Quote:
Originally Posted by simplicitus
"Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain
There he goes again, making up nonsense and making ridiculous claims that have no relationship to reality. Ray Kurzweil must be able to spin out a good line of bafflegab, because he seems to have the tech media convinced that he's a genius, when he's actually just another Deepak Chopra for the computer science cognoscenti."
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2...t_understa.php
Myers is making that claim off of gizmodo's writeup of a speech, of which there isn't a transcript available (nor is there a video). Obviously, Myers was not there.
Apparently, people who attended do not corroborate the math anecdote.
It appears that Kurzweil was just making the point that the genome does contain the "plans" for the brain, and that it can be represented with a small number of bytes.
Considering that all of us own computers that could store the compressed genome in RAM many many times over, claiming that Kurzweil thinks that reading the genome will reverse engineer the brain seems to imply that he both doesn't understand biology
and computer science, which is an unfathomable claim.
I have never seen Kurzweil make any quantitative claim relating the genome's entropy to mind-simulation.
In Kurzweil's defense, it is fascinating out how little you need to make a brain - a womb + a cell, both of which have "plans" contained in 3 gigabases. That alone would be amazing, let alone the fact that the genome can be compressed, and that almost (controversial) all of the genome can undergo basechanges w/o any change in the product.
It is unfathomable that a professor in this field could possibly consider backing up a claim relating to the entropy of the genome and the ease of which a brain simulator can be made. Myers should probably have shot him an email before writing this nonsense.
If Kurzweil actually thinks that the genome will easily allow the simulation of the brain, then yes, plans made around this assumption are dog ****.
(sentence in red): The design of the brain is in the genome.
Quote:
See that sentence I put in red up there? That's his fundamental premise, and it is utterly false.
As a side note, Myers' posting the descriptions of the proteins is totally irrelevant. Furthermore, "utterly false" is just rhetoric. Myers knows this, because he's been published in Development.
It will be interesting to see if Myers does any sort of editing / retraction, as he seems to have accused Sejnowski of thinking that an atom-by-atom simulation of the brain is in the works. Oh wait, this is an internet, so you can write anything you want and not get in trouble. So while I'm here - "Myers thinks that the genome is irrelevant to understanding the development of the brain." Take that, Myers! Let's see you get published now, prick.
In closing, the source of Myers' rage, gizmodo, also posted Myers' rant.
http://gizmodo.com/5614927/ray-kurzw...tand-the-brain
The first comment links to a slashdot comment
http://science.slashdot.org/comments...2&cid=33278862 stating that Kurzweil didn't make the claim.
So, we've got someone writing bull**** after reading a reprint of a Wired article, which, like 99% of science journalism was bull**** for the laity to begin with. I
the internet