PZ’s comment regarding the implausibility of speeding up an emulated brain was a real head-scratcher to me, and Andrew G calls him on it in the comments. Apparently (judging from his further comments) what he really meant was that you have to simulate or emulate a good environment, physiology, and endocrine system as well otherwise the brain would go insane.
I’m the blogger PZ was responding to in his post, and I specifically recommended PZ read Sandberg and Bostrom’s Whole Brain Emulation: A Roadmap.
That’s what PZ is claiming to have read when he writes “I read the paper he recommended,” but PZ doesn’t seem to have read it very carefully, in particular missing out on the sections “simulation scales” (pp. 13-14), “Body Simulation,” and “Environment Simulation” (pp. 74-78). I’ve written a post explaining PZ’s apparent confusions in greater detail at my blog.
Seems similar enough to “Every part of your brain assumes that all the other surrounding parts work a certain way. The present brain is the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness for every individual piece of the present brain.
Start modifying the pieces in ways that seem like “good ideas”—making the frontal cortex larger, for example—and you start operating outside the ancestral box of parameter ranges. And then everything goes to hell.
So you’ll forgive me if I am somewhat annoyed with people who run around saying, “I’d like to be a hundred times as smart!” as if it were as simple as scaling up a hundred times instead of requiring a whole new cognitive architecture.”
Well, OTOH, he also complains that messing around by trial and error is likely to cause unpredictable side effects, like nasty insanity, some of which may be too subtle to notice at first, or just tolerated.
PZ’s comment regarding the implausibility of speeding up an emulated brain was a real head-scratcher to me, and Andrew G calls him on it in the comments. Apparently (judging from his further comments) what he really meant was that you have to simulate or emulate a good environment, physiology, and endocrine system as well otherwise the brain would go insane.
Of course, we already knew that...
Right on.
I’m the blogger PZ was responding to in his post, and I specifically recommended PZ read Sandberg and Bostrom’s Whole Brain Emulation: A Roadmap.
That’s what PZ is claiming to have read when he writes “I read the paper he recommended,” but PZ doesn’t seem to have read it very carefully, in particular missing out on the sections “simulation scales” (pp. 13-14), “Body Simulation,” and “Environment Simulation” (pp. 74-78). I’ve written a post explaining PZ’s apparent confusions in greater detail at my blog.
Copy-and-paste error with the link; I think you meant to give this one.
Thanks, fix’d.
Seems similar enough to “Every part of your brain assumes that all the other surrounding parts work a certain way. The present brain is the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness for every individual piece of the present brain.
Start modifying the pieces in ways that seem like “good ideas”—making the frontal cortex larger, for example—and you start operating outside the ancestral box of parameter ranges. And then everything goes to hell.
So you’ll forgive me if I am somewhat annoyed with people who run around saying, “I’d like to be a hundred times as smart!” as if it were as simple as scaling up a hundred times instead of requiring a whole new cognitive architecture.”
Eliezer Yudkowsky, Growing Up is Hard
Well, OTOH, he also complains that messing around by trial and error is likely to cause unpredictable side effects, like nasty insanity, some of which may be too subtle to notice at first, or just tolerated.