Wednesday, March 23, 2005

In Search of the Sixth Sense

Ray Kurzweil: "If you go out to 2030, say, and talk to a person of biological origin, they're going to have a lot of non-biological processes running in their brain. As you interact with them, you'll be interacting with someone who's a hybrid of non-biological and biological intelligence. We know that biological intelligence is pretty fixed in its architecture. Today, we have approximately 10^26 calculations per second in the humans species. 50 years from now, the power of our biological thinking will still be 10^26 power. [...] You get to the 2030s and 2040s, the non-biological portion of our thinking is going to be millions of times more powerful than the biological portion. So if you talk to a person of biological origin, the fast majority of their interacting is going to be non-biological."
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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Kurzweil's timeline is way overoptimistic. And the simple reason for this is what I would call the current mind-brain confusion. Most studies of human cognition focus on how the brain works, which strikes me as analogous to trying to understand the functionality of Windows XP by examining the operation of an Intel Pentium chip. Looking at the chip would give you the basic idea that what is going on there is the operation of a complex set of logic gates, and you could probably deduce what the gates were and the nature of the logic by which they operated. But after all this, would you still really have any clue as to how Windows XP operated?
--WMB

4:03 PM
JohnFen said...

Actually, it's even worse than that. When I worked in a neuroscience lab, my PI analogized it this way: it's like trying to determine exactly how a computer works when it doesn't speak English and all you can do is type on a flaky keyboard, read a flaky monitor, and drill a hole in the side of the case, stick a wire in and probe more or less blindly.

11:52 PM
Anonymous said...

One alternative that's been suggested is to study the mind "from the inside," so to speak, using essentially the methods developed by the philosophical school known as phenomenology. This would at least lead in the direction of decoding the mind-brain system's "source code" (though it's doubtful it's anything resembling C++ or Java! -- More like so-called "machine language" probably). Unfortunately, this approach is dismissed by most researchers (in the English-speaking world, anyway) as being too narcissistically introspective and even "mystical."
--WMB

10:20 AM

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