[ExI] Kurzweil's latest

[Stefano Vaj]

On 2 May 2013 09:16, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:

>
> On 02/05/2013 06:59, Kelly Anderson wrote:
>
> On Mon, Apr 29, 2013 at 3:51 AM, Gordon <gts_2000 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>>  We need to understand the brain before we can hope to duplicate one.
>> It's pretty naive, I think, to suppose that we can create one even before
>> we know how they work.
>>
>
>  Agreed. Have you read Kurzweil's most recent book? What do you think of
> it?
>
>
> I read it. I think it is surprisingly mainstream: many neuroscientists
> (computational  or not) believe roughly in something similar. What many do
> not believe in, and I think Ray does, is that the system is as clean as
> described. In particular, he is a "cortical chauvinist", believing that the
> cortex is mostly what matters - but the subcortical systems is what sets
> our goals, style of learning and evaluations.
>

We have good reasons to investigate the internal organisation of biological
brains. They do exist and work, they do not make us wait their output for
cosmological aeons, and they do that with a trivial consumption of space
and energy.

OTOH, there is no reason *in principle* why a black-box approach should not
feasible as well. Organic brains are finite systems with a finite, albeit
astronomical, number of states.

As soon as you reach the level where the brain's output can be predicted
with sufficient accuracy for your purposes (eg, social recognition of the
system as a generic, or specific, biological organism), voilà, for anybody
other than those believing in ineffable qualities and noumena you have an
"AGI" or an "upload", and you need not any especial effort to hallucinate
your internal, subjective states on it any more than you have with fellow
humans or animals.

--
Stefano Vaj
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