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Comment by plufz | Hacker News Reader

> you will reach human intelligence by just modeling the brain

I'm not so sure. I mean obviously this is very complicated and we still know very little of the brain.

Just one example (from what I understand) you can't really separate intelligence from emotions. There are researchers in emotions that explain our whole system of affect/feeling/emotion/mood/etc. as a very effective abstraction of all the inputs from our whole body (both direct inputs, cognitive processes and stored data). So without a working system of emotions I don't think you will have a working brain at all.

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You won't have a working human brain emulation, but that doesn't preclude some other form of general intelligence with different emotional drivers being developed.

The poster spoke of human intelligence, not general intelligence. I was trying to say that emotions are not just simple drivers they are structurally important pieces that we use to represent the world and that we use in all our cognition. I don't think the human intelligence easily can be separated from emotions since our whole system is built around it.

An older but still popular view of the human mind separate the brain and body as two parts. And we also like to separate emotions and intelligence. From my amateur understanding that does not correspond to modern neuroscience, it is all a very integrated system. We usually like clear and separate categories instead of fuzzy complicated integrated systems.

Exactly this. Is the goal to reach a level of intelligence comparable to a human or is the goal to emulate human behavior?

Those are two very different goals and I don't think one is necessary to achieve the other.

> I'm not so sure. I mean obviously this is very complicated and we still know very little of the brain.

At least, there are people who have lost most of their gut due to disease or trauma, and their human intelligence is still working unharmed. You may say it is needed for development of the brain, but it does not seem to be needed for function once at least partially developed.

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