| Kurzweil's retort falls apart in several places: "It is true that the brain gains a great deal of information by interacting with its environment – it is an adaptive learning system. But we should not confuse the information that is learned with the innate design of the brain." He is misunderstanding Myers here - Myers is talking about the physical ontogenesis of the brain during development (in utero), proteins interacting with proteins (and the environment and such) during its development, not the development of the brain through "adaptive learning" "But we can take a much more direct route to understanding the amount of information in the brain’s innate design, which I also discussed: to look at the brain itself. There, we also see massive redundancy. Yes there are trillions of connections, but they follow massively repeated patterns." "Yes, the system learns and adapts to its environment..." Again, Kurzweil is failing to address the crux of Myers argument, that the design of the brain is not only in the genetic code, but in the intricate "playing out" of cells during brain development. Myers did not talk about the brain adapting to a system in the holistic or psychological sense, but on a much more fine-grained biological level. |