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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."
Clearly, this dispute should be resolved by a poll.
This whole discussion reminds me way too much of the million partisan pundit sissy fights that rage endlessly on the internet. If I wanted to see two guys argue about what the other did or didnt say, I would gladly head over to DailyKos or BigJournalism and drown myself in their pedantry. This is slashdot; please save the inanity for the comments and at least give us stories that have meaning!
Myers, who apparently based his second-hand comments on erroneous press reports (he wasn’t at my talk), goes on to claim that my thesis is that we will reverse-engineer the brain from the genome.
So put your speech up on your site, all I can find are videos from previous summits. TED seemingly posted videos as they happened and therefore we could openly debate them. Summits are great but not everyone has the time or resources to attend them. I would suggest you move towards a more open format of disseminating your ideas and the very specific and lengthy details about them. I'm not going to buy a book on futurism and wade through it for the details you provide about neurobiology and I don't think PZ Meyers would do that either.
I mentioned the genome in a completely different context. I presented a number of arguments as to why the design of the brain is not as complex as some theorists have advocated. This is to respond to the notion that it would require trillions of lines of code to create a comparable system. The argument from the amount of information in the genome is one of several such arguments. It is not a proposed strategy for accomplishing reverse-engineering. It is an argument from information theory, which Myers obviously does not understand.
Well, frankly, I don't understand it either. You're applying information theory to lines of code ... and that just doesn't make any sense to me. I haven't heard of it. I haven't heard of anyone say "theoretically could be reduced to x lines of code." I don't know why we're talking about information theory when we're talking about simulating the brain or even understanding the brain.
The amount of information in the genome (after lossless compression, which is feasible because of the massive redundancy in the genome) is about 50 million bytes (down from 800 million bytes in the uncompressed genome). It is true that the information in the genome goes through a complex route to create a brain, but the information in the genome constrains the amount of information in the brain prior to the brain’s interaction with its environment.
So first it was information theory on the genome and now you're on about compression of the genome. Great, you've applied theoretical limits to lines of code in order to describe a complex biological system and then argued that due to redundancy we can reduce it to 50 million bytes. And what did that buy us exactly? Look at how many lines of code we've devoted to simulating a single neuron or synapse ... and it's not even a complete and accurate simulation. Your theoretical limits are amusing but pointless ... to further apply your 'exponential growth' of the lines of code we can program is further amusing.
Kurzweil is a futurist with just enough knowledge to sell people. His exponential growth to a singularity and proof of it doesn't do him much good when he doesn't understand the complexity of the brain and then applies theoretical limits to that from other disciplines. He's free to keep preaching, I just question at what point people will give up on him. If he dies soon and pulls a L. Ron Hubbard what sort of cult then will we have on our hands?
My work here is dung.
In retrospect, maybe I should have read both articles and thought about what I was writing first instead of just spouting off.
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We don't have more than a rudimentary understanding of how the brain works, or even what consciousness is.
People say this a lot, and I don't understand why. Our understanding of how the brain works is a good deal more than rudimentary. The advances we've made in understanding the brain on both the large and small scales in just the last five years are breathtaking. Our understanding is a long way from complete, but Kurzweil is correct at least to the extent that our understanding is significant and appears to be growing at an accelerating rate. It may not be accelerating as fast as he expects, but keeping up with new developments in neurology at even a cursory level is quite challenging. The main difficulty we face at present in implementing the structures we do understand in silicon is the lack of adequate parallelism in current computing hardware, not our understanding of the relevant neural structures.
As for consciousness, unless you believe in some kind of pre-scientific vitalism, a reasonable working assumption is that it is an emergent property of brain-like structures. Unless and until we discover otherwise, there is no reason to wait for an understanding of consciousness to begin working on replicating the functionality of the brain. Quite likely, the attempt to replicate the brain will reveal more about consciousness than idle philosophical inquiries. Those so inclined might want to settle on a definition of consciousness before trying to figure out how it works.
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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.
"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.