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Comment by zetalyrae | Hacker News Reader

I don't see the relevance.

Natural intelligence has not been understood because if our brains were simple enough that we could understand them, we would be so simple we couldn't. This explains why it has not been reproduced.

>There is no repeatable experiment going from inorganic matter to self-aware, self-replicating life.

You can do the RNA world experiments in a lab, it would just take a lot of time and a lot of primordial soup, but eventually you would observe abiogenesis. I also don't see how abiogenesis and biology are relevant.

>capable of doing the impossible, e.g. predicting the weather with fidelity substantially into the future.

Thankfully this is not a measure of intelligence, since we can't do that either.

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>Natural intelligence has not been understood because if our brains were simple enough that we could understand them, we would be so simple we couldn't. This explains why it has not been reproduced

I don't believe that it works this way, for two reasons. One, the logic would seem to work the other way as well, if our brains are so sophisticated that they make natural intelligence possible, then we should be so intelligent that we would have the means to understand them. (At the end of the day I think this is a case where analogies aren't good enough to settle it one way or the other.)

But secondly, the overall architecture of the brain can be understood in terms of underlying principles that are reapplied over and over, and so we can conceivably 'compress' the totality of information about the brain's architecture to the principles that explain why it functions. Granted we haven't done that yet and that could be extremely difficult, but, I don't think it's forbidden by necessity or by some transcendent principle. I would say that I agree both with your reply about RNA experiments being feasible, and I share your confusion as to how any of that was relevant.

> if our brains are so sophisticated that they make natural intelligence possible, then we should be so intelligent that we would have the means to understand them

It may well be that building a brain is easier than understanding it.

If one has not understood the brain, then how would one be certain that such has been built?

The same way we do it with humans - by observing the end result.

Standing by for the repeatable experiment that goes from a periodic table of elements to self-replicating, carbon-based life.

You can build a brain right now, just find someone pretty of the opposite sex and wait nine months.

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