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Comment by gfodor | Hacker News Reader

Here's something to think about. What does the bitwise encoding of the "brain related" part of the genome actually mean then? Say it's 50 megabytes. Does this mean nothing? Why is it 50 and not 500 nor 5? Surely there's meaning in the amount of bits necessary to encode the genomic information to create a brain. Kurzweil is simply throwing this figure out as food for thought, that from an information perspective this is the kernel of knowledge necessary (with sufficient simulation of the environment) to "grow" a brain.

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"this is the kernel of knowledge necessary (with sufficient simulation of the environment) to "grow" a brain."

Wouldn't it be simpler to say "put 10^80 hydrogen atoms really close to each other and wait a few billion years". Simpler, and just as useless (insofar as it doesn't get anyone closer to simulating a brain in the next 10 years).

At our universe's speeds, but how fast can you simulate it?

Well, there's no guarantee that doing that will generate brains. It might turn out that the vast majority of such simulated universes would fail to contain intelligence.

The human genome, on the other hand, succeeds in growing intelligent brains a more or less measurable fraction of the time, in only a couple of years: at least 5%, if we assume that 94.9% or so of all zygotes fail to implant or otherwise miscarry, and another 0.1% suffer some kind of disability that forecloses the development of intelligence.

This is observably different from the development of most similar-sized chunks of matter, even biological tissue, over similar timescales. For example, my body has contained about 100kg of biological tissue for the past 15 years. That's enough time for each 10kg chunk of it to develop intelligence about 7 times. But I'm not aware of any new intelligent entities in my body during that time. Some might doubt the existence of any intelligent entities in my body at all.

> I'm not aware

Well, no, of curse you wouldn't be. Insensitive clod.

(Signed, The bacteria in your bowels. P.S. stop it with the random antibiotics, or we'll give you a good run).

Think of it as the input to a fractal generator that will expand that input seed in to a physical structure many orders of magnitudes larger than the seed.

For everybody else having trouble with the information theory aspect of this argument: Pop quiz, how many bits of information are contained in the Mandelbrot set? When you figure out the answer to that question, and really internalize the answer, you'll be in a much better position to understand Kurzweil's argument here.

(And forgive me if I think understanding it should be considered a prerequisite to refuting it. Most commenters here are skipping that step. He may yet be wrong, but surely we can at least do him the courtesy of engaging with his actual argument and not dim reflections from a funhouse mirror?)

That was sort of the point, given that the mandelbrot set contains very little real information and that you can express the whole set in one line of math you can take a stab at thinking about the complexity of the structures that you can generate when your input is substantially larger than that.

Find the formula and you have a shot at computing the end result but we're very far away from being able to trace the path from DNA to deep brain structure. Right now we're stuck solidly on being able to figure out the structure of the proteins fast enough (Anton?), once that's more easily done we can move on to the next level of the problem, the interactions of large numbers of proteins in a soupy environment.

By "everybody else", I mean "everybody else not jacquesm", sorry. I am frustrated that you seemed to be the only other commenter understanding it. I was trying to amplify, not criticize. A lot of people are making arguments (without realizing it) that equally well prove we can never compute anything about the Mandelbrot set because look at the amazing staggering complexity it has, except that A: obviously we have and B: the information content is actually quite small.

I think that's rooted in the number of disciplines that cross in bio-informatics. Code, reverse-engineering, information theory, math, genetics, chemistry, physics and so on.

It's almost by definition interdisciplinary and I doubt there is any one person that really has the whole view.

I mean, Kurzweil is making the same sort of statement that Stephen Wolfram made, claiming that the entire universe is probably one or two lines in mathematica.

Is that a meaningful statement? What does that actually imply?

If you look at the sort of neurological problems that humans exhibit, particularly due to developmental defects, the genome actually encodes a wide variety of possible brains. It may very well be that the human genome encodes for all sorts of general neurological matter. I think that we really are giving short shrift to the importance of brian development.

People keep saying this about any project to build a synthetic brain, and it has a huge level of merit...but its putting the buggy before the horse. You have to be able to build a brain before differences in its experience start to matter, and you have to be able to build the software before the hardware matters. There'd be no point in building experience sets before you built the brain, much as there's little point discussing their importance on a brain as a reason for being unable to build one.

So what if all we can put together is a feral child? It still implies we've built a brain.

I don't agree.

I think you underestimate the degree of development and learning that takes place in the womb (language starts developing for instance). Feral children were still incubated by a mother.

If you were to mash together a bunch of neurons, you won't get a brain. You'll get a mess of neurons and random firing. That's the thing, that development of the brain and the arrangement of and connections between neurons is the critical component. They're dictated by genome, yes, but also by biological environmental factors (hormones), but also by external environmental factors (auditory through the womb).

Maybe you can grow a bunch of neural structures that look like a human brain, but it's just as likely that you'll only get an undifferentiated mass that's as smooth and intelligent as a bowling ball.

Also, you're born with a lot of neurons that are then pruned off during childhood. Newborns have more neurons than adults. Adults have more glial cells.

A big part of the problem here is that people tend to think of us humans with our intelligence as something with purpose.

But if you looked at it in a different way, think about us as a collection of cells that all happen to have roughly the right environment to survive in, hooked up in roughly the right way to their neighbours. a series of inter-dependent colonies forming a symbiotic ecology then the picture changes dramatically.

It suggests that it is possible that intelligence is emergent if you have something that is roughly that structure, create something that is organized along the lines of a human brain with computational elements in it that can connect in the same way our nerve cells do and such a colony would have the potential to develop intelligence.

If you phrase it like that I think you get the closest to Kurzweils argument without any roundabout through the messy workings of biology.

What Meyers suggests is that the biological part is a requirement. I'm not qualified either way, but I think it is very well possible that they both have a valid point, and that the end solution will contain a portion of both.

Kurzweil has had noticeably more success simulating intelligent processes in software than Wolfram has had simulating the universe.

The majority of human beings who survive to birth eventually develop some form of intelligence, despite wide variation in their environments. Even children raised by wolves show substantial ability to learn, even though they rarely develop language. By contrast, treating a chimpanzee or a dog like a human child will not result in the development of fluent language or super-dog intelligence.

This suggests strongly that much of what we call "intelligence" is encoded in our genes, not acquired from our environment.

Additionally, though, if we could develop a robot that could acquire culture as easily as a human baby (or even five times more slowly), we could raise it as a human baby and claim success.

"(with sufficient simulation of the environment)"

The point is this parenthetical dwarfs the information in the genome to the point of irrelevance.

At least, that is Myer's argument, as I understood it.

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