On The Limits of Mind and Imagination
Both Kurzweil’s theory of the Singularity and Nicolelis’ ideas of human-machine symbiosis are exciting (and not mutually exclusive). However, for Nicolelis to dismiss the artificial brain because the human mind “most important features are the result of unpredictable, non-linear interactions amongst billions of cells”, it’s just an easy and unsatisfactory copout. It has no scientific basis but the old “it’s too big to grasp”.
Size, we should know by now, is not an unresolvable problem.
You can’t predict whether the stock market will go up or down because you can’t compute it,” he says. “You could have all the computer chips ever in the world and you won’t create a consciousness.” —The Brain is Not Computable
Nicolelis mixing apples and oranges.
February 19, 2013 ☼ quotes