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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 ch

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.

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.