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minds are much more complicated It's actually not clear if brains are more complicated to understand than modern smartphones. Modern smartphones are designed u

by p1esk 8y ago

minds are much more complicated It's actually not clear if brains are more complicated to understand than modern smartphones. Modern smartphones are designed using numerous abstraction levels - it makes it easier to design, but harder to understand if you don't know those abstractions. Brain, on the other hand, might have fewer fundamental algorithms/methods. In fact, most of the brain complexity could just be evolutionary quirks, some to make to make it's slightly more efficient, others to make some biological functions easier, etc. In the end, it might turn out that the actual human intelligence is not that hard to understand once we got through understanding all those design quirks. This might sound ridiculous - after all a human brain looks so much more complex than an iPhone! But if you didn't know anything about transistors, analog circuit design, digital logic design, computer architecture, OS architecture, and software engineering (not to mention the complexity of cellular protocols), you would have a really hard time reverse engineering a smartphone.

RIMR 8y ago
I think you hit the nail on the head here. The brain is perfectly understandable, it's just that we need to learn to understand more things about it before we get there. We designed everything in a smartphone and can say with confidence that it works a certain way, and even explain why. The brain was designed by evolution, and while we mostly understand what it does, we aren't quite sure of the how and why yet.
- shkkmo 8y ago
  > The brain is perfectly understandable, it's just that we need to learn to understand more things about it before we get there. Perhaps. While the mobile phone might be more complicated than the human brain (I suspect not), that doesn't mean that the human brain is perfectly understandable. The smartphone was designed by a large number of groups that all built and shared abstractions with the express purpose of these being understandable by other groups. The smart phone's design is purposely built to be comprehensible to the human mind. There is no clear reason to expect that there are clean, human friendly abstractions we can make about all the different layers on which the brain inter-operates. To analogize to software, it may be like the difference between diving into well documented code that has: clean separation of concerns, standard libraries and design patterns, hardware agnostic implementation, a modern programming language vs code that was coded by a self-taught developer using design patterns that they made up, employs no separation of concerns and relies on hardware timing and interference quirks. The former may have far more complicated functionality, but still be easier to understand and reason about than the latter because the former was designed to be easy to understand.
  - Retric 8y ago
    No single person understands how a modern smartphone is built. From the camera optics, transistors, OS, wireless systems, AI, etc it simply covers enough domains to be incomprehensible for a single person. What abstraction provides is a means for organizations to understand it. By comparison DNA is actually a fairly reasonable, program 3 Billion base pairs, but fairly compressible and that’s covering far more than just the brain. But the brain lacks those easily separated chunks, making it harder to decode but not nessisarily more complex.
  - p1esk 8y ago
    still be easier to understand and reason about than the latter because the former was designed to be easy to understand. All those things you mentioned: clean separation of concerns, standard libraries, etc, are only easier to understand if you already know about them. If you have no clue what a standard library is, what it does, or how it fits in the design, then you're faced with more complexity to understand than a code which implements everything from scratch.
wpietri 8y ago
You will note that I said minds, not brains. Even once we understand the hardware of the brain, I think we'll have an incredibly long way to go to understand the mind that runs on top of it. I'll add that the neurologists I've talked with understand a great deal about the hardware of the brain; the organ has been receiving intense study for a long time. But even for them their most common reaction is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ when confronted with basic questions like "why is he doing that?" and "will he get better or worse?"
- p1esk 8y ago
  You will note that I mentioned both hardware and software components of the smartphone. If you have no idea where one starts and another ends, then all you see is electrons running around in circles, both in a brain, and in a smartphone. Most mobile CPU designers would have a hard time debugging iOS apps, and most iOS devs would have a hard time debugging Apple A12 design. This, however, does not mean that fundamental principles which make a smartphone "smart" are hard to understand: concept of a stored program, high level programming language commands, user interface, etc. But these fundamental principles are buried behind massive design complexities which might not be directly related to the "intelligence" aspect of the phone (computer). I suspect (hope) this also applies to brains.

by p1esk 8y ago

RIMR 8y ago

I think you hit the nail on the head here. The brain is perfectly understandable, it's just that we need to learn to understand more things about it before we get there. We designed everything in a smartphone and can say with confidence that it works a certain way, and even explain why. The brain was designed by evolution, and while we mostly understand what it does, we aren't quite sure of the how and why yet.

shkkmo 8y ago
> The brain is perfectly understandable, it's just that we need to learn to understand more things about it before we get there. Perhaps. While the mobile phone might be more complicated than the human brain (I suspect not), that doesn't mean that the human brain is perfectly understandable. The smartphone was designed by a large number of groups that all built and shared abstractions with the express purpose of these being understandable by other groups. The smart phone's design is purposely built to be comprehensible to the human mind. There is no clear reason to expect that there are clean, human friendly abstractions we can make about all the different layers on which the brain inter-operates. To analogize to software, it may be like the difference between diving into well documented code that has: clean separation of concerns, standard libraries and design patterns, hardware agnostic implementation, a modern programming language vs code that was coded by a self-taught developer using design patterns that they made up, employs no separation of concerns and relies on hardware timing and interference quirks. The former may have far more complicated functionality, but still be easier to understand and reason about than the latter because the former was designed to be easy to understand.
- Retric 8y ago
  No single person understands how a modern smartphone is built. From the camera optics, transistors, OS, wireless systems, AI, etc it simply covers enough domains to be incomprehensible for a single person. What abstraction provides is a means for organizations to understand it. By comparison DNA is actually a fairly reasonable, program 3 Billion base pairs, but fairly compressible and that’s covering far more than just the brain. But the brain lacks those easily separated chunks, making it harder to decode but not nessisarily more complex.
- p1esk 8y ago
  still be easier to understand and reason about than the latter because the former was designed to be easy to understand. All those things you mentioned: clean separation of concerns, standard libraries, etc, are only easier to understand if you already know about them. If you have no clue what a standard library is, what it does, or how it fits in the design, then you're faced with more complexity to understand than a code which implements everything from scratch.

wpietri 8y ago

You will note that I said minds, not brains. Even once we understand the hardware of the brain, I think we'll have an incredibly long way to go to understand the mind that runs on top of it. I'll add that the neurologists I've talked with understand a great deal about the hardware of the brain; the organ has been receiving intense study for a long time. But even for them their most common reaction is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ when confronted with basic questions like "why is he doing that?" and "will he get better or worse?"

p1esk 8y ago
You will note that I mentioned both hardware and software components of the smartphone. If you have no idea where one starts and another ends, then all you see is electrons running around in circles, both in a brain, and in a smartphone. Most mobile CPU designers would have a hard time debugging iOS apps, and most iOS devs would have a hard time debugging Apple A12 design. This, however, does not mean that fundamental principles which make a smartphone "smart" are hard to understand: concept of a stored program, high level programming language commands, user interface, etc. But these fundamental principles are buried behind massive design complexities which might not be directly related to the "intelligence" aspect of the phone (computer). I suspect (hope) this also applies to brains.