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Comment by kirse | Hacker News Reader

So let's see, you set out to build a human brain and emulate consciousness, yet in the process you reaffirm to everyone that it takes a phenomenal level of supercomputing power, complexity and intelligent, purpose-guided scientists to create something that can operate on its own.

I may be mistaken, but tell me again how intelligently designing and creating an autonomous entity furthers the atheist world-view (which I am guessing you agree with, given your careful choice of phrasing ala god delusion)? If I was one of the masses -- who are evidently far less enlightened than yourself -- I would argue that this project demonstrates that an intelligent being is clearly involved in the production of a conscious entity.

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Philosophical dualism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dualism_(philosophy_of_mind)) is a mistake at the core of most religions. Making a human brain would contribute much to destroying the concept of the mind as something separate from the brain, rather than the mind as something the brain does.

I would not call it a mistake, yet. Just another philosophical position (which I do not agree with, but that's not the point).

Apropos dualism: Did you thought about how artificial intelligence might end the dualism in economic theory: I.e. that one has to account for labour and capital as completely separate factors of production? (I am ignoring land etc here for the sake of simplicity.)

Interestingly this might just be a result of the perceived dual consciousness of the brain - see http://neuropolitics.org/Conservative-Left-Brain-Liberal-Rig... and others

dualism is also the core of the age of enlightenment and scientific philosophy. funny that.

This is not about ID vs. evolution. It is about whether the brain can be reduced to a purely physical system or if there is something nun-physical about it, i.e. a 'soul'. Clearly, building a functioning artificial brain by copying the physical characteristics of a human brain should settle this one. I'm not saying we are there now, but there is certainly progress.

I did not say it was about ID vs. Evolution, either, but the original post clearly indicates a world-view that claims a lack of a designer. As I already noted, there would be an obvious logical dilemma between how the results of this experiment were achieved (if it ever came to fruition), and his world-view.

Clearly, building a functioning artificial brain by copying the physical characteristics of a human brain should settle this one.

You state this as if replicating a human brain would be like buying a new Lego set and following the instructions. I think we should first nail down the theory on why we sleep. You are aware that scientists still can't fully explain the most common mental process that takes up 30% of our lifetime?

The human brain will never be perfectly replicated in this lifetime or any lifetime, in the same way that a group of toddlers would never 100% figure out the full technology and complete mechanical blueprints if they were handed a Ferrari.

They think sleep is garbage collection: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=547598

Regardless of the question of sleep, the lack of a human known answer does not mean something else must exist that knows the answer. Perhaps the answer is unknown in the universe.

If you believe otherwise, where did the intelligent being who knows this information come from?

lack of a human known answer does not mean something else must exist that knows the answer

However, in your same vein of logic, the incapability to prove the existence of a designer does not invalidate the existence of a designer in the equation.

This same flimsy logic is applied within scientific naturalism, where we assume that because the existence of a designer is not capable of being proven, that the only way we can conclude something "coming about" is by inferring from only what is empirically given.

Surely you would not try to argue with me that because a child is not present (and thus logically unprovable to exist) that the existence of a sand castle on the beach could only be explained by the waves and functions of the ocean.

Obviously in that example we have external information to invalidate our faulty logic (i.e. seeing prior children build sand-castles), but it serves to highlight the absurdity that comes about when trying to infer from what is only empirically given. Now take that simple sand castle example and apply it to the insane complexity of trying to explain the creation of the universe. Not to mention remove the external information that enables us to validate/invalidate our claims.

I hope you can see why I choose to merge my intuition for recognizing intelligent design with empirical science.

There are many people on HN capable of making pattern-recognizing neural nets. Neural nets are loosely (very) modeled on human neurons.

To create a neural net, a framework is created that sets up layers of neurons and sets their weightings (often randomly). The framework runs the net against batches of data, measures the level of success, and changes the weightings. Eventually this process produces a "brain" that can, for example, recognize letters.

The framework's creator can't explain how the generated neural net functions because no one designed it. To someone not familiar with the process, the neural net would trigger their intuition for recognizing intelligent design.

OK, and so what does that conclusion have to do anything?

You just went in a big circle to tell me that my intuition about the neural network was correct -- that there was a designer (the framework's creator) outside of the neural network who set the boundaries and then let that unique neural network run its course.

It doesn't matter if we know how the neural network works (and so forth), because this argument becomes logically invalid the moment you inject a designer (The framework's creator) into an argument to prove the lack of one.

Edit: Even if your comment was trying to show how an intuition for recognizing design can be "fooled", it still fails out because the intuition was correct.

There was an intelligent designer for the framework, sure, but not for the intelligence in the neural net. That was just the product of a feedback loop organized by simple rules. Mistaking order (like a fractal, for instance) for intelligent design is one item I was addressing.

>> I think we should first nail down the theory on why we sleep. You are aware that scientists still can't fully explain the most common mental process that takes up 30% of our lifetime?

>> The human brain will never be perfectly replicated in this lifetime or any lifetime

The other item I was addressing with the example is your implication that we can't create something until we understand every aspect of it.

And finally, adding an intelligent designer can't do more than push the argument back a step and leave you saying "who created him?"

You are aware that scientists still can't fully explain the most common mental process that takes up 30% of our lifetime?

I don't think that's clear at all. I might agree with your first point, that we don't understand the internal mechanisms very well, but in some cases it's a lot easier to model a system than to understand how it functions. This is particularly true of emergent behavior, which pretty much anyone in the field acknowledges the brain is largely driven by.

Even in fields as concrete as physics, there are plenty of emergent results which can be verified to arise from the small-scale behaviors that we can observe, whereas a full "understanding" of how that emergence happens is beyond our grasp.

I'm not sure that it will settle anything. Even if you built a brain that functioned identically to a human brain, one can never prove that the brain is experiencing/creating consciousness. It could always be argued that the brain is just mimicking function but lacks subjective awareness. Since we have no way of measuring consciousness even in a human brain, how will be prove that a man-made brain is conscious.

Probably won't change many minds, but it does prove there's no "magic" in the recipe, and proves that god(s) are not necessary for the creation of life. It challenges the assumption that some magic chunk of soul-cloth is required to make consciousness work.

That said, surely there will be those that argue that conscious machines have no rights because they are missing their chunk of soul-cloth.

I've never understood this argument. If an INTELLIGENT being produced the conscious entity, who or what was responsible for creating this intelligent being?

And no, you can't side step this question. You can't say "well, it's god" because that's special pleading. I just don't understand how people can assume that evidence of complexity requires a designer, but never seem to have a problem inventing said designer out of thin-air as a magically preexisting entity.

What's more likely: that a natural process of change followed by selection essentially navigated through an infinite search space of possible configurations, some of which would create things like intelligent life, or that there was, magically, a pre-existent eternal intelligent being that decided to create other intelligent beings?

The people who propose a designer simply haven't learned how to think properly. It's as simply as that. They don't understand logic even though they pretend to.

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