3 ms·

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

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.

andolanra 16y ago
Myers isn't trying to argue that the million lines of code aren't there or aren't important. He's trying to argue that those million lines of code have to run on hardware which is poorly understood at best, and that trying to reverse-engineer the hardware is several orders of magnitude more difficult than trying to understand the original programming. The hardware components don't follow the law of superposition, either, so we can't just look at each element in isolation. The entire thing has to be understood. Imagine going back to ancient Roman/Greek/Etruscan/&c times and handing them a ream of paper filled with the hexadecimal representation of an x86 application compiled for a Windows environment, and then showed them what it looked like when running. "Hey, look, now you can play videos and music!" Now imagine it was several orders of magnitude more difficult than that, and you're beginning to get the idea. "If you could reproduce those 1 million lines and set them loose, allowing them to construct a human being..." The exact point he was making was that there's a lot of handwaved complexity in this statement, and that the abstraction "understand human being program, run code" is abstract to the point where it no longer accurately reflects the reality of the situation.
- Confusion 16y ago
  He's trying to argue that those million lines of code have to run on hardware which is poorly understood at best He may be trying to argue that, but that isn't the central thesis of what he is arguing. His central thesis is that [The brain's] design is not encoded in the genome and that's just patently false. There's only one single blueprint for the brain and that's the genome. That the ways in which the blueprint is being read, interpreted and carried out are not in the genome does not detract from the fact that the genome is the blueprint. His arguments support the thesis that a blueprint is not enough. The objections to Kurzweil that I list are a summary/rephrasing of the arguments Myers provides. But he starts out by saying "No, that isn't the blueprint" and none of the arguments support that thesis.

andolanra 16y ago

Myers isn't trying to argue that the million lines of code aren't there or aren't important. He's trying to argue that those million lines of code have to run on hardware which is poorly understood at best, and that trying to reverse-engineer the hardware is several orders of magnitude more difficult than trying to understand the original programming. The hardware components don't follow the law of superposition, either, so we can't just look at each element in isolation. The entire thing has to be understood. Imagine going back to ancient Roman/Greek/Etruscan/&c times and handing them a ream of paper filled with the hexadecimal representation of an x86 application compiled for a Windows environment, and then showed them what it looked like when running. "Hey, look, now you can play videos and music!" Now imagine it was several orders of magnitude more difficult than that, and you're beginning to get the idea. "If you could reproduce those 1 million lines and set them loose, allowing them to construct a human being..." The exact point he was making was that there's a lot of handwaved complexity in this statement, and that the abstraction "understand human being program, run code" is abstract to the point where it no longer accurately reflects the reality of the situation.

Confusion 16y ago
He's trying to argue that those million lines of code have to run on hardware which is poorly understood at best He may be trying to argue that, but that isn't the central thesis of what he is arguing. His central thesis is that [The brain's] design is not encoded in the genome and that's just patently false. There's only one single blueprint for the brain and that's the genome. That the ways in which the blueprint is being read, interpreted and carried out are not in the genome does not detract from the fact that the genome is the blueprint. His arguments support the thesis that a blueprint is not enough. The objections to Kurzweil that I list are a summary/rephrasing of the arguments Myers provides. But he starts out by saying "No, that isn't the blueprint" and none of the arguments support that thesis.