[ExI] Can we understand ourselves? was: 1DIQ: an IQ metaphor to explain superintelligence

[Ben Zaiboc]

From:

https://alleninstitute.org/news/why-is-the-human-brain-so-difficult-to-understand-we-asked-4-neuroscientists/

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      Can your brain understand itself?

Nearly 100 years ago, physicist Emerson Pugh famously said, “If the 
human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so 
simple that we couldn’t.” It’s a clever quote but, on the face of it, 
seems to imply that human neuroscience is a futile endeavour. That 
doesn’t mean it, or neuroscience, is complete hogwash.

“Our brains are probably more complicated than any one human 
intellect,” Allen Institute neuroscientist Stephen Smith, Ph.D. said. 
“But you also have to take into account the fact that we’re social 
creatures.”

Like most other scientists, modern neuroscientists don’t work alone. And 
they also don’t start their research in a vacuum. All of today’s 
experiments and data are built on the shoulders of the research and 
methodology that came before them.

“Is a singular human brain capable of understanding the brain? as 
opposed to: is a collection of human brains capable of understanding the 
brain? I think those are different questions,” de Vries said. “We learn 
a lot not just through the neural processes of learning, but through our 
interactions with other people and through conversations and 
collaboration. I do believe in the collective human ability to 
understand the human brain.”


    Why don't we understand the brain?

On a slightly more pragmatic note, Christof Koch 
<https://alleninstitute.org/what-we-do/brain-science/about/team/staff-profiles/christof-koch/>, 
Ph.D., Chief Scientist of the Allen Institute’s MindScope Program, 
points out that our understanding might come not from (or not only from) 
our collective research, but from the powerful computers we’ve built to 
help that research.

“It may well be possible that while in principle we can sort of 
understand how the brain works, given its vast complexity, humans may 
never fully understand,” Koch said. “Maybe what it means to understand 
shifts from the kind of classical model of scientific understanding, 
like Newton’s apple or the double helix of DNA. The details of the brain 
may be way beyond human capacity and capability to understand, so we may 
more and more need to rely on computer models to give us correct answers 
without us knowing why those particular answers are correct.”/  /

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I expect the same applies to the rest of our biology, and to biology in 
general. It's vastly more complex even than our brains, but that's not a 
reason we can't make sense of it, and learn what we need to, to be able 
to do useful things with it, even to the extent of modifying and 
improving it.

-- 
Ben

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