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

[Jason Resch]

On Wed, Oct 29, 2025, 4:05 AM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

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

Yes. I like to use the analogy of Microsoft Word.

Obviously the collective understanding across Microsoft understands it, or
else they wouldn't be able to produce it.

That said, Word is if such great complexity that no one programmer can ever
hope to understand it fully.

Word contains 45 million lines of code. It would take a programmer (reading
3,000 lines of code a day) over 40 years to read it all. By the time he's
finished, will he even still remember the first lines he read all those
decades ago, and how they relate to the rest?

Word is a few Gigabytes of code.

The human brain contains at least a few petabytes of information. That's 6
orders of magnitude greater than the size of word.

So we might estimate, that converting synaptic connections to a human
readable code, would result in around 45 trillion lines of code, which
would take 40 million years to read.

But again we could imagine the design documents for Microsoft word might
describe the high level elements of its various components, and this could
be more easily read and fully understood by the software architects.
Similarly, a neuroscientist may have some rough idea of what each of the
400 sub regions of the brain do, and how they're interconnected, without
understanding anything of the implementation.


Jason


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.”
>
> *==============================================*
>
> 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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