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

[John Clark]

On Aug 17, 2010, at 12:42 PM somebody, not clear who, 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.

Somebody else wrote:

> How does the genome explain protein folding?

It doesn't. So what? 

> 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.

When I was a kid I built some electronic devices from kits, I just followed the instructions. When I was soldering in a capacitor I didn't understand how it interacted with all the other capacitors coils resistors and transistors in the device much less the integrated circuits, nevertheless when I was finished the thing worked because I followed instructions. Understanding is for philosophers not assembly line workers. The great advantage of reverse engineering is that understanding is not necessary.

 John K Clark  





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