Eugen Leitl wrote:
On Wed, Mar 14, 2007 at 09:12:55AM -0400, Ben Goertzel wrote:
It is a trite point, but I can't help repeating that, given how very
little we know about the
brain's deeper workings, these estimates of the brain's computational
Not to belabor the point, but the objections about how little we
know about neuroscience typically come from AI folks, who, frankly
are not particularly versed in the matter. So I'd take my Koch or my
Markram over Kurzweil any time.
I am not a neuroscientist but living a few miles from the NIH I
frequently attend
neuroscience seminars there and I think I have a decent sense of what
the overall state
of knowledge is. Also, it happens my wife is a grad student in
cognitive neuroscience
at the moment.
None of the NIH neuroscientists can tell me how an abstract concept is
represented in the brain, nor how an
abstract pattern (e.g. a mathematical rule) is represented. Without
that knowledge, how
can we really estimate what the brain's capacity or power is, in any
pragmatic sense?
If you have the structure, you can crunch things from first principles.
At the low level of theory the problem is well-understood.
I disagree. You can come up with an upper bound on computational
capacity that way,
but it may be a big overestimate. There are a lot of ways that neural
infrastructure could
be used to implement cognition, some vastly more computationally
wasteful than others.
Do you have
a well-understood low-level theory of generic AI? Or *any* theory at
all?
I have a well-understood generic theory of a particular class of AGI
designs (Novamente and
similar designs). The space of all possible AGI designs is mighty large
and I have no general
theoretical handle on it, beyond the level of conceptual/philosophical
understanding.
neural computing power
may also be meaningful!
http://www.amazon.com/Biophysics-Computation-Information-Computational-Neuroscience/dp/0195181999/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/104-7341035-9436725?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1173876708&sr=8-1
http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0262681080/ref=s9_asin_image_2/104-7341035-9436725
I would really recommend that as many list subscribers who can
afford the time (they're cheap) to read these two books.
Koch is a very good scientist ... but knowing the computational capacity
of a single neuron only lets you
place an upper bound on the computational capacity of the brain
(assuming neurons rather than microtubules
or quantum-resonating water macromolecules or whatever are the key
processing element in the brain), it doesn't
let you make a really accurate or meaningful estimate...
Ben
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