6 ms·

Amusingly i think that Kurzweil demonstrates his ignorance all the more clearly in this post. The brain is a product of not just the genome but the environment

Amusingly i think that Kurzweil demonstrates his ignorance all the more clearly in this post. The brain is a product of not just the genome but the environment in which it develops. You are not just the product of your genome. You are the product of your genome and the womb in which you were incubated, and the environmental stressors on your mother. You can't go from genome => organism without a WHOOOOOLE lot of Ceteris Paribus to fill in the gaps. Information theory is really pretty irrelevant to the subject of developing a biological model of the brain. To clarify (having read Kurzweil's post more carefully), a lot of the interesting features of the brain are specified in the configuration and connections of the brain. The base building blocks and types of neurons might be specified in the genome (i'm not positive about that, i'm not a geneticist), but even if that were to be the case, Kurzwiel would have to demonstrate that environmental factors were not critical in the development of the structures of the brain that make us thinking beings. I don't think he can do that. Biologists and computer scientists have spent a long time doing research on the building blocks of neural networks, and not only do the fields still face some difficult and fundamental challenges, but for the time being, it's very clear that we do not have the tools necessary to interrogate the brain in the manner we would need in order to be able to map interesting things out. Perhaps things have changed in the 5 years since i graduated university, but... i haven't heard anything earth shattering that would indicate we do have the level of sophistication to computationally model the brain in an accurate manner, or even promising starts to such an endeavor. Additional Edit: Kurzweils assertion that we can't predict how technology will change is correct. Neither can he. Progress is a discontinuous non-linear process. It may be that we'll be able to track all the particles in the brain and watch them as the develop over time, but... then again it very well be that we won't be able to. Tinkering with brains in invasive ways is difficult, let alone non-invasive ways.

illumin8 16y ago
You're mis-characterizing his post: "It is true that the brain gains a great deal of information by interacting with its environment – it is an adaptive learning system." Where does he say that the brain is only the product of its genome?
- jacquesm 16y ago
  You sidestep the whole embryology problem like that. The 50 megs of data we're talking about encodes the basic building blocks, the scaffolding, and some of the process, but not the end result. DNA encodes proteins, not brains.
  - sprout 16y ago
    You sidestep the whole hardware problem like that. Computer code encodes software programs, not computers.
    - jacquesm 16y ago
      Correct, all this is premised on the fact that we think that we can simulate a brain by using nothing but software. If that's not the case then we will most likely have to revise our view of biology drastically.
- knowtheory 16y ago
  Yeah, apologies, i've edited my post to clarify
- raimondious 16y ago
  I thought that comment was still a little inaccurate — "the environment" in biology is not only what the brain actually processes and learns, it includes the chemical environment as well. The genome does not explicitly describe how the cells should develop, and this is different from how the brain changes in response to neural input.
  - sprout 16y ago
    Presumably when we're talking about this task the first simulation would take place on a very large cluster, with a lot of human data as input. Kurzweil is giving a lines-of-code metric, but lines-of-code is only one piece of the puzzle. Kurzweil is calling LOC analogous to DNA. Chemistry is analogous to the actual hardware (of which there will undoubtedly be a lot) and classical 'experience' is just that. I'm beginning to feel like the people who understand the biology are misunderstanding the computer science.
gfodor 16y ago
Here's something to think about. What does the bitwise encoding of the "brain related" part of the genome actually mean then? Say it's 50 megabytes. Does this mean nothing? Why is it 50 and not 500 nor 5? Surely there's meaning in the amount of bits necessary to encode the genomic information to create a brain. Kurzweil is simply throwing this figure out as food for thought, that from an information perspective this is the kernel of knowledge necessary (with sufficient simulation of the environment) to "grow" a brain.
- jacquesm 16y ago
  Think of it as the input to a fractal generator that will expand that input seed in to a physical structure many orders of magnitudes larger than the seed.
  - jerf 16y ago
    For everybody else having trouble with the information theory aspect of this argument: Pop quiz, how many bits of information are contained in the Mandelbrot set? When you figure out the answer to that question, and really internalize the answer, you'll be in a much better position to understand Kurzweil's argument here. (And forgive me if I think understanding it should be considered a prerequisite to refuting it. Most commenters here are skipping that step. He may yet be wrong, but surely we can at least do him the courtesy of engaging with his actual argument and not dim reflections from a funhouse mirror?)
    - jacquesm 16y ago
      That was sort of the point, given that the mandelbrot set contains very little real information and that you can express the whole set in one line of math you can take a stab at thinking about the complexity of the structures that you can generate when your input is substantially larger than that. Find the formula and you have a shot at computing the end result but we're very far away from being able to trace the path from DNA to deep brain structure. Right now we're stuck solidly on being able to figure out the structure of the proteins fast enough (Anton?), once that's more easily done we can move on to the next level of the problem, the interactions of large numbers of proteins in a soupy environment.
esrtgadg 16y ago
Decider: Behaviours and abilities of feral children. Winner: Myers. Next? ;)
anamax 16y ago
> The brain is a product of not just the genome but the environment in which it develops. You are not just the product of your genome. You are the product of your genome and the womb in which you were incubated, and the environmental stressors on your mother. While I may be a product of my genome plus a specific womb with specific stressors (which affected that womb), we're not trying to duplicate me. It's sufficient to generate a brain from a genome and some womb, aka "development environment".
Tichy 16y ago
Well how much information is encoded in the brain making process? Isn't most of it the same that is used for manufacturing all other living tissue? Either way, I don't see you or any other naysayers giving any numbers. Just a vague "it's all too complex we'll never get it". Maybe, maybe not - but it is just a claim, which hardly seems enough to justify trashing Kurzweil.
TheEzEzz 16y ago
>You can't go from genome => organism without a WHOOOOOLE lot of Ceteris Paribus to fill in the gaps. Of course not. Likewise, if all you had was the binary of a Linux distro, and you didn't have a computer or any other associated hardware, it would be very hard to get that code running. On the other hand, if you were trying to recode the distribution from scratch, without trying to decompile anything, a good ball park estimate for the size of your source code would be the size of the original distribution. That's Kurzweil's point: he's simply trying to measure the complexity of the system, to get a rough estimate for how complex the model will need to be.
- clevercode 16y ago
  Recreating the source code by itself does not, in this case, constitute a "model". In order to actually run that binary, you also need to create a virtual computer for it to inhabit.
  - kemiller 16y ago
    The genome is the source code for that, too.
    - clevercode 16y ago
      True, but that fact only becomes useful after you already have it running on a virtual machine. Chicken-and-egg problem.
      - kragen 16y ago
        The chicken-and-egg problem can take a certain amount of effort to solve, but it's not a major engineering obstacle. The easiest way to bootstrap a self-compiling compiler from bare metal is probably by writing a Forth inner interpreter in machine code, which is a few hundred bytes; a Forth outer interpreter in threaded code, which is a few hundred cells; and then an interpreter for the language of your compiler in Forth, which is likely to be a few dozen to a few thousand lines of code, depending on the language. (I don't know if Forth is good for anything else, but it's optimal for this.) I don't know how to estimate this task properly, but I doubt it's more than a few weeks of work for a skilled person.

illumin8 16y ago

You're mis-characterizing his post: "It is true that the brain gains a great deal of information by interacting with its environment – it is an adaptive learning system." Where does he say that the brain is only the product of its genome?

jacquesm 16y ago
You sidestep the whole embryology problem like that. The 50 megs of data we're talking about encodes the basic building blocks, the scaffolding, and some of the process, but not the end result. DNA encodes proteins, not brains.
- sprout 16y ago
  You sidestep the whole hardware problem like that. Computer code encodes software programs, not computers.
  - jacquesm 16y ago
    Correct, all this is premised on the fact that we think that we can simulate a brain by using nothing but software. If that's not the case then we will most likely have to revise our view of biology drastically.
knowtheory 16y ago
Yeah, apologies, i've edited my post to clarify
raimondious 16y ago
I thought that comment was still a little inaccurate — "the environment" in biology is not only what the brain actually processes and learns, it includes the chemical environment as well. The genome does not explicitly describe how the cells should develop, and this is different from how the brain changes in response to neural input.
- sprout 16y ago
  Presumably when we're talking about this task the first simulation would take place on a very large cluster, with a lot of human data as input. Kurzweil is giving a lines-of-code metric, but lines-of-code is only one piece of the puzzle. Kurzweil is calling LOC analogous to DNA. Chemistry is analogous to the actual hardware (of which there will undoubtedly be a lot) and classical 'experience' is just that. I'm beginning to feel like the people who understand the biology are misunderstanding the computer science.

gfodor 16y ago

Here's something to think about. What does the bitwise encoding of the "brain related" part of the genome actually mean then? Say it's 50 megabytes. Does this mean nothing? Why is it 50 and not 500 nor 5? Surely there's meaning in the amount of bits necessary to encode the genomic information to create a brain. Kurzweil is simply throwing this figure out as food for thought, that from an information perspective this is the kernel of knowledge necessary (with sufficient simulation of the environment) to "grow" a brain.

jacquesm 16y ago
Think of it as the input to a fractal generator that will expand that input seed in to a physical structure many orders of magnitudes larger than the seed.
- jerf 16y ago
  For everybody else having trouble with the information theory aspect of this argument: Pop quiz, how many bits of information are contained in the Mandelbrot set? When you figure out the answer to that question, and really internalize the answer, you'll be in a much better position to understand Kurzweil's argument here. (And forgive me if I think understanding it should be considered a prerequisite to refuting it. Most commenters here are skipping that step. He may yet be wrong, but surely we can at least do him the courtesy of engaging with his actual argument and not dim reflections from a funhouse mirror?)
  - jacquesm 16y ago
    That was sort of the point, given that the mandelbrot set contains very little real information and that you can express the whole set in one line of math you can take a stab at thinking about the complexity of the structures that you can generate when your input is substantially larger than that. Find the formula and you have a shot at computing the end result but we're very far away from being able to trace the path from DNA to deep brain structure. Right now we're stuck solidly on being able to figure out the structure of the proteins fast enough (Anton?), once that's more easily done we can move on to the next level of the problem, the interactions of large numbers of proteins in a soupy environment.

esrtgadg 16y ago

Decider: Behaviours and abilities of feral children. Winner: Myers. Next? ;)

anamax 16y ago

> The brain is a product of not just the genome but the environment in which it develops. You are not just the product of your genome. You are the product of your genome and the womb in which you were incubated, and the environmental stressors on your mother. While I may be a product of my genome plus a specific womb with specific stressors (which affected that womb), we're not trying to duplicate me. It's sufficient to generate a brain from a genome and some womb, aka "development environment".

Tichy 16y ago

Well how much information is encoded in the brain making process? Isn't most of it the same that is used for manufacturing all other living tissue? Either way, I don't see you or any other naysayers giving any numbers. Just a vague "it's all too complex we'll never get it". Maybe, maybe not - but it is just a claim, which hardly seems enough to justify trashing Kurzweil.

TheEzEzz 16y ago

>You can't go from genome => organism without a WHOOOOOLE lot of Ceteris Paribus to fill in the gaps. Of course not. Likewise, if all you had was the binary of a Linux distro, and you didn't have a computer or any other associated hardware, it would be very hard to get that code running. On the other hand, if you were trying to recode the distribution from scratch, without trying to decompile anything, a good ball park estimate for the size of your source code would be the size of the original distribution. That's Kurzweil's point: he's simply trying to measure the complexity of the system, to get a rough estimate for how complex the model will need to be.

clevercode 16y ago
Recreating the source code by itself does not, in this case, constitute a "model". In order to actually run that binary, you also need to create a virtual computer for it to inhabit.
- kemiller 16y ago
  The genome is the source code for that, too.
  - clevercode 16y ago
    True, but that fact only becomes useful after you already have it running on a virtual machine. Chicken-and-egg problem.
    - kragen 16y ago
      The chicken-and-egg problem can take a certain amount of effort to solve, but it's not a major engineering obstacle. The easiest way to bootstrap a self-compiling compiler from bare metal is probably by writing a Forth inner interpreter in machine code, which is a few hundred bytes; a Forth outer interpreter in threaded code, which is a few hundred cells; and then an interpreter for the language of your compiler in Forth, which is likely to be a few dozen to a few thousand lines of code, depending on the language. (I don't know if Forth is good for anything else, but it's optimal for this.) I don't know how to estimate this task properly, but I doubt it's more than a few weeks of work for a skilled person.