On 29/02/2008, Matt Mahoney <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > 4. The "embodied, planned, personalized" Turing test. Communication is not > restricted to text. The machine is planted in the skull of your clone. Your > friends and relatives have to decide who has the carbon-based brain. > > Level 4 should not require simulating every neuron and synapse. Without the > constraints of slow, noisy neurons, we could use other algorithms. For > example, low level visual processing such as edge and line detection would > not > need to be implemented as a 2-D array of identical filters. It could be > implemented serially by scanning the retinal image with a window filter. > Fine > motor control would not need to be implemented by combining thousands of > pulsing motor neurons to get a smooth average signal. The signal could be > computed numerically. The brain has about 10^15 synapses, so a > straightforward simulation at the neural level would require 10^15 bits of > memory. But cognitive tests suggest humans have only about 10^9 bits of long > term memory, suggesting that more compressed representation is possible. > > In any case, level 1 should be sufficient to argue convincingly that either > consciousness can exist in machines, or that it doesn't in humans.
I agree that it should be possible to simulate a brain on a computer, but I don't see how you can be so confident that you can throw away most of the details of brain structure with impunity. Tiny changes to neurons which make no difference to the anatomy or synaptic structure can have large effects on neuronal behaviour, and hence whole organism behaviour. You can't leave this sort of thing out of the model and hope that it will still match the original. -- Stathis Papaioannou ------------------------------------------- singularity Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/11983/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/11983/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=4007604&id_secret=96140713-a54b2b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
