Splicetoday

Writing
Mar 04, 2009, 07:29AM

The anti-computer brain

Quite the background for the arc of artificial intelligence and the discussions involving the human brain.

A huge rock of an essay, but worth the read:

Intriguingly, some involved in the AI project have begun to theorize about replicating the mind not on digital computers but on some yet-to-be-invented machines. As Ray Kurzweil wrote in The Singularity is Near:

"Computers do not have to use only zero and one.... The nature of computing is not limited to manipulating logical      symbols. Something is going on in the human brain, and there is nothing that prevents these biological processes from    being reverse engineered and replicated in nonbiological entities."

In principle, Kurzweil is correct: we have as yet no positive proof that his vision is impossible. But it must be acknowledged that the project he describes is entirely different from the original task of strong AI to replicate the mind on a digital computer. When the task shifts from dealing with the stuff of minds and computers to the stuff of brains and matter—and when the instruments used to achieve AI are thus altogether different from those of the digital computer—then all of the work undertaken thus far to make a computer into a mind will have had no relevance to the task of AI other than to disprove its own methods. The fact that the mind is a machine just as much as anything else in the universe is a machine tells us nothing interesting about the mind. If the strong AI project is to be redefined as the task of duplicating the mind at a very low level, it may indeed prove possible—but the result will be something far short of the original goal of AI.

Discussion

Register or Login to leave a comment