[ExI] Fwd: [Body Hacking] Reverse-Engineering of Human Brain Likely by 2030, Expert Predicts

[darren shawn greer]

> Yeah, Kurzweil's way off mark. See here:
> http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/08/ray_kurzweil_does_not_understa.php


Awesome article. My favorite is when he calls him a pseudo-scientific dingbat. Not that I'm qualified to judge, but I like the mix of confidence and alliteration. 


Darren



'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.

-Alfred Lord Tennyson






________________________________
> Date: Tue, 17 Aug 2010 12:26:17 -0500
> From: jebdm at jebdm.net
> To: extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> Subject: Re: [ExI] Fwd: [Body Hacking] Reverse-Engineering of Human
> Brain Likely by 2030, Expert Predicts
>
> On Tue, Aug 17, 2010 at 11:42 AM, Bryan Bishop
>> wrote:
>> Here’s how that math works, Kurzweil explains: The design of the
> brain is in the genome. The human genome has three billion base pairs
> or six billion bits, which is about 800 million bytes before
> compression, he says. Eliminating redundancies and applying loss-less
> compression, that information can be compressed into about 50 million
> bytes, according to Kurzweil.
>>
>> About half of that is the brain, which comes down to 25 million
> bytes, or a million lines of code.
>
> How does the genome explain protein folding?
>
> Just because a million lines of code describe the genesis of the
> brain's biological systems, doesn't mean that we understand the
> interactions of the subsequent structures.
>
>
> Yeah, Kurzweil's way off mark. See here:
> http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/08/ray_kurzweil_does_not_understa.php
> .
>
> Of course, presumably we don't have to understanding the interactions,
> so long as we can simulate whatever causes the interactions. But we
> can't do that yet, either. Which i think was Kurzweil's point, even
> though he got the details (very) wrong.
>
>
> --
> Jebadiah Moore
> http://blog.jebdm.net
>
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