[ExI] Uploads on a Postcard (was: GPT-4 on its inability to solve the symbol grounding problem)

[Gadersd]

> You are leaving out a massive number of neurons which do many things, most of which are currently unknown.  The gut.

The complexity of the entire human form is roughly equal to the complexity of our DNA which can fit on a thumb drive. 700 MB is intuitively complex to wrap our minds around as we couldn’t imagine memorizing that code, but in computer science terms it is quite simple especially compared to much of the software we have today which run into many gigabytes in size.

> On Apr 6, 2023, at 4:59 PM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> 
> You are leaving out a massive number of neurons which do many things, most of which are currently unknown.  The gut.  bill w
> 
> On Thu, Apr 6, 2023 at 3:39 PM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org <mailto:extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>> wrote:
> On 06/04/2023 19:49, bill w wrote:
>> Simple???  You think humans are simple?  Our brains are the most complex thing in the universe and the more psychology tries to understand       it, the more complex it becomes.
> 
> I'm not denying that our brains are massively complex (as you say, the most complex in the universe (so far, as far as we know)). I'm saying that it could be easier than we currently think, to unravel enough of how our minds work, to make it possible to figure out a 'generic model, plus individual variables' method of achieving uploading.
> 
> I'm pretty sure, for one thing, that our brains are a lot more complex than they need to be, simply because they evolved rather than being designed. Secondly, the whole brain isn't necessary for what we are interested in for uploading: the individual personality. I doubt that the brainstem, for example contributes anything significant to individual personality (in a healthy individual, that is).
> 
> Embodiment is going to be essential for any upload of course, but that embodiment doesn't have to be controlled by a brain-analogue, with all its messy complexities. Probably better if it's run by bunch of traditional software that we understand and can tailor much easier than tinkering with a brain model (this will be true whether the embodiment is in a physical or a virtual body. My preference would be for a fusion of both, but that's another topic).
> 
> We can already create pretty good software that does the same thing as the cerebellum, and I don't doubt the motor and sensory cortices have enough regularities to make them tractable, simplifieable, and an equivalent created in normal software.
> 
> That leaves the core of our mental selves: memory (the general mechanisms, that is), that attention-directing network, I forget what it's called, all those recursive loops between the thalamus and cortex, and so on. Still complex, yes, but less so than the entire brain. And if we can derive a 'standard model' of this, a generic system that everyone is based on, then all that's left (still a lot, I know, but nothing like the brain as a whole) is whatever creates the individual differences between people. I'd expect a lot of that will be the actual contents of our memories, so that might be a good target to start with.
> 
> You say "the more psychology tries to understand it, the more complex it becomes", which is fair enough, but I'm not proposing to go anywhere near psychology. This is neurology. The psychology emerges out of that, and may be very complex indeed, but that doesn't need to be addressed directly.
> 
> An artist tries to carefully draw each individual curve in a lissajous pattern, but a scientist just plugs in x=A\sin,\quad y=B\sin (or some such arcane mathematical formula (I don't pretend to understand it)) to a system capable of executing the formula and displaying the result on a screen. You get the same complexity (if the artist is good enough), but one approach is far simpler, and quicker, than the other.
> 
> So what I'm saying is not that our brains are simple, but that emulating them (or rather the appropriate parts of them) might well turn out to be simpler than we expected.
> 
> Another analogy is John Conway's Game of Life. Endless complexity, but the code for generating it is so simple that even I can write one from scratch (and my coding expertise is very rudimentary).
> 
> Of course, I may be wrong, and we may need every bit of the brain after all, and be forced to take the artist's approach. I haven't seen any evidence of that so far, though.
> 
> Ben
> 
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