>To put it in simple terms: It's too warm, and too wet.
Penrose never claimed that quantum computations were going on in the conscious brain. In fact, he specifically says "non-computational action". What he proposed is that quantum processes in collections of microtubules might manifest macro behaviors at the neuronal level. Tegmark is way off base when he starts ranting about quantum computing and doesn't seem to understand Penrose's theory. As to Tegmark's claims of to rapid decoherence... he doesn't have a clue how hot or how wet or what other factors might be in play at the microtubule level, so really it's just one guy's opinion...
> Almost nobody takes Penrose's ideas seriously...
Well, technically it's Hameroff's theory, but Penrose was a big and influential supporter. However, there are still a few advocates of the idea as evidenced by the large number of books on the subject from Mindell, Walker, Paster, Radin, Rosenblum, Kuttner, Talbot, Stapp, Barrett, Lockwood, Wolberg, Clayton, Stern, Jibu, Yasue, Tuszynski,...(I got tired of typing - I didn't run out of authors)... So "almost nobody" seems a bit of a mischaracterization...
BTW, for the record, I don't personally buy into the Hameroff-Penrose theory of quantum consciousness, but at least I understand it. I wonder if Tegmark ever read "The Emperor's New Mind" or "Shadows Of The Mind"...
> the two human observers involved in the test would become entangled...
Not really. By definition, once "observed" the photons cease to be entangled (the wavefunction collapses)- and by "observed" we mean that one or the other photon is sensed by a rod or cone in one of the observers' eyes.
> I think most of us understand that you're not permitted to > redistribute someone else's copyrighted material absent the > express permission to do so
That is exactly the point. Apple isn't claiming it's an infringement for you to hack the firmware on your personal iPhone. What they are saying is that it's an infringement for someone else to hack the firmware and redistribute it without their consent. It would also be an infringement for you to use that infringing derivative work.
Apple is essentially protected from the DMCA exceptions by the mere fact that 99.999% of the population is not capable of successfully re-engineering the firmware on their own personal iPhone. If you're in that 0.001% - have at it, guilt free!
If you are referring to the firmware in the iPhone, then you are incorrect. Users do not "own" this software, they license it. They are allowed to use it as long as they abide by the terms of use.
If you are referring to the application software, that depends on the nature of that license. However, let's assume that the user DOES own the application; Apple has no obligation to change the terms of their license to allow the user to load the application on their hardware platform, so the only option is new firmware... Nothing prevents someone developing their own firmware for the iPhone hardware platform, independently, without violating Apple's copyrights. That would be fair game, but then it would no longer be an iPhone, would it?
(1) Partial quoting is misquoting. What the constitution actually says is:
> "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by > securing for limited times to Authors and Inventors the > exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
The keyword here being "exclusive".
(2) The DMCA does not provide an exception for this kind of interoperability with applications. Specifically it says:
>...when circumvention is accomplished for the sole purpose > of lawfully connecting to a wireless telephone communication > network.
> courts have ruled that copying software while reverse engineering is a fair > use when done for purposes of fostering interoperability with independently > created software.
If we were talking about patents instead of copyrights, there would be no question. Is it OK for me to copy the iPhone hardware and make a few changes to make it work in a different environment? Why should Apple's IP in their boot loader be treated any different? They paid a bunch of money to a bunch of engineers to invent that software and for someone to simply take it for their own purposes is... well... stealing!
If you don't like Apple's rules - don't buy Apple. Anarchy is not the answer.
Only one species of mosquitoes actually transmit malaria to humans; the Anopheles. Interesting stunt to scare the uninformed, but most likely more harmless than, say, releasing Windows 7 to the unsuspecting masses.
Personally, I prefer on-line versions. With hyper-links and video, the content can be greatly enriched. Plus none of those pesky issues with storing old magazines, or recycling, or worse, land-fill.
> You are saying, and are claiming that Hawkin's is saying, that > complexity/scaling won't lead to intelligence, but you are wrong.
No, I'm saying that the architecture that Hawkins defines is an artificial neural network, plain and simple. He has some different thoughts about how an ANN accomplishes it's feat, but he's an ANN man, through and through.
The real problem is that Hawkins makes the same assumption that a lot of people make (i.e. just because we can describe a neuron as a Hebbian summing node and just because it looks like the brain is just a bunch of these nodes hooked together in an incredibly complex network, doesn't mean that this is the right architecture or even an essential architectural component for intelligence). Intelligence may have nothing to do with the coincidental fact that neurons also happen to function as summing junctions...
> Scaling the RIGHT architecture will lead to it
I agree with your emphasis on "RIGHT", but that's where Hawkins failed to make his case. He never got around to the RIGHT architecture, unless you believe that the brain is actually organized into cleanly delineated functional layers, but neuroscience has already shown that to NOT be the case.
As far as "scaling", this is trivially true. For anything to function it must have appropriate scale. We can always imagine something that functions at one scale, but fails to function as we reduce scale.
The 10% statistic is merely an old wives tale. We use most of our brains, just perhaps not most of it simultaneously.
Certainly there is a lot of redundancy in the brain, and maybe there's even some seemingly counterproductive 'elements', but who's to say that redundancy and counterproductivity aren't essential to what we call intelligence?
You might be right, we might be able to design a better engine, but most of the significant strides in scientific achievement have been made through improvements on what we already understand. Once we understand how the brain does it, then we can think about improving the design.
There are two problems with the computer/brain analogy. One is that there's no reason to think that what can be done with biological machinery can necessarily be done with silicon machinery. The other is that we're, as you say, trying to reverse engineer intelligence. We know that intelligence occurs in the brain and we're trying to guess at ways this might occur using the limited physical models we know of (computers being one of these models).
Or to translate these into your fire/rocket analogy, First there's not necessarily a logical progression from fire to ion drive. Second, if I see a rocket take off, but I know nothing of rocket science, is it logical for me to assume that some extreme configuration of fire is all that is necessary for a successful space flight?
In chapter 8, Hawkins discuses "The Future of Intelligence". A few pages into the chapter he writes:
> To build inteligent machines, we will need to construct large > memory systems that are hierarchically organized and that > work like the cortex. We will confront challenges with > capacity and connectivity.
He discusses the challenges of making memories dense enough and solving the connectivity problem. Then he closes that section with this:
> Once the[se] technological challenges are met, there are > no fundamental problems that prevent us from building > genuinely intelligent systems.
I guess you and I were reading different books...
BTW, you're right Hawkins chastises the scientific community for having no theories that were based on neurology... but that claim is simply false. He cites Crick, Koch, Kandel, and Mountcastle in his bibliography - was he not paying attention? Of course, there are many others, Ramachandran, Dayhoff, and Edelman, to name a few.
You wrote:
> Hawkins highlighted specific mechanisms that he believes > are lacking in existing models. For example, the need to > treat all signals as going both ways
Again, not a fair characterization from Hawkins. Many of the existing popular theories include this in their models. Read Koch, Crick and especially Edleman, for instance.
> Still, you are not fairly representing his book.
Well, you're right there, but I'm much too polite to tell you what I really think of that piece of work.
I read "On Intelligence", too. While Hawkins has some interesting thoughts, I was less than inspired. Probably because I read John Searle's "Rediscovery of the Mind" first. Actually, most of Searle's work, as well as the work of Roger Penrose has led me to the conclusion that the Strong AI tract is missing the boat. The Strong AI proponents, like Hawkins, believe that if we build a sufficiently complex artificial neural network we will necessarily get intelligence. Searle and Penrose have very convincing arguments to suggest that this is not the right path to artificial intelligence.
Realistically, how could one build an artificial brain without first understanding how the real one works? And I don't mean how neural networks function; I mean how the configuration of neural networks in the brain (and whatever other relevant structures and processes that might be necessary) accomplish the feat of intelligence. We still do not have a scientific theory for what causes intelligence. Without that, anything we build will just be a bigger artificial neural network.
Also, the thing that Strong AI'ers always seem to forget... An artificial neural net only exhibits intelligence by virtue of some human brain that interprets the inputs and outputs of the system to decide whether the results match expectation (i.e. it takes "real" intelligence to determine when artificial intelligence has occured). Contrast this with the way your brain works and how you recognize intelligence from within, then you'll realize just how far from producing artificial brains we really are...
I'm not saying that artificial intelligence is impossible, and neither is Searle (Penrose is still on the fence). I'm just saying, don't think you can slap a bunch of artificial neurons together and expect intelligence to happen.
General Relativity merely added more explanation and greater accuracy to Newton's universal force theory. "Debunked" is a very harsh mischaracterization, I think.
Turing had no way to anticipate the advent of natural language processing algorithms. He assumed that any software that could parse semantic content from human language constructs would have to be intelligent. He also assumed that there would be practical limitations to the amount of data a computer could access in a reasonable time - a key ingredient of any convincing "conversation". His assumptions were flawed. None of the Loebner Prize "contestants" had any intent on expressing general intelligence. They have only one goal, fool a human into thiniking that they are conversing with another human. That is a very specific (albeit difficult) task, but it does not require "intelligence" the way that most of us think about intelligence. Of course, it all depends on how you define intelligence. By some definitions, thermostats are intelligent. Eugene is certainly as intelligent as any thermostat, and certainly more complex, but more than that - I'm afraid not.
As for God... who's to say he didn't cause the Big Bang in one of his petri dishes?
BTW, no matter how you skin it, it comes down to what you believe. Some believe in a God, some in many gods, some believe in aliens and volcanos, some believe in random acts of cosmic debris, and some believe that none of us and the things around us actually exist except as constructs in some hyper computer. There are even an elite few who claim not to believe anything, yet that in itself is a belief... so there you go.
Get yourself a recumbent stationary bike and a cheap computer. Put the computer near the bike and you can bike 'n surf. I do it all the time. It's amazing how fast the time flies and it's the perfect geek-er-cise. BTW, I rigged a keyboard holder to the handlebars to make things a little easier.
Saying that Richard Dawkins is an "advocate of the merits of atheism" is like saying the Pope is an advocate of the merits of religion. Dawkins refers to himself as a "militant atheist".
Second, there seems to be a big problem with latency.
Third, something seems fishy about this demonstration. The timber of your voice, inflection, accent, most of the recognizable aspects involve the movement of air over the vocal chords. Yet somehow, supposedly without air moving across the demonstrators vocal chords, the output sounded just like his speaking voice, including normal dynamic range. That's some computer algorithm! Much, much better than any prior text-to-speech technology available. I mean, if I didn't know better, I would swear that we were merely hearing pre-recorded clips... oh wait... I guess I don't know better.
Slashdot Mirror
>To put it in simple terms: It's too warm, and too wet.
Penrose never claimed that quantum computations were going on in the conscious brain. In fact, he specifically says "non-computational action". What he proposed is that quantum processes in collections of microtubules might manifest macro behaviors at the neuronal level. Tegmark is way off base when he starts ranting about quantum computing and doesn't seem to understand Penrose's theory. As to Tegmark's claims of to rapid decoherence... he doesn't have a clue how hot or how wet or what other factors might be in play at the microtubule level, so really it's just one guy's opinion...
> Almost nobody takes Penrose's ideas seriously...
Well, technically it's Hameroff's theory, but Penrose was a big and influential supporter. However, there are still a few advocates of the idea as evidenced by the large number of books on the subject from Mindell, Walker, Paster, Radin, Rosenblum, Kuttner, Talbot, Stapp, Barrett, Lockwood, Wolberg, Clayton, Stern, Jibu, Yasue, Tuszynski,...(I got tired of typing - I didn't run out of authors)... So "almost nobody" seems a bit of a mischaracterization...
BTW, for the record, I don't personally buy into the Hameroff-Penrose theory of quantum consciousness, but at least I understand it. I wonder if Tegmark ever read "The Emperor's New Mind" or "Shadows Of The Mind"...
> the two human observers involved in the test would become entangled...
Not really. By definition, once "observed" the photons cease to be entangled (the wavefunction collapses)- and by "observed" we mean that one or the other photon is sensed by a rod or cone in one of the observers' eyes.
> I think most of us understand that you're not permitted to
> redistribute someone else's copyrighted material absent the
> express permission to do so
That is exactly the point. Apple isn't claiming it's an infringement for you to hack the firmware on your personal iPhone. What they are saying is that it's an infringement for someone else to hack the firmware and redistribute it without their consent. It would also be an infringement for you to use that infringing derivative work.
Apple is essentially protected from the DMCA exceptions by the mere fact that 99.999% of the population is not capable of successfully re-engineering the firmware on their own personal iPhone. If you're in that 0.001% - have at it, guilt free!
Which software are you referring to?
If you are referring to the firmware in the iPhone, then you are incorrect. Users do not "own" this software, they license it. They are allowed to use it as long as they abide by the terms of use.
If you are referring to the application software, that depends on the nature of that license. However, let's assume that the user DOES own the application; Apple has no obligation to change the terms of their license to allow the user to load the application on their hardware platform, so the only option is new firmware... Nothing prevents someone developing their own firmware for the iPhone hardware platform, independently, without violating Apple's copyrights. That would be fair game, but then it would no longer be an iPhone, would it?
Flamebait? Seriously? Jeez...
I think you are confused on two counts:
(1) Partial quoting is misquoting. What the constitution actually says is:
> "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by
> securing for limited times to Authors and Inventors the
> exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
The keyword here being "exclusive".
(2) The DMCA does not provide an exception for this kind of interoperability with applications. Specifically it says:
> ...when circumvention is accomplished for the sole purpose
> of lawfully connecting to a wireless telephone communication
> network.
> courts have ruled that copying software while reverse engineering is a fair
> use when done for purposes of fostering interoperability with independently
> created software.
If we were talking about patents instead of copyrights, there would be no question. Is it OK for me to copy the iPhone hardware and make a few changes to make it work in a different environment? Why should Apple's IP in their boot loader be treated any different? They paid a bunch of money to a bunch of engineers to invent that software and for someone to simply take it for their own purposes is... well... stealing!
If you don't like Apple's rules - don't buy Apple. Anarchy is not the answer.
Only one species of mosquitoes actually transmit malaria to humans; the Anopheles. Interesting stunt to scare the uninformed, but most likely more harmless than, say, releasing Windows 7 to the unsuspecting masses.
Nit pick, but suppositories not withstanding, most pills are edible...
Actually, most suppositories are probably edible... but I digest...errr... digress ;-)
The demos didn't show them rotate the phone for a landscape display.
If I'm browsing with a half VGA display, I want some width...
Personally, I prefer on-line versions. With hyper-links and video, the content can be greatly enriched. Plus none of those pesky issues with storing old magazines, or recycling, or worse, land-fill.
> You are saying, and are claiming that Hawkin's is saying, that
> complexity/scaling won't lead to intelligence, but you are wrong.
No, I'm saying that the architecture that Hawkins defines is an artificial neural network, plain and simple. He has some different thoughts about how an ANN accomplishes it's feat, but he's an ANN man, through and through.
The real problem is that Hawkins makes the same assumption that a lot of people make (i.e. just because we can describe a neuron as a Hebbian summing node and just because it looks like the brain is just a bunch of these nodes hooked together in an incredibly complex network, doesn't mean that this is the right architecture or even an essential architectural component for intelligence). Intelligence may have nothing to do with the coincidental fact that neurons also happen to function as summing junctions...
> Scaling the RIGHT architecture will lead to it
I agree with your emphasis on "RIGHT", but that's where Hawkins failed to make his case. He never got around to the RIGHT architecture, unless you believe that the brain is actually organized into cleanly delineated functional layers, but neuroscience has already shown that to NOT be the case.
As far as "scaling", this is trivially true. For anything to function it must have appropriate scale. We can always imagine something that functions at one scale, but fails to function as we reduce scale.
The 10% statistic is merely an old wives tale. We use most of our brains, just perhaps not most of it simultaneously.
Certainly there is a lot of redundancy in the brain, and maybe there's even some seemingly counterproductive 'elements', but who's to say that redundancy and counterproductivity aren't essential to what we call intelligence?
You might be right, we might be able to design a better engine, but most of the significant strides in scientific achievement have been made through improvements on what we already understand. Once we understand how the brain does it, then we can think about improving the design.
There are two problems with the computer/brain analogy. One is that there's no reason to think that what can be done with biological machinery can necessarily be done with silicon machinery. The other is that we're, as you say, trying to reverse engineer intelligence. We know that intelligence occurs in the brain and we're trying to guess at ways this might occur using the limited physical models we know of (computers being one of these models).
Or to translate these into your fire/rocket analogy, First there's not necessarily a logical progression from fire to ion drive. Second, if I see a rocket take off, but I know nothing of rocket science, is it logical for me to assume that some extreme configuration of fire is all that is necessary for a successful space flight?
In chapter 8, Hawkins discuses "The Future of Intelligence". A few pages into the chapter he writes:
> To build inteligent machines, we will need to construct large
> memory systems that are hierarchically organized and that
> work like the cortex. We will confront challenges with
> capacity and connectivity.
He discusses the challenges of making memories dense enough and solving the connectivity problem. Then he closes that section with this:
> Once the[se] technological challenges are met, there are
> no fundamental problems that prevent us from building
> genuinely intelligent systems.
I guess you and I were reading different books...
BTW, you're right Hawkins chastises the scientific community for having no theories that were based on neurology... but that claim is simply false. He cites Crick, Koch, Kandel, and Mountcastle in his bibliography - was he not paying attention? Of course, there are many others, Ramachandran, Dayhoff, and Edelman, to name a few.
You wrote:
> Hawkins highlighted specific mechanisms that he believes
> are lacking in existing models. For example, the need to
> treat all signals as going both ways
Again, not a fair characterization from Hawkins. Many of the existing popular theories include this in their models. Read Koch, Crick and especially Edleman, for instance.
> Still, you are not fairly representing his book.
Well, you're right there, but I'm much too polite to tell you what I really think of that piece of work.
I read "On Intelligence", too. While Hawkins has some interesting thoughts, I was less than inspired. Probably because I read John Searle's "Rediscovery of the Mind" first. Actually, most of Searle's work, as well as the work of Roger Penrose has led me to the conclusion that the Strong AI tract is missing the boat. The Strong AI proponents, like Hawkins, believe that if we build a sufficiently complex artificial neural network we will necessarily get intelligence. Searle and Penrose have very convincing arguments to suggest that this is not the right path to artificial intelligence.
Realistically, how could one build an artificial brain without first understanding how the real one works? And I don't mean how neural networks function; I mean how the configuration of neural networks in the brain (and whatever other relevant structures and processes that might be necessary) accomplish the feat of intelligence. We still do not have a scientific theory for what causes intelligence. Without that, anything we build will just be a bigger artificial neural network.
Also, the thing that Strong AI'ers always seem to forget... An artificial neural net only exhibits intelligence by virtue of some human brain that interprets the inputs and outputs of the system to decide whether the results match expectation (i.e. it takes "real" intelligence to determine when artificial intelligence has occured). Contrast this with the way your brain works and how you recognize intelligence from within, then you'll realize just how far from producing artificial brains we really are...
I'm not saying that artificial intelligence is impossible, and neither is Searle (Penrose is still on the fence). I'm just saying, don't think you can slap a bunch of artificial neurons together and expect intelligence to happen.
"Relativity debunked Newton's theories"?
General Relativity merely added more explanation and greater accuracy to Newton's universal force theory. "Debunked" is a very harsh mischaracterization, I think.
Turing had no way to anticipate the advent of natural language processing algorithms. He assumed that any software that could parse semantic content from human language constructs would have to be intelligent. He also assumed that there would be practical limitations to the amount of data a computer could access in a reasonable time - a key ingredient of any convincing "conversation". His assumptions were flawed. None of the Loebner Prize "contestants" had any intent on expressing general intelligence. They have only one goal, fool a human into thiniking that they are conversing with another human. That is a very specific (albeit difficult) task, but it does not require "intelligence" the way that most of us think about intelligence. Of course, it all depends on how you define intelligence. By some definitions, thermostats are intelligent. Eugene is certainly as intelligent as any thermostat, and certainly more complex, but more than that - I'm afraid not.
BTW, my original comment was intended to be funny, but apparently the humor of it was lost on some people... including the modders ;-)
You're not paying close enough attention...
The Big Bang **WAS** a brane collision...
As for God... who's to say he didn't cause the Big Bang in one of his petri dishes?
BTW, no matter how you skin it, it comes down to what you believe. Some believe in a God, some in many gods, some believe in aliens and volcanos, some believe in random acts of cosmic debris, and some believe that none of us and the things around us actually exist except as constructs in some hyper computer. There are even an elite few who claim not to believe anything, yet that in itself is a belief... so there you go.
I don't get the connection between artificial life created in a laboratory and creationism...
However, this does seem to lend some credence to the theory of inteligent design...
Get yourself a recumbent stationary bike and a cheap computer. Put the computer near the bike and you can bike 'n surf. I do it all the time. It's amazing how fast the time flies and it's the perfect geek-er-cise. BTW, I rigged a keyboard holder to the handlebars to make things a little easier.
These kinds of pilots happen all the time, always with the same results...
(1) The user experience with the Mac OS is generally high
(2) The IT department decides that more Macs means less dependence on IT
(3) Less dependence on IT means smaller empires for IT managers...
Guess who gets to decide what users are allowed to have on their desktops...
Saying that Richard Dawkins is an "advocate of the merits of atheism" is like saying the Pope is an advocate of the merits of religion. Dawkins refers to himself as a "militant atheist".
First, this is still a long way from telepathy.
Second, there seems to be a big problem with latency.
Third, something seems fishy about this demonstration. The timber of your voice, inflection, accent, most of the recognizable aspects involve the movement of air over the vocal chords. Yet somehow, supposedly without air moving across the demonstrators vocal chords, the output sounded just like his speaking voice, including normal dynamic range. That's some computer algorithm! Much, much better than any prior text-to-speech technology available. I mean, if I didn't know better, I would swear that we were merely hearing pre-recorded clips... oh wait... I guess I don't know better.
I wasn't saying that PE was contradictory to Darwin, I was saying that Dawkins believes this.
I, of course, think PE is completely relevant.
I'll see if I can dig up some references to convince you of Dawkins' stance on the subject.