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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."
Kurzweil is absolutely correct. His best argument is not the complexity of the genome, but focusing on the actual functional structures in the brain. A cortex composed of a billion repeating units is something we CAN feasibly simulate. Already, we have massive systems that run an algorithm spread across billions of separate instances. (google.com is one)
An "algorithm" could also model the behavior of a few neurons working in circuit.
Also, keep in mind that most of the complexity of the brain and body are completely unrelated to the task of thinking. Much of that genome codes for molecular machine parts needed to maintain and grow the hardware. There's all kind of defense and circulatory and support systems that we won't have to worry about when designing artificial minds.
And finally, when you consider the changes made to the brain from the enviroment : that doesn't make the problem harder. Once you have a self organizing neural system that works like the human brain but a million times faster, you expose that system to our environment and train it up just like we do with humans. Sure, it might take a few years for such a system to reach super-intelligence, but if your fundamental design was right then this would eventually happen.