understand the brain to let a simulation happen. However, to properly simulate the brain, we do have to know. Otherwise, how would we know that we have properly simulated it? I know that is a cop-out answer, but it stands. Look at physics. We can set boundaries for the experiment, calculate noise floors, have a 5-sigma threshold, etc. We would have to do that with a brain simulation in order for it to have any real meaning. Yes, we could inadvertently simulate a brain, but then we would not be able to definitively say we have done so without understanding it. This discussion is much more complicated and nuanced and really hinges on the definition of the word 'understand', an argument that has been going on since Plato and before that even. Speaking as a person working deeply in the neuro field, it is going to be a long time, not 'a couple of years'. Yes, surprises happen, and history is littered with paradigm shifters. But is is precisely because those events are so novel and rare that we celebrate them. Most science is very long hard work and consists of experiments that just set ever smaller limits to more and more nuanced phenomena. Take it from me, neuro has a very very long way to go before we have even a passing understanding of the brain. Still, you are correct, our current internet may already be a super-brain, a silicon demi-god. If that is so, then it is behaving just like the one that many people in the US believe in: taciturn and quiet. [0]http://www.gallup.com/poll/193271/americans-believe-god.aspx http://www.gallup.com/poll/193271/americans-believe-god.aspx [1]http://www.livescience.com/379-scientists-belief-god-varies-starkly-discipline.html http://www.livescience.com/379-scientists-belief-god-varies-...

SilasX 10y ago

You don't need to understand how birds fly to build something that flies. Heck, you don't even need a good understanding of aerodynamic lift (or rocketry topics). But it really, really helps. You can simulate the brain by simply increasing the precision of your measurements of it, and throwing more nodes at your simulation. But it really helps to know which parts are functionally relevant so you can focus on simulating those parts rather than e.g. the ion channels that implement the spiking (if those details turn out to be irrelevant). (For that matter, even if you did simulate the human brain well, it will probably only be good for mimicking things that evolution selected humans for in human contexts, like emotion identification; when it comes to general inference, the human brain structure is not optimal.)

danblick 10y ago
In his book "Antifragile" Nassim Taleb has a long rant about "teaching birds to fly" and the fact that practice usually precedes theory rather than deriving from it. He mentions jet engines as a case where the technology developed without any theory of how it worked...
ThomPete 10y ago
Another way to look at that is to say that we didn't need to engineer gravity and air. I.e. there might be simple rules that we can apply which in combination with the environment we are in (or create) allow for awareness.

deegles 10y ago

A good analogy I heard is that we're able to design airplanes because we have fundamental concepts like Bernoulli's Law, mechanical engineering, etc. We can't (yet) 'design' an intelligence because we don't have a fundamental 'law' of consciousness to build from.

ThomPete 10y ago
Another way to look at that is to say that we didn't need to engineer gravity and air.