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Comment by knowtheory | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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