Let's get this straight: Ray Kurzweil is just a few ticks off crazy. Outside of Moore's law graphs (which he didn't discover), his predictions quickly veer off course into crazy land, especially in the case of diets and theories on intelligence (which others have routinely criticized him for - see everywhere).
But here's the problem I have with Ray Kurzweil and other people like him - you can't just ignore them, you can't just write them off. He's like the Joker. A guy that makes proclamations on the edge of what's reasonable, and when he's right, he's really right - and the results of what he thinks are about to happen will really screw us all. I think this of all slightly off kilter people, Peter Thiel, Aubrey de Grey, Sean Parker, Elon Musk (the least off kilter of the bunch - most rational - but man, does this guy take insane risks - I'm long TSLA :), Ray Kurzweil, Peter Diamandis (he is amongst one of the worst on the proclamations) - these are people who should be listened to, not because anything that they actually say makes any sense - because they often don't.
No, they should be listened to because of the very nature of their personalities. The way their personalities are set up makes them act like early black swan detection devices. This allows them to call the black swans out well before they're apparent to the rest of us. More often than not, they're wrong though.
They're like the canaries in the coal mine. Vigilant, plenty of false alarms, and usually ignored most of the time.
But sometimes these people, they are just so fucking right - that you better hope you are on the right side of the wave they just called out.
Too many people have been screwed thinking that the crazy fool talking about crazy things should be ignored. The counterfactual is also true:
> All prophets are false prophets.
So watch these guys out of the corner of your eye, don't take them too seriously most of the time, but if things come up, again and again and again - take notice, think carefully and make your own decisions.
They are just early warning detection systems - it's up to you to make the final decision as to whether or not it's time to fire the nuke (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov).
> Outside of Moore's law graphs (which he didn't discover), his predictions quickly veer off course into crazy land
I think Ray Kurzweil would agree with you. That's why he uses language like "the intuitive linear view" and "the historical exponential view" [1]
The whole POINT is that the predictions sound crazy. But the reason why he gathers such a following is because, unlike most "futurists", who make bold predictions for decades in the future only to slink away and hide when the time comes to for a test, Kurzweil welcomes rigorous evaluation of his past predictions. [2]
You can read through second link there and decide for yourself. He laboriously goes point for point and evaluates (in 2010) how he did in his earlier predictions from decades before. I gotta say, it's pretty impressive.
So the reason people listen to him is because his future predictions are even MORE crazy, but it's hard to argue with an 87% accuracy rate. Even his failures aren't WAY off the mark.
Yeah, I mentioned below reading his predictions for 2009 only a couple of years before they were supposed to come about (which he wrote in the late 90s), and many seemed kind of far fetched - and then all of a sudden the iPhone, iPad, Google self-driving car, Siri, Google Glass, and Watson come out, and he's pretty much batting a thousand.
Some of those predictions were a year or two late, in 2010 or 2011, but does a couple of years really matter in the grand scheme of things?
Predicting that self-driving cars would occur in ten years in the late 90s is pretty extraordinary, especially if you go to youtube and load up a commercial for Windows 98 and get a flashback of how primitive the tech environment actually was back then.
Kurzweil seems to always get technological capabilities right. Where he sometimes falls flat is in technological adoption - how actual consumers are willing to interact with technology, especially where bureaucracies are involved- see his predictions on the adoption of elearning in the classroom, or using speech recognition as an interface in an office environment.
I wouldn't put Elon Musk in that list. I think you're mixing up two distinct types of people there. There's a difference between a person having an unconventional idea, e.g. for a business, and an unconventional theory, which they claim has a sound scientific basis. These unconventional theories are often stated with an unjustifiable certainty by people like Kurzweil and I think that's what irritates people.
I don't think that's a very fair assessment of Kurzweil's role in technology.
He was on the ground getting his hands dirty with the first commercial applications of AI. He made quite a bit of money selling his various companies and technologies, and was awarded the presidential Medal of Technology from Clinton.
As I was growing up, there was a series of "Oh wow!" moments I had, associated with computers and what they were now capable of.
"Oh wow, computers can read printed documents and recognize the characters!"
"Oh wow, computers can read written text aloud!"
"Oh wow, computers can recognize speech!"
"Oh wow, computer synthesizers can sound just like pianos now!"
I didn't realize until much later that Kurzweil was heavily involved with all of those breakthroughs.
> There's a difference between a person having an unconventional idea, e.g. for a business, and an unconventional theory, which they claim has a sound scientific basis.
You sure about that? I thought most business plans were thrown out upon any contact with the customer and morphed in feedback to the customer, after a crazy idea was attempted.
Of course I could be wrong - but it feels like a false division between business and science. Most businesses when they do come out don't have a scientific basis as to why they succeed at the time - just like many theories. You can of course use hindsight bias to make it so.
It should be noted that Einstein was mostly ignored until he was verified by the Mercury orbit measurements.
You have your scientific history wrong. I'm fairly certain that you confused Mercury with the bending of light by the Sun, and you are confusing general public recognition with the attention paid by scientists. Here is a timeline.
- 1859: Mercury's precession is recognized as not fitting Newtonian predictions.
- 1887: The Michelson-Morley experiment shows the speed of light not varying as expected with motion.
- 1905: Einstein publishes several groundbreaking papers, including his special theory of relativity, and an explanation of the photo-voltaic effect (which he eventually received the Nobel for)
- 1908: Einstein becomes a professor, is widely recognized in scientific circles.
- 1911: Einstein comes up with his general theory, explains the precession of Mercury, and predicts gravitational lensing.
- 1916: Einstein appointed president of the German Physical Society.
- 1919: An Englishman, Eddington, confirms the gravitational lensing prediction during an eclipse, the press seizes on this sign of international cooperation in the aftermath of WW I, Einstein soon becomes a household name.
- 1921: Einstein receives the Nobel award in physics.
In 1905 the theories published then all fit experiment.
1919 was special because it was the confirmation of a prediction that contradicted widely accepted theory. It was made more special because it came at an extremely fortuitous time for the news cycle.
You kinda lost me a little at Kurzweil's diets (which are okay, regardless of whether or not they confer "immortality"), but you irrevocably lost me at Elon Musk. You might have strong opinions, but you have no idea what you're talking about.
Perhaps. That is always a distinct possibility. I cannot preclude the possibility that I have no idea what I'm talking about and as per the Dunning-Kruger effect, I might not be aware of how little I know.
However, it should be known - I'm long TSLA and have been since the IPO - so don't think I don't know anything. I also know Musk's background inside and out (due diligence and all).
But why do you know who Elon Musk is? Because he succeeded. Let's say he didn't. Now do you think what you do now?
What if the GFC had continued into a depression - who'd buy a an unproven, $5K reserve priced Model S (a veblen good) during a recession, with falling gas prices? He'd be out of capital within the year without cap-ex funds from Panasonic, Toyota, Daimler and the public markets to lever up and be set to produce 20K cars next year (~$1 billion in revenue).
What if the 4th Falcon launch failed and Musk ran out of cash (COTS pays only after hitting each milestone)?
What then huh? You must always look at the probabilistic alternatives, because confirmation bias and the survival bias will fuck your thinking up.
By the way - I do have strong opinions. But I hold them weakly.
I am liable to change them at any moment based upon empirical evidence.
Of all the launcher designs I've seen over the years, the Falcon / Dragon program is one of the most sensible ever. Every aspect of the design that I've seen fulfills the twin goals of reliability and low operational cost. They didn't try to create an awesome/cool system with unproven concepts (space plane, scramjet, rotors for re-entry, etc.). Instead, they took the best exisiting and well proven concepts, wrapped them in a nice package, tested it well, and made it work.
The existing large players like LockMart optimize for performance and their own profit; the small players all seem to be trying unproven (and in most cases rather dubious) concepts. Compared to how the orbital launch industry normally works, SpaceX is a refreshing dose of sanity. I salute their hard work and engineering prowess, and I wish them much success and profits.
You're reinforcing this point by with even "stronger opinions" but you're avoiding the fundamental issue:
"There's a difference between a person having an unconventional idea, e.g. for a business, and an unconventional theory, which they claim has a sound scientific basis."
Unlike a business proposal, no degree of bizarre circumstance or incredible luck can transform the underlying operation of the brain.
Ironically, you're using a human bias (pushing an analogy outside it's original domain) to argue about human bias. I'm pretty sure 99% of folks involved in this debate are well aware behavioural psychology and the like, so you can spare the "fuck you up" histrionics.
Please note that he's probably the least off kilter and by far the most rational/works more from first principles than analogy of the bunch.
He quit a PhD in physics at Stanford to go chase the internet with ~$2K in his bank account. He then invested the $20 million (all in) he got from Zip2 straight back into X.com which later became PayPal through what can only be described as a series of random accidents that lead to its eBay sale. That's insane risk for someone who essentially had fuck you money.
He then subsequently plowed the $300 or so million from the sale of PayPal to eBay, and pushed it directly into both SpaceX and Tesla - well before NASA or the world really had any need for either one of them - there was no guarantee that NASA would need SpaceX, or that COTS would continue to have government support (SpaceX bootstrapped on these contracts), or that any launch vendor would go with him over proven tech.
And with Tesla, there was no guarantee that laptops/smartphones/tablets would explode from 2005-2010, driving down the cost of Li-on batteries by an order of magnitude as South Asia's factories came online with their economies of scale, hundreds of millions of people and hundreds of billions in surplus capital that all combined to help make electric cars and an upstart car company price competitive with established luxury car brands.
There can be no doubt about it - Elon Musk takes huge risks, he is very lucky, and these are not the actions of a normal person. Normal people do not do these things - the risks he took were abominations on a risk adjusted scale (if the recession continued to decimate the economy and kill demand for veblen goods and SpaceX didn't get that 4th launch - Musk would be done - as in out of money and out of luck).
Which reminds me - the best investors are mentally damaged in some way, especially in terms of emotion (a distinct lack of empathy and emotion).
Because, if they weren't, well, they'd do what everyone else did, and be just like them.
To be contrarian, is to be damaged.
This does not mean that any of the people are mentally damaged - I merely found the studies on the relative percentages of functional psychopaths in leadership and investing positions highly curious (http://sgforums.com/forums/2092/topics/154210).
> Normal people do not do these things - the risks he took were abominations on a risk adjusted scale (if the recession continued to decimate the economy and kill demand for veblen goods and SpaceX didn't get that 4th launch - Musk would be done - as in out of money and out of luck).
I suspect that he just values things differently from you -- that he's less averse to losing large sums of money, and more averse to regretting opportunities passed by, than you are. You can call him crazy if his actions are a spectacularly bad way of getting what he wants, but if he just wants differen things than you do, that's a matter of taste rather than sanity.
> Which reminds me - the best investors are mentally damaged in some way, especially in terms of emotion (a distinct lack of empathy and emotion).
I wonder, if you raised the subject with some of these guys, what they would say to this.
> I suspect that he just values things differently from you -- that he's less averse to losing large sums of money
Truth. Same argument can be applied to terrorists and soldiers - they value the respect of their group and their families (in some cases this is monetary) over their own lives.
But then again - I presume most people think most terrorists would be damaged in some way (brain washed/delusional/lost parents) and soldiers in another way (PTSD/lose a friend/people die in front of you).
I'm not stating Elon Musk is, or is not, this - however I do find the parallels highly curious.
> I wonder, if you raised the subject with some of these guys, what they would say to this.
4. Ergo, Elon Musk is mentally damaged (or more likely to be damaged, or this is an indication that he might be damaged, as is implied).
Total analogy fail.
EDIT: Since I can't seem to be able to reply to your reply (too nested): Bringing up the analogy in the argument and finding it curious indicates that there is some reason as to why it even applies, when in fact it is completely irrelevant.
I don't suppose you have ever sat at a craps table in Vegas with a couple of hundred thousand dollars on the 'pass' line?
One of the weird things that happened to me when I was living in Las Vegas as a young man was that it really warped my sense of 'money'. People would roll into Vegas, lose a few hundred thousand and drive out with a 'see you next year' attitude. People would walk into a casino with a couple of hundred dollars and walk out with several thousand. Basically "money you had" was completely disassociated from "your work product" because if you won or lost was just random chance. So there was no confusion about having "worked" for this money, or "scrimped and saved" this money, it was just "Oh look, here is a bag of money where no money was before."
If you were living off a modest to low burn rate (like practically nothing) then you knew you could 'lose it all' and not a whole lot would change in your life. So betting everything you had on the next roll of the dice wasn't crazy, it was fun, either you'd keep playing or your fun was over for the night.
A number of people in the early days of the dot.com explosion were stunned at how 'easy' it was to 'make' a ton of money. There was even a cartoon about it where the CEO of some startup says "And the police never show up?" and the VC/Investor is saying "That's the beauty of it, its all totally legit!" When you're in that mode, and you've made your first few million, I could see thinking "Doesn't matter if I lose it all, I'll just make more. It's not that hard." When the music stopped if you were currently 'up' by a large margin you did a double take perhaps.
Having known people who are that agnostic to 'money', it just doesn't mean that much to them, it doesn't present like sociopathic behavior. The sociopaths I've known have always had some sort of 'score' system running as a way of evaluating whether or not they were 'winning' and money is a very attractive scoring system.
Which reminds me - the best investors are mentally damaged in some way, especially in terms of emotion (a distinct lack of empathy and emotion).
I wonder if this relates to the discovery that the two systems in the brain responsible for empathy and reason are mutually exclusive (that is, in the study I read about but can no longer find, activating one system always deactivated the other).
I actually remember reading an article in the New Yorker about Elon Musk a few years ago that portrayed him as a bit crazy. Looking at the plans for Tesla and SpaceX at that time, there seemed to be only a slim chance they would succeed, and if I remember correctly Elon had invested a big fraction of his fortune in these ventures (at least in Tesla maybe?). Today you wouldn't call him off kilter since he has really delivered on his ambitions, but before this happened his portrayal in the media was a bit different. There were definitely some people rolling their eyes and thinking "yeah sure Elon, your going to replace NASA and revolutionize the auto industry."
Elon: "I think I probably am a bit crazy. But I think maybe that’s sort of a healthy sign. Because there’s a point at which you can conclude that you're not crazy at all, then you probably are. It's sort of a recursive thing."
At the risk of invading Elon's personal life, one could go further and investigate his father Errol Musk, who was an electrical & mechanical engineer back in South Africa, to see if there is a biological explanation for any potential personality disorders.
Does this mean that Elon is crazy? I have no idea, but I think that he's a very logical person with life experiences that makes him a huge risk taker. For example, he tweeted briefly about the benefits of near death here: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/152394000857448448 On his google plus about page, he wrote "Not dead yet" on his bragging rights section.
So really, his worst case scenario is dying. That's his mental trick of making so many crazy risky decisions, as long as they are based on logic. That mindset cannot simply be attained by anyone, you have to experience near-death to truly get it. Mike Lazerow is another good example of such an entrepreneur. Background Story: http://www.lazerow.com/2012/06/a-new-beginning.html#tpe-acti...
Also he thinks that people should be less risk averse (8m10s) because even if they fail, it's not like they're going to starve. Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nMQ0-1jqFs#t=5m55s This is probably based on his college experiment of eating for just $1 a day without getting scurvy, or perhaps his direct observations of starvation in South Africa. I honestly have no idea, just pure speculations.
So yeah, I hope that helps enlighten a little bit of how Elon can be such a risk-taker.
I agree with your first statement. I disagree with your second statement.
I'm not a fan of Elon Musk - that would be making a fundamental attribution error - and it is a logical fallacy to think that one person is perfect. No body should be respected irrespective of action - and merely by name - that's simply foolhardy and cognitively incoherent.
All I have merely stated is thus:
These people are early warning detection systems for future black swans that can fuck us all, and they come with high number of false positives.
So don't get sucked in with their rhetoric - but don't ignore them either - because if you do, you'll get fucked.
As history would have it, one (or many people) shouting at the top of their lungs about the future does not have a huge impact on the future typically. He has a lot of interesting theories, and plenty of uninteresting or outright dubious ones (I suspect he is accelerating his own death with his over-the-top vitamin consumption). The people who make history are the ones who make it, not speculate about the future. Be wary of anyone who charges $25,000 an hour to make speeches - the line between oracle and scam artist is pretty thin these days.
You should also be aware of what is happening behind the talkers. For example, look at Singularity Institute: while they are all talk as a foundation, the scientists and entrepreneurs who speak at the Singularity Summit (run by SI) are often at the forefront of the fields (or preceding fields) of the "all talkers" futurists.
Just look at genetic engineering: this is what the futurists used to talk about. Now in popular culture genetic engineering has a negative connotation due to Gattaca and eugenics and people talk often about bioethics and socioeconomics in this context. However, even now we can do in vitro fertilization while selecting against fertilized eggs that contain a specific gene (such as for Wilson's or Huntington's disease). The beginnings of genetic engineering are already here but it has snuck up on the public, just like technologies will sneak up from behind the futurists.
His diet suggestions seem to be the opposite of crazy. He was very early with "more fat, less carbs, no sugar" which seems to be more or less common wisdom now. That coupled with generally few calories (CR must be the most well studied diet there is) and vegetables is basically what he recommends dietwise. His early and seemingly correct conclusions on diet allowed him to cure his diabetes type 2. That you would suggest those as crazy makes you seem poorly researched and makes me less likely to believe your other statements.
Long ago I read Kurzweil's "Spiritual Machines," because people kept saying he was a smart guy, and AI intrigues me. It was the first and last book of his I read. It literally had me laughing out loud at the sheer ridiculousness of his predictions and the pomposity with which he delivered them. I remember thinking to myself, "Everybody thinks this guy is a genius--but he's just writing bad sci-fi! How is he fooling everyone? What's going on here?!"
>As Kurzweil fleshes it out, the P.R.T.M. is even more like the Hierarchical Temporary Memory system proposed several years ago by his fellow entrepreneur Jeff Hawkins (who founded PalmPilot). Kurzweil’s weak efforts at differentiating his theory from Hawkins’s—“the most important difference is the set of parameters that I have included for each input … especially the size and size variability parameters”—are likely to convince no one.
Yup. That's what I thought when the book was announced and I said this:
>So is this On Intelligence 2?
I find being an armchair cynic is even easier than being an armchair futurist, since I haven't read either book (the rip off is clear from the synopsis).
I'm not sure why there's so much vitriol about Kurzweil. Maybe it's disappointment that we don't have our brain uploads ready yet, just like we were pissed about no flying cars twenty years ago. He doesn't have to be right all the time to be worth at least considering his ideas without getting so angry.
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." - Aristotle
Maybe the title is too sensationalist. But even something like "A New Kind of Science" may not have been so earth shattering, but it was still a lot of fun to read and play with.
Yeah, I don't get the recent backlash with Kurzweil on HN. I understand being critical of some of his conclusions, but he's had a pretty impressive career before becoming an author, and quite frankly he has the best track record out there on predicting the future.
It's amazing how accurate his Age of Spiritual Machines predictions became, even if some of them were a year or two late. Google's self-driving car, ipads, Siri, Watson, Google Glass, etc. He seems to always get technological capability correct, but sometimes misses the mark on technological adoption.
Even if a few of his more outlandish predictions like immortality are a few decades - or even generations - off, I think the road map of technological progress he outlines seems pretty inevitable, yet still awe inspiring.
In the preface to the book Kurzweil argues, with good reason, that “reverse-engineering the human brain may be regarded as the most important project in the universe.”
Even though Ray's futurist predictions can be looney at times, in his book "Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever" he provides a lot of useful/applicable insights into the state of modern medicine. Like how flawed our "pay per medical service" system is, or how heart disease is preventable in almost all instances (but still kills Americans more than anything else), or how most modern humans in the US have diet's and exercise habits (or lack there of) that are extremely detrimental to our bodies and their pre civilization biological programming. Our bodies firmware is indisputably out of date and no one seems to care or acknowledge this fact. I'd rather have Ray and the likes pointing these facts out and imagining a future in which someone uses technology to change them vs criticizing them for not being able to predict the future on a %100 clip. They may introduce the problems to the minds that come along and solve them one day.
Temporal. It's such a jarring mistake that it looks more like misunderstanding than a typo.
He dismisses the concept of immortality out of hand, which is frustrating. Where I live the life expectancy has increased by 20 years over the last 50. I'll bet glide ratios were also improving before powered-flight happened.
He is also somehow unaware of the advances in the last decade in machine intelligence. At the consumer level, this should be as obvious as doing a search on Google. Long-hold your iPhone home button to see pretty good voice recognition, or try Google's and be blown away. Even a little deeper, there are many modern businesses with machine intelligence as part of their very fabric. If you've confused artificial personhood with artificial intelligence then it's an understandable mistake, otherwise not.
> Where I live the life expectancy has increased by 20 years over the last 50.
But maximum life expectancy has been stuck at 130 or so for as long as there have been people.
The fact that more people live longer does not mean that suddenly we'll all live forever.
Forever is a long long time, besides having to define forever (presumably as something > 130), the whole rapture of the nerds thing is more driven by a fear of death. The various religious have been selling that particular snake oil for thousands of years, it is not surprising that those outside religion would yearn for a pseudo-scientific version of it.
It makes for some interesting science fiction but I think it is a fairly safe bet to say that you'll die a regular death.
The maximum life expectancy point is good, note that actually it's changed a bit.
"The maximum (recorded) life span for humans has increased from 103 in 1798 to 110 years in 1898, 115 years in 1990, and 122.45 years since Calment's death in 1997" - Wikipedia
And "as long as there have been people" is going way too far.
Your point that there seems to be some intrinsic limit stands, until medical science disproves it.
Living forever is as ridiculous as 100% uptime, but eliminating preventable deaths remains a good goal.
the whole rapture of the nerds thing is more driven by a fear of death
"Being scared of death is like being scared of a great big monster with poisonous fangs. It actually makes a great deal of sense, and does not, in fact, indicate that you have a psychological problem."
- Harry Potter (the version from http://hpmor.com)
The various religious have been selling that particular snake oil for thousands of years
True. The difference is that science might actually work.
I think it is a fairly safe bet to say that you'll die a regular death.
Most likely. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to do something about the annihilation of billions of sentient beings.
"The challenge of figuring out how the mind works is too complicated for even the smartest of entrepreneurs to solve on their own."
I would agree with that statement. The main problem is still simply understanding exactly how the brain works. PRTM I think is just one model that describes a type of functionality, as noted in the article there seem to be many more, and certainly we don't know enough about how the brain itself works. Once we have good well tested models for the functionality there I don't forsee any major problems in holding us back from replicating a brain ie. AI or singularity or whatever.
Sorry, not sure if I'm understanding you correctly. Are you arguing that there is more to consciousness than just the atoms in our brains? If so what is your reason for thinking this?
Kurzweil can identify the basic components that make up a working human brain, and concludes that if you put together a similar assemblage of components, what you'll get is going to be a working human brain.
The problem is that we're not sure we have all of the right components, we're not sure of how those components need to interact, we're not sure of what subtle patterns have arisen through evolution to head off design traps that we're not even aware of.
In short, yes we may be confident that we are described by physical processes, and intelligence is an emergent phenomena. But it is by no means guaranteed that when we put our components together that we'll get will be intelligent. Or if it is, then how similar to us it will be.
So far what I've said can be dismissed as abstract hypothesizing (of course so can the bulk of Kurzweil's work), so let me give a concrete example to worry you. Humans have an innate ability at language. If you have deaf twins who never encounter a language that they can understand, they will invent one complete with a consistent grammar. (This experiment has been conducted by accident.)
Other primates have no such innate ability at language. We've managed to teach chimps sign language, but they have been unable to master grammar.
There is a gene, FOXPRO2, that has 2 point mutations between us and chimps. Humans who lack either of those point mutations have extreme grammar problems. There is therefore clear evidence that putting together a primate brain is NOT SUFFICIENT to get language. Whatever it is that FOXPRO2 does differently between us and chimps is necessary for language.
The problem is that we don't know what FOXPRO2 is actually doing differently between us and chimps. We've recently shown that if you put our version of FOXPRO2 into mice, they behave differently. We can catalog the differences but we don't know why that happens.
Now suppose that we wire something artificial together that we think should be similar in capacity to a human brain. Given that we don't know what FOXPRO2 actually is doing to our brains, what are the chances that our artificial model manages to capture the necessary tweaks that FOXPRO2 makes in brain function for language function?
My bet is, "A lot lower than Kurzweil would have people believe."
You make a great argument, and I agree with you that it is very unlikely that a model which can only ever be an approximation of a human brain will ever exhibit intelligence.
My gut tells me that we'll have more success building an exact 1:1 copy of a brain, but from digital components rather than wetware. The discovery of memristors[1], and other yet to be discovered building blocks, may lead to just these types of advances.
If consciousness still doesn't emerge in such a 1:1 copy then that would be spooky.
Making a 1:1 copy of the brain without understanding its mechanisms is pointless, because there's no way to bracket the problem. You don't know how low-level you have to go: if there's only a single crucial quantum interaction, you have to model that level as well, increasing the complexity many orders of magnitude (if you have to model quantums or atoms, the simulation wouldn't even fit on earth I'm afraid). Similarly for the higher levels: it's obvious that brain development depends crucially on a stimulating environment (and meaningful interaction with it), so are you going to simulate a complete environment and upbringing? Reminds me of the Sagan quote "if you want to make apple pie, you first have to invent the universe."
In a similar vein, we have succeeded in copying (digitizing) the full human genome. But, to actually do something with that requires an even greater tasks of understanding what all those genes in it actually mean (what the proteins they express do). For the brain we haven't done the former, let alone the latter. I believe there's more point in trying to understand the working of the brain or mind on a more abstract level.
I agree with you that an more abstract understanding would be more useful than a naive copy, however I think calling it "pointless" is a bit of an exaggeration. Imagine being able to make an indistinguishable 1:1 copy of your own brain at the exact moment at which you die, voilà immortality. Tad Williams wrote an interesting bit of fiction about exactly this called the Otherland series - well worth a read.
Not to mention that simply building such a copy would yield its own set of insights.
Well, here we have an interesting demonstration of a quirk in the human mind. I guess you could call it a misattribution of word memory.
Your description of "FOXPRO2" interested me enough that I searched wikipedia for it after reading your comment,
then found out FoxPro2 is a programming language and database management system, ha, a fitting misattribution for this crowd.
Then using google's implementation of a collective phrase memory(search suggestions) I determined you likely meant -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOXP2
I suspect the argument is more along the lines of, "The human brain does not obey the superposition principle." A sentence is just letters, but that doesn't mean that thorough examination of each letter provides you with the knowledge necessary to understand the sentence.
Anyway, saying "It's just atoms" is also misleading, because one also must content with the laws of physics which drive the atoms. Those laws are not yet thoroughly understood, and even with our significant current understanding we still have trouble programmatically predicting protein folding, to say nothing of the staggering complexity contained in the brain.
Thanks for your answer, its given me something to think about.
A few things immediately come to mind though:
A sentence is just letters, but that doesn't mean that thorough examination of each letter provides you with the knowledge necessary to understand the sentence
I see what you're saying here, but consider this example:
Give someone a box of clock components and a clock from which to draw inspiration, and without any understanding of how a clock works or how the cogs and springs are manufactured etc, they will, given enough perseverance build a working clock.
This simple analogy illustrates that understanding exactly the functioning of each sub-component of a system is not necessary to be able to exploit its usefulness.
I was primarily making an argument the other way around: I said that understanding the subcomponents (i.e. the letters) did not guarantee understanding of the whole (i.e. the sentence), while you're giving an example in which someone builds a whole, presumably by understanding and replicating the connections of major components, but does not understand the parts. More analogous to my point would be attempting to understand the workings of a clock by examining each gear.
Also, I don't know that your thought experiment holds water. I can certainly conceive of a universe in which a person never makes the logical leap from holding a clock and parts—or even having a thorough understanding of the workings of the subcomponents of a clock—to building their own. The pre-Columbian New World civilizations, for example, had all the resources to build wheeled vehicles, and certainly understood the principle behind them enough to build wheeled toys or use rolling logs to transport large objects, and the Inca Empire even had a sprawling complex of roads—but never in their long history did the notion of a wheeled cart occur to any of them. Which is to say: the search space of ideas is vast, and one can't reasonably be expected to exhaust them all even with help.
That's not really the point I was making. My point is that you don't have to understand the workings of a clock (or its subcomponents) to be able to build one given the subcomponents and an example from which to work. Simply mimicking exactly what you observe will produce the desired outcome.
There are lots of examples where the underlying workings are not understood, and yet useful work is done. Look at medicine for example. For thousands of years people knew that if you mix herb A and B and boil them for time X you get something that fights infection or helps with headache. The underlying biochemistry doesn't need to be known or understood to be able to follow the steps to get the desired outcome.
The same might hold true for the brain. If we can catalogue all the connections and information pathways (chemical, electrical), we may not need to be able to explain how every combination of subcomponents interact, but, we may know that a particular arrangement gives the outcome we're after.
PS: "the search space of ideas is vast, and one can't reasonably be expected to exhaust them all even with help."
That's true but in this example we're not searching for anything. Over millions of years one solution to intelligence, from an infinity of other possibilities has already evolved. Each of us already has a working version of what we want to replicate in our own skull. Now we need to tease out all of the cogs and springs and how they are arranged, arrange them in the same ways, and unless there truly is a metaphysical component we will have something indistinguishable from human intelligence/consciousness.
I'm not the author of the comment you'replying to but I'm pretty sure that consciousness is more than atoms. Feeling pain can't be explained as an interaction of physical particles. You could describe the chemical processes in the brain accompanying pain to very high detail. But at no point you can't explain why does it hurt so much when the atoms in the brain are in a specific state.
Because physics doesn't even have the language to describe the feeling of pain. Similarly, physics doesn't have a language to describe how "green" looks, it can only describe the frequency of green etc.
Feeling pain can't be explained as an interaction of physical particles
Do you mean physical or emotional pain? I imagine that physical pain is very well understood and can be explained in (maybe) all of its entirety as a purely material (as in atoms) phenomenon.
I personally don't see any reason why emotional pain can't be explained in the same way i.e. without requiring a metaphysical component.
Both, it doesn't really matter, basically any state of consciousness. Physical processes in brain accompanying physical pain may be understood very well. But we don't understand the mechanism that translates the physical state of brain matter to the hurting feeling. Why does it hurt, when we arrange brain's atoms in a specific way?
Your explanation doesn't make sense. We know that there are people who
a) don't exhibit emotional pain or very little compared to "normal" (sociopaths/psychopaths)
b) are autistic and have "...difficulty with “subtle emotions like shame, pride, things that are much more socially oriented” [1]
c) people with Congenital insensitivity to (physical) pain, some of whom experience the condition due to excess production of endorphins in the brain
You seem to suggest that the question "but why does it hurt" is somehow mystical or metaphysical. I don't think it is. It hurts because your brain is wired so that it does. If it is wired otherwise (as in some people it is) then it doesn't hurt.
We can describe the entirety of an operating system down to its individual ones and zeroes. Do you posit that some irreducible "Tuxness" state exists that computer scientists just refuse to acknowledge?
The unpleasant feeling of pain is a very real phenomenon, unlike tuxness. It can't be reduced to smaller parts. All that we can do is say "When we arrange brain's atoms like this, it hurts."
We could construct robots, that react to pain exactly like humans (screaming, sweating, ...) without feeling anything. Why aren't we like that?
“Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.” Max Planck
If you posit "why anything exists instead of nothing", then I will have to ask whether "why" even makes sense in this context.
From what we now know of quantum physics, "nothingness" itself might be either less likely than having anything or perhaps nothing but a fiction born of our mental heuristics.
Once we dive deep enough into the functioning of the brain, and its heuristics in particular, the very idea of "essences" looks more and more like mental JPEG compression artifacts and less and less like pyramids on Mars.
I love this part: "Google built the largest pattern recognizer of them all, a system running on sixteen thousand processor cores that analyzed ten million YouTube videos and managed to learn, all by itself, to recognize cats and faces" with 15.8 percent accuracy.
Its interesting and all, but compare it to a human baby. It takes them several months of data processing to learn things like object permanence. While 16 thousand processor cores may seem like a lot, I seriously doubt it even approached 1/10th of the power of a babies brain. Indeed, I doubt it was even 1/10th of the power of the region of the babies brain dedicated to recognizing objects.
But here's the problem I have with Ray Kurzweil and other people like him - you can't just ignore them, you can't just write them off. He's like the Joker. A guy that makes proclamations on the edge of what's reasonable, and when he's right, he's really right - and the results of what he thinks are about to happen will really screw us all. I think this of all slightly off kilter people, Peter Thiel, Aubrey de Grey, Sean Parker, Elon Musk (the least off kilter of the bunch - most rational - but man, does this guy take insane risks - I'm long TSLA :), Ray Kurzweil, Peter Diamandis (he is amongst one of the worst on the proclamations) - these are people who should be listened to, not because anything that they actually say makes any sense - because they often don't.
No, they should be listened to because of the very nature of their personalities. The way their personalities are set up makes them act like early black swan detection devices. This allows them to call the black swans out well before they're apparent to the rest of us. More often than not, they're wrong though.
They're like the canaries in the coal mine. Vigilant, plenty of false alarms, and usually ignored most of the time.
But sometimes these people, they are just so fucking right - that you better hope you are on the right side of the wave they just called out.
Too many people have been screwed thinking that the crazy fool talking about crazy things should be ignored. The counterfactual is also true:
> All prophets are false prophets.
So watch these guys out of the corner of your eye, don't take them too seriously most of the time, but if things come up, again and again and again - take notice, think carefully and make your own decisions.
They are just early warning detection systems - it's up to you to make the final decision as to whether or not it's time to fire the nuke (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov).