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Comment by bluedanieru | Hacker News Reader

I would agree he's certainly right about Kurzweil's unrealistic optimism, but I'm not sure our understanding of the brain (and other aspects of our biology for that matter) isn't increasing exponentially. Perhaps rather it just seems linear compared to the turbo-charged progress of these enabling technologies? Certainly we've come a lot further since Phineas Gage than a linear trajectory would allow.

He should have thrown around some numbers while he was at it. I wonder if he'd agree with clinical immortality by the end of this century, and mind-uploading by the end of the next?

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I think you might be missing the point, though. The argument is that we're collecting exponentially more data about the brain, but that data doesn't translate directly to understanding.

You mentioned Phineas Gage. That case led to the idea of regions of the brain controlling different things, which led to lobotomy as a psychiatric treatment, which was used up until the 1960s or so. Then chemical methods improved, and people came to understand that neurotransmitters played a role too, which led to antidepressants and other drugs. Those drugs have improved, but their design hasn't changed that much in the last few decades. Obviously this is over-simplified -- but it doesn't sound like an exponential growth of understanding to me.

At the end, we can't talk about exponential or linear growth. We have no 'mesure' for scientific advance. and we need mesure for mesuring something. Or maybe somes exist but I'm not... okay so I googled it before posting some stupid stuff: It seems that there's no 'real' mesure.. scientific paper to prove it: http://www.springerlink.com/content/m1h2150x02u153x3/

There's something rather disingenuous about your phrase: "not sure our understanding of the brain isn't increasing exponentially".

I think the claim that our knowledge (_actual_ knowledge, mind you) of anything is increasing exponentially (with the usual implication that the exponent isn't 1.01 per decade :-) ) is the claim that requires proof.

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