Re: Artificial life likely in 3 to 10 years

Tim Tyler <seemysig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
DK wrote:
Tim Tyler <seemysig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Neurons are certainly not analogous to supercomputers
in their functional role in the brain, as signal
processing devices. It's more down to the fact that
there's a hundred billion of them that gives the
brain its processing power.

I feel very strongly that this is very wrong. Make 'em
any number you want, in the face of practically infinite
tunability of *every* neuron, a bunch of crude switches
(e.g. calculator - or the supercomputers you are talking
about) can never emulate brain's processing power.

That sounds like scepticism about the whole idea
that you can simulate the brain with a digital
computer - i.e. a whole bunch of transistors.

You have some company if so - Penrose, Searle, etc.

I don't think that intelligence = consciousness. That said,
I find the best solution to the consciousness dilemma
in essentially believing dualist proposition (everything
has consciousness, perhaps it's just another
dimension in the world).

However, the point has been done to death by now, and
me adding words has never, in my experience helped.

If you /seriously/ doubt this, you are on another planet
from me,

When it comes to intelligence, I seriously doubt it but not
out of some theological conviction but simply because
on and off switches fundamentally can't reproduce the
complexity of biochemical behavior.

and I'd rather get on with other things than
attempt to convince you of the mistaken nature of your view.

If you are just saying that a neuron is worth more than
a few digital switches - then I agree. The question is:
how many. I don't rate the number as /especially/ high -
and "practically infinite" sounds like an over-estimate.

Sounds about right to me. Each cell is thousands of
linked Belousov-Zhabotinsky reactions which gives
complexity that is completely intractable to predictive
calculation. That it is stable and in many ways
predictable is only a result of long evolutionary
selection - something we can't reproduce either.

A neuron computes some weighted function of its inputs to
probably not more than a few decimal places.

Except that in real life neuron's inputs and outputs are
continuous and not simple ons and offs and that
a bunch of neurons in turn constitutes another
unpredictable system.

This guy is on the right track, IMO:
http://uncomp.uwe.ac.uk/adamatzky/index.html
(I am guessing we had some common teachers or
influences).

More accuracy
would be wasted - due to the levels of noise in the brain.

Heh, but the noise of inseparable part of brain functioning.
It's not just about the fact that in real life signal transmission
is imperfect. It's also about the fact that the very way brain
functions generates noise and requires it!

Probably the most interesting bits - from the simulator's point
of view - are the initial developmental process and how axon
growth works.

The fundamental of that stuff are probably as simple as
couple of differential equations but in real life it's as complex
as Earth's climate - understandable, "modelable" but not
predictable with certainty.

DK

.

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