marquidf@uunet.uu.net (02/19/91)
I hate to be a spoilsport (well, OK, I actually *love* to be a
spoilsport, but go with me on this one, OK?), but nobody knows how the brain
works except in its grossest functions. We know how nerves "communicate". We
know that glial cells actually do useful things. We know if you don't keep it
fed and war and oxygenated, it dies.
That's about it (at the risk of oversimplifying).
There is a persistant myth (mythos?) that states that the brain is a
computer. NO IT ISN'T! The brain is something in-and-of-itself. It does a lot
of things other than "compute", most of which we are ignorant of. We have a
long way to go before Moravec's ideas are even technically discussable.
I don't say that we shouldn't talk about such "fin-de-siecle
hubristic technology", to use a Regisism, but we should curb our assessment
s of the current technology. We are nowhere near the point where we need to
be, to even raise the right philosophical issues. By the time we are able to
accurately map the brain, talk meaningfully about how it works, and duplicate
its functions, we are likely to have changed our ideas aboutbrain
up/downloading. Which we might just look back on as hopelessly pessimistic
and limited!
--David Twery (a.k.a. "Marquis de Freud")
[I think this is a serious oversimplification. It omits, in particular,
the phenomenon of levels of operation and understanding. By this I mean
something like copying the whole by understanding each part well enough
to reproduce it, and then reproducing each part in the correct relation-
ship to the others. For the brain, this concept is usually applied at
the neuron level--that was the crux of the recent discussion over
whether uploading or AI would happen first.
Let me repeat an analogy I've used before: Uploading is like Edison
recording "Mary had a little lamb" without having the foggiest notion
how to synthesize a human voice from scratch. (Or if it's me you're
copying, maybe I'd better say more like Avery Fischer recording the
first symphony in high fidelity without being able to compose like
Beethoven.) He was working at one self-sufficient level, and it is
unnecessary to have full understanding at a higher level.
Pure sound is not the only level available to copy a symphony. You
might have a computer doing a physical simulation of each instrument,
driven directly by control inputs from the human musician, and producing
the sound the physics of the simulation dictate. You can easily
imagine a much more efficient program that produces virtually the
same output from a few control equations and some recorded waveforms.
Getting more ambitious you could simulate the musician as a function
of the score and the actions of the maestro, who alone would provide
conrol inputs. You can easily think of a dozen more levels between
that and something that invents the score itself--it is only fairly
late in the chain that you begin to need complete understanding of
the genius of Beethoven to produce music to equal his. It is very
much easier to copy than to create.
--JoSH]