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."

Comments

Re:What is this, a pundit slap fight?

[Stargoat]

I'm actually glad to see that Slashdot is participating in such a debate. As a longtime Slashdot resident, I'm happy that Slashdot is attempting to find a niche in the Internet that involves scientific (or semi-scientific) and computer related matters.

The draw to Slashdot needs to be the articles, but also the response to the articles. The comments should be a cut above what you see at other websites.

Basic assumption about brain development flawed

[timepilot]

The major flaw I can see in his response (which I think was addressed by Myers) is

but the information in the genome constrains the amount of information in the brain prior to the brain’s interaction with its environment.

He even underlined it. The problem is that the brain doesn't just spring into existence fully formed and THEN get exposed to the environment. The brain starts out as a few cells and is constantly exposed to the environment as it develops. I think this was a major point in Myers response and RK just blew right past it.

Re:Basic assumption about brain development flawed

[timepilot]

My point is that the genomic argument isn't relevant for addressing the objection that the brain is a system too complex to describe in any amount of code.

Even referencing the genome weakens the argument if you're using it to describe complexity. The genome is more of a bootstrap code than it is a descriptor of the system itself.

My understanding is that Kurzweil is looking at the brain as an existing system to be simulated, and Myers is saying that it is actually a long process that begins at the formation of a few cells and proceeds through exposure to its environment and its own chemistry. That the meaning of the system is actually bound up as much in that growth process as it is in the chemistry. That even the things that we see as redundancies may (or may not) be significant.

Both of these people are way smarter than I am. So like any good slashdotter, I feel compelled to criticize one of them to make myself feel better.

Re:The best resolution...

[edw]

I believe you may be falling prey to what Kurzweil warns about in his response to Meyers: linear thinking. Things go from impossible to inevitable without us much noticing. The bottom of a parabola looks a lot like a horizontal line.

Let's say Kurzweil has been too optimistic about the rate of growth of our understanding of the way the brain works. Assuming the exponent on the rate of growth of our knowledge and technology is greater than one, and assuming that Penrose and Searle are full of it—which they IMO are—and there isn't some mystical quantum mechanical woo-woo that is just as irrational as the Silicon Valley Deepak Chopra mumbo-jumbo that Meyers's crew accuses the Singularity Crows of pedaling, Kurzweil will ultimately be vindicated, even if he—or his cyborg replacement body—is not around to say, "I told you so."

Re:Not really the main issue is it?

[monoqlith]

"I don't deny there are levels of consciousness, they're just all physical. "

I've had a neurogical disease that affected my level of consciousness, and I can still tell you this question is not nearly as clear cut as you think. I quite certainly believe that all my thoughts and experience originate in my brain, because those were the things that were compromised, or went away, with the disease process, which is physical.

But beyond that, I'm stumped. I can't account for how *I* come to experience my thoughts and sensations. Yes, my brain represents the world in a 3 dimensional mental map - but represents it *to* whom? That sky appears blue. But it appears blue to what?

Furthermore I can't decide whether, when I "woke up" from the illness, I popped back into existence out of nowhere *or* the possibility of my experience was present the entire time, even though my brain wasn't functioning correctly.

There are no certain answers to this question. Anyone who claims they have answered it with any certainty on any side of the issue is mistaken or worse.

This is the hard problem of consciousness, the fundamental problem of consciousness. To repeat: how is subjective awareness, or experience, possible at all? You haven't answered this question.I suspect its out of our epistemological reach because we can never 100% verify that a physical machine which speaks and acts like us is actually conscious, actually has subjective experience. If the machine insists he has experience of pain, or pleasure, do we believe him? From an ethical standpoint, I think we have to. But from an epistemological standpoint we can never really know for sure. Because our qualia are non-substitutable. There is no way to get your experience into my brain - as soon as it enters my brain it becomes my experience.

So if you reduce awareness to a set of physical propositions, you lose the experience of "what it is like." and "what is it like to be me" - That's the other side of the coin, the subjective side. The best we can come up as far as how this is possible - physically or spiritually - is at most a hypothesis and at worst a religious assumption, even if we believe in materialism. If we want to be truly scientific we should begin to view this fundamental question as fundamentally undecidable.