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Why on earth does it have to be real time? "simulate a human brain" isn't a practical suggestion for a path forward, it's an existence proof that says at least

Why on earth does it have to be real time? "simulate a human brain" isn't a practical suggestion for a path forward, it's an existence proof that says at least one route is possible (and thus others probably are too).

notahacker 7y ago
> Why on earth does it have to be real time? Because you're not going to pass a Turing test with an approach which takes days to simulate the process that generates a reply. (And since otherwise you've got to align the speed of the inputs to the brain simulation with the speed it simulates the chemical reactions in response to them, slowing things down may not be simplifying things anyway). It's not an existence proof if a simulation of a human brain depends on technology and processes no more grounded in things which exist than "ask the omnipotent deity to do it for us". If you can simulate each individual chemical reaction in a byte, you're still using a year's worth of internet traffic to simulate the number of simultaneous reactions going on, so even if you Moore's Law away the issue with the required processing power and assume into existence the technology to observe whole brain activity at the molecular level, you probably need Yahweh or Krishna to program the simulation...
- DuskStar 7y ago
  I think we're using different values of "existence proof" here. You seem to be taking it as "we can't build this, therefore it is not a proof". It was intended as "it is theoretically possible to build this", and "it will run really, really slow" isn't a disqualifier there. (And it could still pass a turing test - you'd have to give the human equivalent constraints, but that's true for any "text on a screen" test anyways) How about this. Would being able to perfectly simulate a Caenorhabditis elegans brain be an existence proof for whole-brain simulation, or do you think that there's some sort of discontinuity before you get to human brains?
  - notahacker 7y ago
    Not really, I'm arguing that "it is theoretically possible for humans to build and program Turing machines to undertake human whole brain simulation" relies entirely upon magical thinking. It's not so much a case of "we don't have the processing power", though we don't, as "there's no theoretical basis for assuming the human mind[1] has the capability to parse and understand the information content of a molecular structure so complex it contains the human mind within it in sufficient detail to program an accurate simulation of a human mind" (the real time stuff is moot, but since the whole point of a Turing test is a human can be convinced that another human is sat the other side of a terminal, an extended delay whilst the machine parses the complexity of "what is your name?" is a pretty hard fail). I think it's pretty obvious there's a discontinuity between simulating mechanical responses of a nematode worm to stimulation of fewer neurons than I've lost typing this sentence and achieving AGI by human brain emulation, though we're finding the worm pretty tough. Nobody is arguing nematode worms have intelligence, for a start... [1]obviously one could assume sufficiently powerful AGI could do it, but if the prior existence of AGI is a prerequisite for a particular approach to AGI, we can safely ignore it as a proof of routes to AGI.

notahacker 7y ago

> Why on earth does it have to be real time? Because you're not going to pass a Turing test with an approach which takes days to simulate the process that generates a reply. (And since otherwise you've got to align the speed of the inputs to the brain simulation with the speed it simulates the chemical reactions in response to them, slowing things down may not be simplifying things anyway). It's not an existence proof if a simulation of a human brain depends on technology and processes no more grounded in things which exist than "ask the omnipotent deity to do it for us". If you can simulate each individual chemical reaction in a byte, you're still using a year's worth of internet traffic to simulate the number of simultaneous reactions going on, so even if you Moore's Law away the issue with the required processing power and assume into existence the technology to observe whole brain activity at the molecular level, you probably need Yahweh or Krishna to program the simulation...

DuskStar 7y ago
I think we're using different values of "existence proof" here. You seem to be taking it as "we can't build this, therefore it is not a proof". It was intended as "it is theoretically possible to build this", and "it will run really, really slow" isn't a disqualifier there. (And it could still pass a turing test - you'd have to give the human equivalent constraints, but that's true for any "text on a screen" test anyways) How about this. Would being able to perfectly simulate a Caenorhabditis elegans brain be an existence proof for whole-brain simulation, or do you think that there's some sort of discontinuity before you get to human brains?
- notahacker 7y ago
  Not really, I'm arguing that "it is theoretically possible for humans to build and program Turing machines to undertake human whole brain simulation" relies entirely upon magical thinking. It's not so much a case of "we don't have the processing power", though we don't, as "there's no theoretical basis for assuming the human mind[1] has the capability to parse and understand the information content of a molecular structure so complex it contains the human mind within it in sufficient detail to program an accurate simulation of a human mind" (the real time stuff is moot, but since the whole point of a Turing test is a human can be convinced that another human is sat the other side of a terminal, an extended delay whilst the machine parses the complexity of "what is your name?" is a pretty hard fail). I think it's pretty obvious there's a discontinuity between simulating mechanical responses of a nematode worm to stimulation of fewer neurons than I've lost typing this sentence and achieving AGI by human brain emulation, though we're finding the worm pretty tough. Nobody is arguing nematode worms have intelligence, for a start... [1]obviously one could assume sufficiently powerful AGI could do it, but if the prior existence of AGI is a prerequisite for a particular approach to AGI, we can safely ignore it as a proof of routes to AGI.