[ExI] Critical take on The Age of Em

[Samantha Atkins]

On 06/26/2016 05:27 PM, John Clark wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 23, 2016 at 5:33 AM, Robin D Hanson <rhanson at gmu.edu
> <mailto: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.

If you arguing from the size of the genome then that is a bit odd.  The
brain physically is produced from the genome over many years to full
maturity.  So you have a bit of generative code that unfolds into
something resembling an adult brain.  OK.  Now what about all that
content only vaguely caught by neural net type things.  And NNs are
notoriously opaque to understand the workings of quite unlike software
most SEs deal with. We go out of our way to avoid even modestly adaptive
software systems that self modify over time.  The brain is a quite
massive adaptive system. 


It is unclear whether and how soon the full enough brain state can be
capture in vivo and exactly what kind of computational substrate is
needed to run such a captured brain state.  To resolve that we do need
to know a lot more about the brain and perhaps about what parts of what
the brain does we do and do not want to have in our
simulations/uploads/EMs. If we just take the entire think then getting a
rich enough simulation environment for the upload to not go mad from
lack of expected interactions.  Thus the simulation living environment
becomes more complex if the entire brain is taken including the need for
simulated autonomous nervous system, etc.

I do have some hope and working hypothesis that a lot of a human brain
is mostly the same across all human brains with a much smaller set of
stuff that makes it unique.  But again we have to know a lot more about
the brain to figure out which is which.

I could be wrong but I have long had the opinion that getting to AGI by
uploading a human brain effectively is sort of like getting to human
flight capability by scaling up literal birds, flapping and such and all.

I think that we will arrive at distinctly not human AGI by a mixture of
methods long before we have true human upload capability.

- samantha


>
>     ​ > ​
>     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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