Miguel Nicolelis <http://www.nicolelislab.net/>
> You could have all the computer chips ever in the world and you won’t > create a consciousness. > It must be grand being a "hard problem" theorist because it's the easiest job in the world bar none, no matter how smart something is you just say "yeah but it's not conscious" and there is no way anybody can prove you wrong. >computers will never replicate the human brain and that the technological > Singularity is "a bunch of hot air. The brain is not computable and no > engineering can reproduce it," > Unless you're willing to get on the mystical bullshit train (and even in the 21'st century many are all too willing to get on that broken down old choo choo) then the only conclusion to make is that the neural wiring required to develop human level intelligence CANNOT be impossibly complex because in the entire human genome there are only 3 billion base pairs. There are 4 bases so each base can represent 2 bits and there are 8 bits per byte so that comes out to just 750 meg, and that's enough assembly instructions to make not just a brain and all its wiring but a entire human baby. So the instructions MUST contain wiring instructions such as "wire the neurons up this that and the other way and then repeat that procedure 917 billion times. And there is a huge amount of redundancy in the human genome, if you used a file compression program like ZIP on that 750 meg you could easily put the entire thing on half a CD, not a DVD not a Blu ray just a old fashioned vanilla CD. > human consciousness (and if you believe in it, the soul) simply can’t be > replicated in silicon. That’s because its most important features are the > result of unpredictable, non-linear interactions amongst billions of cells > Unpredictability and non-linear reactions are a dime a dozen but are more the defining attribute of insanity than intelligence or the feeling of personal identity that persists over decades; and besides, computers have no trouble being unpredictable and non-linear. The first program I ever wrote was to zoom in and look at small parts of the infinite Mandelbrot set in detail, and even though I wrote the program if I wanted to know what the image it would produce next would look like all I could do is wait and see what sort of picture the program would create. > You can’t predict whether the stock market will go up or down because you > can’t compute it > But it would be easy to write a program that goes up and down in such a way that it passes the exact same statistical tests for randomness that the real stock market does. So yes, it would be easier to make a intelligent computer than it would be to make a intelligent computer that also happens to be John K Clark or any other specific individual. > the human brain has evolved to take the external world—our surroundings > and the tools we use—and create representations of them in our neural > pathways. > And those neural pathways have started to understand how they work and has devised technology to produce intelligent behavior without biological neurons. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
