Slashdot Mirror
Ray Kurzweil Responds To PZ Myers
On Tuesday we discussed a scathing critique of Ray Kurzweil's understanding of the brain written by PZ Myers. Reader Amara notes that Kurzweil has now responded on his blog. Quoting: "Myers, who apparently based his second-hand comments on erroneous press reports (he wasn't at my talk), [claims] that my thesis is that we will reverse-engineer the brain from the genome. This is not at all what I said in my presentation to the Singularity Summit. I explicitly said that our quest to understand the principles of operation of the brain is based on many types of studies — from detailed molecular studies of individual neurons, to scans of neural connection patterns, to studies of the function of neural clusters, and many other approaches. I did not present studying the genome as even part of the strategy for reverse-engineering the brain."
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1757102&cid=33280252
The point isn't the mechanics of the genome, but understanding the process of thought itself and emulating it.
P.Z. Myers has always been an idiot, but now he's really stepped into the zone of being one of those pricks from high school who was always dense but thought he was the bee's knees because he had political opinions the teachers liked to hear.
Futurist Traditionalism
what in your deluded pathetic piece of shit brain can you possibly cite as reason why kurzweil would be deserving of any such thing? Because you saw his name in an article talking about sciency sounding things and you feel threatened? Feel free to agree or disagree about his predictions, but his predictions are just that, nothing more. Hes not a terrorist or former warmongering president. Hes just a guy with alot of education and inventions who is predicting an optimistic view of human technological advancement. And if he did live forever, he would never see his ideas proved wrong. He endlessly adjusts his views and re-predicts. Thats what these people do. That threatens you in some way?
> The fundamental assumption is that there is some kind of mystical brain/mind dualism.
> Mind is nothing more than categorized recollected experience extrapolated to understand unfolding or future/potential events.
I don't know whether to laugh or cry at your total ignorance. Materialism has long been disproved / shown to be incomplete. Brain != Mind.
For starters I would recommend:
- Peter Russell, The Primacy of Consciousness
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7799171063626430789#
- Lynne McTaggart, The Intention Experiment
http://www.amazon.com/Intention-Experiment-Using-Thoughts-Change/dp/0743276965/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpi_2
Are you that blissfully unaware of what the founder of the quantum theory, Max Plank, said back in 1931 ??
"I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness."
Finally, as a mystic, you are completely blind to the levels of consciousness. To use a computer analogy, the brain is the hardware, the mind the software, the spirit the electricity.