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Kurzweil's Discover article says if we build a sufficiently complex machine it will be conscious as fully as humans are conscious. And he says we might do this
by pbw 14y ago
Kurzweil's Discover article says if we build a sufficiently complex machine it will be conscious as fully as humans are conscious. And he says we might do this by 2029.
This blog post says there are all sorts of low-level physical processes in the brain like detailed interactions of neurotransmitters and calcium ion channel dynamics which are super complicated and scary. And it will take hundreds of years to figure it all out and replicate it.
The answer is we don't have to replicate the human brain to create a system complex enough to exhibit consciousness. Modeling is not simulation, we can model a system after the human brain without simulating every last detail.
- nathan_long 14y ago>> Modeling is not simulation, we can model a system after the human brain without simulating every last detail. Maybe so, but I think the author is arguing that those details are part of the emergent whole; in other words, without them, you might get an intelligence, but a very alien one.
- pbw 14y agoThomas waves his hands and says "the brain is really complicated". He doesn't address how much complexity needs to be modeled, but he implies a lot of it does. Kurzweil says a "sufficiently complex" program will exhibit consciousness. So the rub is exactly what are the essential properties of the brain, and what are the accidental ones or the ones that can be implemented some other way.