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Comment by CWuestefeld | Hacker News Reader

Let's start with building another human, then, beginning with elemental chemicals. I think we all know how far we can get with that.

Or, let's try to engineer an entire economy to supplant the emergent system of markets. Oh, wait, that results in millions of people starving to death.

Some systems are so complex that it's beyond our abilities to dream about how we might approach such a problem, let alone execute it. Given that we've been so unsuccessful in assigning a definition to creativity or intelligence, I think that these things might be in the same category of overly-complex systems.

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You forgot: Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible. Oh wait...

Edit: Not sure why I got downvoted, probably the snarkyness. Fine, I can also put it the long-winded way:

There used to be a time when flying seemed beyond our abilities to dream about how we might approach it. Likewise for most other achievements that we have made.

What's going to stop us from building a human body, including the brain, once we have the manufacturing technology to do so?

>What's going to stop us from building a human body, including the brain, once we have the manufacturing technology to do so?

it's that we don't know what "manufacturing technology" we need, because we don't have a deep enough understanding of how the brain works. I think the parent's point was that attempts to engineer complex systems fail because these attempts can't reproduce the emergent behavior that arises from many layers of interactions from individual agents. a plane is complex, but it's not a complex system.

edit: I actually disagree a bit with myself - you can make a case that planes have elements of complex systems, but it's not at the same scale as a brain, in my opinion.

Yes, I don't dispute that we can not build a brain today. But I'd say this is not very different to our inability of building a plane (or understanding how it could possibly work) back in the 1900s.

I just checked wikipedia and about 100 years ago (February 1911):

    The first official air mail flight takes place from Allahabad, India to Naini,     
    India, when Henri Pequet carries 6,500 letters a distance of 13 km.

Today, 100 years later, I tell you about this event by typing my "letter" into a portable device that will soon transmit my message over the shy distance of ~8000 miles, in under 100 milliseconds.

So, looking back at what we've achieved in the past 100 years, and unless someone discovers some inherent property of the human brain that prevents it from being replicated (did God add DRM?), I remain pretty optimistic that we will be able to build one soon.

If evolution can do it, we will be able to do it, too. (Given enough time.) I’m not at all sure how markets figure into this. Human brains are not markets, this comparison strikes me as non-sensical.

I don’t see you claiming that there is anything in principle impossible about that.

brains and markets are both complex adaptive systems. they aren't similar in high-level function, but they are with respect to low level dynamics.

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