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Comment by retina_sam | Hacker News Reader

> But... Strong AI can be achieved, if nothing else by emulating a brain synapse by synapse. Therefore god doesn't exist?

Isn't this type of thinking a form of cargo cult science, though? According to Facebook's AI director [1]:

> The equivalent [of cargo cult science] in AI is to try to copy every detail that we know of about how neurons and synapses work, and then turn on a gigantic simulation of a large neural network inside a supercomputer, and hope that AI will emerge. That’s cargo cult AI. There are very serious people who get a huge amount of money who basically—and of course I’m sort of simplifying here—are pretty close to believing this.

[1] http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial-intel...

At any rate, that's a theory you have there (that simulating neurons results in emergent AI), now you have to prove your theory before I will admit God doesn't exist. I contend that without a spirit, no such AI will emerge.

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If that's a theory he has there, then you imply god and the spirit are not a theory. If that is the case, please provide proof. Quite literally the entire human race would be interested.

> If that's a theory he has there, then you imply god and the spirit are not a theory

That's just lazy. You can't shift the burden of proof on me when OP was the one making the extraordinary claim (sufficiently sophisticated synapse simulations are guaranteed to result in emergent strong AI). If you want to demand proof of my claims, you'll need to post your demands to the comment in which I made the extraordinary claim.

If you're going to dodge the question on a technicality, then frankly you're not worth the time.

The existence of god is an extraordinary claim. The claim that replicating a brain at the molecular level will reproduce the behaviour of a brain is not an extraordinary claim. It's not even a claim, it's a fact.

Not really a fair comparison - the islanders of the 'cargo cult' were trying to entice aircraft full of cargo down by recreating what the explorers did - build towers, runways out of palm leaves, and wave coconut 'radios' around.

But they didn't know aircraft were built by humans, what radios did, or that there was a huge society far away building aircraft and training people to fly them.

And how many aircraft did they ever see, and how long did they spend trying before they were invaded/educated/gave up?

If they had 7 billion aircraft, seeing them all from scratch, and a thousand years to investigate, would they have progressed further?

We know brains work, we believe they are completely grown and contained within a skull (no remote factories building them), and we keep exploring further and building better tools and gathering more data.

The roundworm C. elegans has one of the simplest nervous systems of any organism, with its hermaphrodite type having only 302 neurons. Furthermore, the structural connectome of these neurons is fully worked out. There are fewer than one thousand cells in the whole body of a C. elegans worm, each with a unique identifier and comprehensive supporting literature because C. elegans is a model organism. Being a model organism, the genome is fully known, along with many well characterized mutants readily available, a comprehensive literature of behavioural studies, etc. With so few neurons and new calcium 2 photon microscopy techniques it should soon be possible to record the complete neural activity of a living organism. By manipulating the neurons through optogenetic techniques, combined with the above recording capacities the project is in an unprecedented position to be able to fully characterize the neural dynamics of an entire organism.

In trying to build an "in silico" model of a relatively simple organism like C. elegans, new tools are being developed which will make it easier to model more complex organisms.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenWorm

Is that 'cargo culting', or is that 'reverse engineering in progress'? And what's the difference - existing knowledge or approach?

> I contend that without a spirit, no such AI will emerge.

A couple of questions seem to fall out of this:

1. If an AI would not emerge from a high-fidelity whole-brain simulation, then what, in your theory, would emerge? How would you characterise it?

2. How would you determine that what emerges is or is not intelligent? In other words, how would you determine whether or not your theory had been falsified?

3. If an AI actually had a spirit (adopting your definition), would you have a way to recognise this?

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