There seems to be a good deal of confusion (on this list and also over on the Singularity list) about what people actually mean when they talk about building an AGI by emulating or copying the brain.
There are two completely different types of project that seem to get conflated in these discussions:
1) Copying the brain at the neural level, which is usually assumed to be a 'blind' copy - in other words, we will not know how it works, but will just do a complete copy and fire it up.
2) Copying the design of the human brain at the cognitive level. This may involve a certain amount of neuroscience, but mostly it will be at the cognitive system level, and could be done without much reference to neurons at all.
Both of these ideas are very different from standard AI, but they are also very different from one another. The criticisms that can be leveled against the neural-copy approach do not apply to the cognitive approach, for example.
It is frustrating to see commentaries that drift back and forth between these two.
My own position is that a cognitive-level copy is not just feasible but well under way, whereas the idea of duplicating the neural level is just a pie-in-the-sky fantasy at this point in time (it is not possible with current or on-the-horizon technology, and will probably not be possible until after we invent an AGI by some other means and get it to design, build and control a nanotech brain scanning machine).
Duplicating a system as complex as that *without* first understanding it at the functional level seems pure folly: one small error in the mapping and the result could be something that simply does not work ... and then, faced with a brain-copy that needs debugging, what would we do? The best we could do is start another scan and hope for better luck next time.
Richard Loosemore ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
