"The genome is not the program; it's the data."One consistent cycle in computer science is that there is no difference between program and data, and the easier it is to treat data as code and code as data the easier it is to produce adaptive systems.
I guess I'm curious as to why we need to simulate proteins at all; what's wrong with idealized neurons firing off idealized action potentials?Because the brain is not composed of idealized neurons. Real neurons may change their connections, over time, based on what's going on inside them. They divide and create new brain cells. Memory is stored in some manner (we have no idea how) and so on.
I would consider people like Kurzweil at a severe disadvantage because he seems like the type of brain that aims its crosshairs at something and concentrates on it.They'll be at a disadvantage until they actually succeed, at which point it will be obvious to most people they were correct.
How so? I mean, looking at Google Scholar I only see about 10 papers from the late 1980s and early 90s, with one paper from 1998 with him on the byline.PZ Myers might be good at blogging, but is he actually much of a scientist?Yes.
We cannot derive the brain from the protein sequences underlying it; the sequences are insufficient, as well, because the nature of their expression is dependent on the environment and the history of a few hundred billion cells, each plugging along interdependently.The problem with this statement is there is no reason why the fact that the "environment, history of a few hundred billion cells each plugging along independently" is something that can't be done in software. It certainly can't be done in software today. Will it be possible in 20 years? Maybe.
Got that? You can't understand RHEB until you understand how it interacts with three other proteins, and how it fits into a complex regulatory pathway. Is that trivially deducible from the structure of the protein? No.Right. Well, the argument is that we will get all of those interactions figured out. in the next 20 years. Maybe that's overly optimistic. But it's not impossible that we'll get it figured out eventually.
To simplify it so a computer science guy can get it, Kurzweil has everything completely wrong. The genome is not the program; it's the data. The program is the ontogeny of the organism, which is an emergent property of interactions between the regulatory components of the genome and the environment, which uses that data to build species-specific properties of the organism.The problem with this statement is that programs are data. I think he's confusing "program" with "processor" here.
I've noticed an odd thing. Criticizing Ray Kurzweil brings out swarms of defenders, very few of whom demonstrate much ability to engage in critical thinking.PZ thinks everyone who disagrees with him is being irrational, and that everything he thinks is correct because obviously he's hyper-rational and knows everything about every field. Guy's an idiot.
it's a simple matter to write a fractal generator that will create something that looks like a tree, something else entirely to create a *specific* tree. Or a dog. Or a person.It is indeed a different thing but what makes you think it's impossible? Doing exactly that is the basis for Fractal Image Compression, which mainly isn't used because of patent encumbrance.
If you need to produce a particular complex result, writing a simple program to do it is actually much harder than writing a complex program to do it.A brain simulation obviously won't be written with normal source code, it would be a simulation that operates on an enormous amount of data, most of it computer generated. The actual human written source code wouldn't be very long. Just enough to manage loading data and implementing whatever rules the simulation runs on.
I don't know who this Kurzweil is, but he seems to have a tenuous grasp on both the nature of code and the nature of this thing we call intelligence.Well, you could read the wikipedia article but I guess that would just be too much work. You can say that he doesn't understand intelligence if you want, but to argue that he doesn't understand code is pretty idiotic, for sure.
Kurzweil thinks he is making a point about the Kolmogorv complexity of the brain. What he is in fact talking about is the complexity of a process for generating an infant brain in vitro.Right. Which is why I was talking about the 'emulator' for the 'processor'. Writing an emulator won't be easy. And we don't exactly know how much external stimulus is needed to start with. That would all need to be included in the 'program'.
In short: In order to simulate a brain, using the human genome, we first have to simulate the entire universe.Only if by 'universe' you mean 'single cell' (at least to start). Do you really think something on mars is going to affect an embryo? Really? Now who's getting into 'woo' territory?
But here, you're being illogical because:No, I said I thought Kurzweil was probably wrong, several times in this tread (first in this comment). Apparently you can't read, which doesn't give me a lot of faith in your logic.
1) You do say that Kurzweil is right by supporting his ignorant, and quasi-religious belief that the genome is a program that just needs an emulator.
2) You're arguing that a developmental biologist isn't qualified to talk about the current state of developmental biology, or the kinds of methods that are needed to advance developmental biology.No, I said he wasn't qualified to talk about the state of developmental biology in 20 years. Which is obvious. I do think it's something that might happen in the next 100-200 years but we'll have to see.
Kurzweil's argument is illogical because it's based on a misconception about a basic theory of developmental biology.Whether or not an argument it's based on a misconception has no baring on whether or not the argument is logical. Whether or not an argument is logical and whether or not it's correct in the real world are two separate things.
It's like saying you can model the solar system if you had enough computing power to add all the epicycles.Uh, it's pretty easy to model the solar system. You could probably model it computationally as a system of geocentric epicycles pretty easily, if you wanted to. In fact, all you would need would be eight epicycles centered around the sun.
You're saying that Kurzweil is wrong about the timeline but right about the theory. Meyers is pointing out that the theory behind the timeline is false. And since he's a developmental biologist, he's in a better position to examine that theory than Kurzweil.He says it's false, but he doesn't really give a solid reason why he thinks its false.
How is a developmental biologist unqualified to talk about the state of developmental biology in 20 years? I'd say that he's likely in a damn good position to extrapolate from current developments to what is likely to happen in the next decade or so.Because people can't predict the future? Seems obvious enough. Meyers isn't saying Kurzweil's prediction is unlikely, he's saying it's logically impossible, and (trying) to make an argument based on fundamental principles without bothering to do the math. He's just pointing out a few proteins and pointing out how they all interact with each other. But he's not actually sitting down and computing how many interactions there are, how much computing power they'll actually take and more importantly - whether or not the interaction matrix can be simplified or optimized.
I pointed out the three obvious fallacies in your argument which is 1) constructing an argument based on an empirically false premiseYes, and I have explained how that is not a logical fallacy. Whether or not the logic is sound is independent of whether or not the premises are true.
If you are complaining that I've claimed it will be impossible to build a computer with all the capabilities of the human brain, or that I'm arguing for dualism, look again. The brain is a computer of sorts, and I'm in the camp that says there is problem in principle with replicating it artificially.So, not illogical, not impossible, but much more difficult than Kurzweil's ludicrous claims based on a basic misunderstanding of developmental biology.
What I am saying is this:
Reverse engineering the human brain has complexities that are hugely underestimated by Kurzweil, because he demonstrates little understanding of how the brain works.
delmoi: I just read carefully over PZ Meyers article again, and I have to add a strawman to your list of sins here. Because Meyers doesn't call Kurzweil's claim "illogical" or "impossible." So let's try arguing with what Meyers actually DOES say: -- KirkJobSluderReally? Then what's this:
He's not just speculating optimistically, though: he's building his case on such awfully bad logic that I'm surprised anyone still pays attention to that kook. -- PZ MyersAre you claiming that "awfully bad logic" is somehow different then 'illogical'? Because I think most people interpret them the same way.
Let's suppose I magically gave you a computer that was 100 times as powerful as any existing installation in the world - say, a computer with 100 times the FLOPS and RAM of Google's largest data center. Or, heck, 10,000 times... -- lupus_yonderboyExcept, if Mores law held, it wouldn't be 100 times or 10,000 times by 2(2/3)*n, where n is the number of years. So 1 million in 30 years, or 8 billion in 100 years. (but only 8.2k in 20 years). But anyway, I don't think Moore's law will hold that long.
Is it impossible? I have no idea. Could there be some breakthrough in 20 years? Absolutely possible. I'd be surprised if there weren't SOME breakthrough in AI in the next 20 years (but what was the breakthrough in the last 20 years?) But will we have a machine that passes the Turing test? Unlikely. Uploading consciousness? Very unlikely.But it's important to keep in mind that Simulating the brain on a computer and "AI" are two totally seperate things. Right now there is research being done on brain simulation and the purpose is to be able to do experiments without using live test animals. It has nothing to do with AI. Having AI won't allow us to 'upload our brains' at all.
Craig Silverstein was and probably still is fond of saying that true artificial intelligence is 150 years away. I argued a bit with him at the time - I might be closer to believing 50 years - but he's probably close to the truth. -- lupus_yonderboy
This kind of dogmatic garbage is going to make the cults of the future and this is one of themIsn't it interesting how pretty much all the crazy religious cults are based on the morbid fear of death? The whole Singularity thing really just reeks of that (whether it's possible or not).
Playing chess is the ideal problem for a computer....*sigh* Dude. Cars that can drive themselves on roads with real traffic already exist! (another example) The technology is expensive, and experimental so governments probably wouldn't allow you to put self-driving taxies on the road without a lot of testing. But the technology already exists.
Driving a taxi is a very poor problem for a computer. The field of motion is potentially unlimited, and there are potentially unlimited numbers of objects, which move totally unpredictably. Everything happens at once, things can overlap, the world is 3-dimensional. You can't predict what the world will look like after any given move. AND the computer doesn't have time to process difficult situations, they are all time-critical. Even if you could come up with a set of rules that let a computer safely drive a taxi, getting it to run at the speed it would require would probably take more investment and power than simply paying a human taxi driver.
Sentience is much more like driving a taxi, except that the problem isn't even well defined.
If sentience is replicable, to be blunt: I do not think computers are the kind of device that could efficiently replicate it. It just doesn't fall into the "computers are good at this" box, and adding more computational power doesn't change anything about that.Well, you also don't seem to think that computers can drive cars. Despite the computer driven cars actually exit.
If you read Ray Kurzweil's books and Hans Moravec's, what I find is that it's a very bizarre mixture of ideas that are solid and good with ideas that are crazy. It's as if you took a lot of very good food and some dog excrement and blended it all up so that you can't possibly figure out what's good or bad. It's an intimate mixture of rubbish and good ideas, and it's very hard to disentangle the two, because these are smart people; they're not stupid.posted by meehawl at 10:42 AM on August 20, 2010 [5 favorites]
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