[ExI] Fwd: [Body Hacking] Reverse-Engineering of Human Brain Likely by 2030, Expert Predicts

[Jebadiah Moore]

On Tue, Aug 17, 2010 at 11:42 AM, Bryan Bishop <kanzure at gmail.com> wrote:

> > Here’s how that math works, Kurzweil explains: The design of the brain is
> in the genome. The human genome has three billion base pairs or six billion
> bits, which is about 800 million bytes before compression, he says.
> Eliminating redundancies and applying loss-less compression, that
> information can be compressed into about 50 million bytes, according to
> Kurzweil.
> >
> > About half of that is the brain, which comes down to 25 million bytes, or
> a million lines of code.
>
> How does the genome explain protein folding?
>
> Just because a million lines of code describe the genesis of the
> brain's biological systems, doesn't mean that we understand the
> interactions of the subsequent structures.
>
>
Yeah, Kurzweil's way off mark.  See here:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/08/ray_kurzweil_does_not_understa.php.

Of course, presumably we don't have to understanding the interactions, so
long as we can simulate whatever causes the interactions.  But we can't do
that yet, either.  Which i think was Kurzweil's point, even though he got
the details (very) wrong.


-- 
Jebadiah Moore
http://blog.jebdm.net
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