The press & Dewey thing was a joke.
The lack of senescence wasn’t. The very self-growth, self-organization, regeneration features of the brain also cause it to go haywire in all kinds of ways, and the older it gets the more it’s likely to start sprouting tumors or fail miserably at its self-repairs which in turn impede its functions. That seems like a design flaw to me. On the other hand a book’s a book, and will remain a book as long as it isn’t handled by kids with jelly fingers or those barbarians who break book spines.
That being said, we’re starting to veer ever so further off topic since this isn’t about judging “worth”.
What I was trying to convey through bad jokes is that I would rule out the process by which the brain forms and repairs itself because it has precious little bearing on what the brain *is *or does, how it performs its various functions, or its level of complexity from an information theory standpoint. It’s extremely cool, but it’s besides the point - the complexity of the brain as a functional object, such as it is, would be the same if brains just popped into existence or had to be rigged out of pink plastic by Chinese kids for 6 cents an hour.
Okay, so we can agree that libraries lack these incredibly complex features. Good.
It certainly is a case wherein the design is not perfect. That doesn’t make it less than complex, though. A wristwatch that loses a few seconds per day is still a highly complex mechanism. Ditto for one that eventually runs down.
So what if books don’t malfunction in the same way? That doesn’t make them any more complex. By that logic, one may as well claim that a rock is more complex than a tree.
Remember, we’re not talking about whether an object is immune to damage or malfunctions. We’re talking about how complex they are. Desktop computers are vastly more complex than pocket calculators are, and we don’t get to deny this simply because there are more myriad ways in which they can fail.
They have EVERYTHING to do with what the brain is and does. The brain’s ability to grow and organize itself are fundamental to functions such as cognition, learning, and memory recall. One shouldn’t ignore these features simply because they don’t exist in most man-made objects – or because they don’t support one’s desired conclusion.
Nonsense. You can talk about objects within the universe without talking about the universe itself. It’s like talking about human organs or a computer chip. You don’t need to describe the entire computer or an entire human body in order to meaningfully discuss the complexity of these singular objects.
What are the techinques? Could you do a simulation of the universe where your brain does control mental faculties? In order to find the supraknown one must find the unknown. In other words, understand that which you thought was pretty much a given.
Since it’s a simulation you don’t have to maintain a model of the whole thing all at once. It’s essentially dynamic data compression/decompression on demand. Plus the fact that you don’t have to duplicate all the identical components. So you can’t simulate the universe in real time, but you can simulate the whole thing. It will take a lot of resources just to do that, but it won’t use up the entire universe.
What about multiple simulations interacting with each other? Much like human brains on earth supposedly interacting with each other? Could you do a simulation of the universe where your brain does control mental faculties… in another simulation? :eek: How would you know which simulation was the most complex? Does this mean that to the question “Is the simulation of the human brain in a simulated universe the most complex object in universe?” the answer is yes? What about a simulation of these simulations?
Alright, definitions again. Simulation can mean different things. Are you emulating a brain, or just simulating in the sense of producing the same results? And yeah, once brains get emulated, simulated, or whatever, there’s gonna be some wild recursion that can occur.
Anyway, I don’t think brains are all that complex process wise, as compared to the biological operation. I think the way to get to AI in whatever form is to simulate the operation of the brain in the sense of producing the same results, then working back towards the biological implementation. The other way, modeling the biological functions of the brain first is going to take too many resources. Everyone who has achieved AI is free to call me wrong. The rest better engage in rational argument.
By any reasonable definition I can think of, the universe is surely more complicated than the brain, since the brain is part of the universe. This is why I was careful to throw around the word “density” in my previous postings. Furthermore, while the universe might be more complicated than the brain, it is only so by virtue of being a sum of complicated parts, not because it itself, like the brain, has an emergent property making it as a whole more complicated than the sum of its parts.
I’m not sure I’ve noticed anyone here arguing from such a position. It’s not as though people are just throwing up their hands and saying “welp, beats me! Must be most complex evar!”