[ExI] Critical take on The Age of Em

John Clark johnkclark at gmail.com
Mon Jun 27 00:27:47 UTC 2016


On Thu, Jun 23, 2016 at 5:33 AM, Robin D Hanson <rhanson at gmu.edu> wrote:

​> ​
> You don’t know that human brains are any more modular than is typical
> software.
>

​True.​


> ​> ​
> You don’t know that it only embodies a small number of principles, without
> masses of other implementation details also required for it work.
>

But we do know from the size of the genome so that mass of those other
implementation details can't be significantly larger than what software
engineers are already accustomed to. Of course because the code was nor
written by a human being it could still be hard for them to figure out why
it works, but as long as they know it does work perhaps they don't need to
know why to reverse engineer it.

​> ​
> And you don’t know that the many different parts of the brain are all
> written in the same “language”.
>

​Language might not be the right word but I think there is some reason to
believe there is a common architecture throughout mammalian brains. In the
April 20 2000 issue of the journal Nature
Mriganka Sur
​ reports that he ​connected the nerves from the eyes of
newborn ferret
​s​

​to the part of the brain normally used to process hearing, and the animals
grew into adults that saw normally. So although different parts of the
brain process different types of information the various regions can't be
very specialized.

 John K Clark ​
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