Brad/Ben/all, I think Ben's point about not trying to emulate biological brains with computers is quite important.
The medium they are working with (living cells, computer chips are very different). Effective brains emerge out of an interplay between the fundamental substrate and the connections with the external environment that stimulate the need for and utility of mind processes (unconscious or conscious). The emergence of mind requires an evolutionary interaction between the potential mind sustrate and the environment. In the case of the computer-based system, humans and later AGIs can also consciously design components/concepts that can be thrown into the mind generating architecture. But over it all there will still be be a powerful evolutionary process of "try some things, see what happens, make a selection of what seems to work best, try some more things ...." One thing Ben said is very relevant: > This precision allows entirely different structures and dynamics to be > utilized, in digital AGI systems as opposed to brains. For example, > it allows correct probabilistic inference calculations (which humans, > at least on the conscious level) are miserable at making; it allows > compact expression of complex procedures as higher-order functions (a > representation that is really profoundly unbrainlike); etc. In other words when you are dealing with a profoundly different substrate what you can try to do can be very different and the evolution of systems in different substrates will therefore inevitably be different. So AGIs are our first experience with truly alien intelligence - ie. built on a profoundly different substrate to biological systems (that have Earth history). That is not to say that there will not be convergent evolution in biological brains and computer brains - we share the same meta environment and we will interact with each other. And I'm sure there will be lots of things that can be learned from the study of biological brains that will be useful for designing/evolving computer brains but it seems that starting with an awareness that biological brains and computer brains need to evolve differently due to their fundamental substrate difference makes sense to me. Cheers, Philip ------- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?[EMAIL PROTECTED]
