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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 learni

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.
  - raimondious 16y ago
    I think the debate is this: The CS people see the biologists as overcomplicating the problem while the biologists see the CS people as oversimplifying. I do understand that eventually we will be able to simulate the brain of an adult without having to simulate all the development that created that adult brain and all the minute chemical mechanisms that enable fat and protein to think. You can simulate important parts of the basic components and get the same output as a real brain doing the same thing. However, I think that since many computer scientists see the brain as a chemical computer, they misunderstand how close we are to knowing how it actually works. We have conceptual holes in our understanding in how the brain actually processes input. We are not at the point where we can start simplifying: if we want to truly simulate what we know about the brain, we have to include the activity of every molecule, since we don't yet know what activity we can ignore. We want a Newtonian physics simulator, but we only know subatomic interactions — we have to simulate the entire universe even though F=ma is underlying it all. [Edit: yeah we understand a lot more than that but I think the analogy still applies.]
    - sprout 16y ago
      The big thing I think Kurzweil is absolutely right on is that if Moore's law continues (even in its current crippled parallel-only form) until 2045, we can't help but have the ability to simulate a human brain. Am I convinced that will happen? No. But no one has made any money betting against Moore's law since decades before I was born. It's a fact of my life until proven otherwise.
scott_s 16y ago
That exact line illustrates that he does not understand Meyers' objections. He thinks Meyers meant that we need to also model all of the information that the brain gains as it interacts with its environment. That is not what Meyers meant. What he meant is that we need to model everything that happens to the brain before it becomes a brain. That is, how the proteins interact with each other in the physical world to form the brain. Meyers' analogy was that the genome is the data, and the physical laws of the universe are the program. People are modeling how proteins fold and interact in the physical world, but it's a hard problem, and we're far from being able to do it for an entire organ.
- ugh 16y ago
  Just for context, PZ Myers is a evolutionary developmental (“evo-devo”) biology researcher, which explains the thrust of his criticism. That kind of stuff (developmental processes in embryos, i.e. how the darn animal is built) is right up his alley.
- jasongullickson 16y ago
  Based on this post (and more so what I've been able to find of the original discussion) I don't think he's overlooking this at all; if anything it's so obvious that he's not calling it out literally, like saying "I'm building an automobile"; you don't expect to have to say it's going to have wheels...
  - scott_s 16y ago
    That's because we already know how a car works. We know that wheels and an engine are necessary, but a cupholder is not. Meyers' point, as I understand it, is our understanding of the brain is not yet sophisticated to know what we can exclude from simulation.
  - kragen 16y ago
    When Wilbur and Orville Wright went to go build a bird, they did not endow it with a beak and talons.
- nkassis 16y ago
senki 16y ago
Here: "the brain prior to learning and adaptation". Unfortunately there's no such thing.

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.
- raimondious 16y ago
  I think the debate is this: The CS people see the biologists as overcomplicating the problem while the biologists see the CS people as oversimplifying. I do understand that eventually we will be able to simulate the brain of an adult without having to simulate all the development that created that adult brain and all the minute chemical mechanisms that enable fat and protein to think. You can simulate important parts of the basic components and get the same output as a real brain doing the same thing. However, I think that since many computer scientists see the brain as a chemical computer, they misunderstand how close we are to knowing how it actually works. We have conceptual holes in our understanding in how the brain actually processes input. We are not at the point where we can start simplifying: if we want to truly simulate what we know about the brain, we have to include the activity of every molecule, since we don't yet know what activity we can ignore. We want a Newtonian physics simulator, but we only know subatomic interactions — we have to simulate the entire universe even though F=ma is underlying it all. [Edit: yeah we understand a lot more than that but I think the analogy still applies.]
  - sprout 16y ago
    The big thing I think Kurzweil is absolutely right on is that if Moore's law continues (even in its current crippled parallel-only form) until 2045, we can't help but have the ability to simulate a human brain. Am I convinced that will happen? No. But no one has made any money betting against Moore's law since decades before I was born. It's a fact of my life until proven otherwise.

scott_s 16y ago

That exact line illustrates that he does not understand Meyers' objections. He thinks Meyers meant that we need to also model all of the information that the brain gains as it interacts with its environment. That is not what Meyers meant. What he meant is that we need to model everything that happens to the brain before it becomes a brain. That is, how the proteins interact with each other in the physical world to form the brain. Meyers' analogy was that the genome is the data, and the physical laws of the universe are the program. People are modeling how proteins fold and interact in the physical world, but it's a hard problem, and we're far from being able to do it for an entire organ.

ugh 16y ago
Just for context, PZ Myers is a evolutionary developmental (“evo-devo”) biology researcher, which explains the thrust of his criticism. That kind of stuff (developmental processes in embryos, i.e. how the darn animal is built) is right up his alley.
jasongullickson 16y ago
Based on this post (and more so what I've been able to find of the original discussion) I don't think he's overlooking this at all; if anything it's so obvious that he's not calling it out literally, like saying "I'm building an automobile"; you don't expect to have to say it's going to have wheels...
- scott_s 16y ago
  That's because we already know how a car works. We know that wheels and an engine are necessary, but a cupholder is not. Meyers' point, as I understand it, is our understanding of the brain is not yet sophisticated to know what we can exclude from simulation.
- kragen 16y ago
  When Wilbur and Orville Wright went to go build a bird, they did not endow it with a beak and talons.
nkassis 16y ago

senki 16y ago

Here: "the brain prior to learning and adaptation". Unfortunately there's no such thing.