If you are making an argument on how much compute can find an intelligent mind, you have to look at how much compute used by all of evolution.
Just to make sure I fully understand your argument, is this paraphrase correct?
“Suppose we have the compute theoretically required to simulate the human brain down to an adequate granularity for obtaining its intelligence (which might be at the level of cells instead of, say, the atomic level). Even so, one has to consider the compute required to actually build such a simulation, which could be much larger as the human brain was built by the full universe.”
(My personal view is that the opposite direction is true: it seems with recent evidence that we can pareto-exceed human intelligence while being very far from the compute required to simulate a brain. An idea I’ve seen floating around here is that natural selection built our brain randomly with a reward function that valued producing offspring so there is a lot of architecture that is irrelevant to intelligence)
Yes your paraphrase is not bad. I think we can assume things outside of Earth don’t need to be simulated, it would be surprising to me if events outside of Earth made the difference between evolution producing Homo sapiens versus some other less intelligent species. (Maybe a few basic things like temperature of the Earth being shifted slowly) For the most part the Earth is causally isolated from the rest of the universe.
Now which parts of the Earth can we safely omit simulating is a harder question as there’s more causal interactions going on. I can make some guesses around parts of the earths environment that can be ignored by the simulation, but they’ll be guesses only.
An idea I’ve seen floating around here is that natural selection built our brain randomly with a reward function that valued producing offspring so there is a lot of architecture that is irrelevant to intelligence
Yes gradient descent is likely a faster search algorithm, but IMO you’re still using it to search the big search space that evolution searched through, not the smaller one a human brain searches through after being born.
Just to make sure I fully understand your argument, is this paraphrase correct?
“Suppose we have the compute theoretically required to simulate the human brain down to an adequate granularity for obtaining its intelligence (which might be at the level of cells instead of, say, the atomic level). Even so, one has to consider the compute required to actually build such a simulation, which could be much larger as the human brain was built by the full universe.”
(My personal view is that the opposite direction is true: it seems with recent evidence that we can pareto-exceed human intelligence while being very far from the compute required to simulate a brain. An idea I’ve seen floating around here is that natural selection built our brain randomly with a reward function that valued producing offspring so there is a lot of architecture that is irrelevant to intelligence)
Yes your paraphrase is not bad. I think we can assume things outside of Earth don’t need to be simulated, it would be surprising to me if events outside of Earth made the difference between evolution producing Homo sapiens versus some other less intelligent species. (Maybe a few basic things like temperature of the Earth being shifted slowly) For the most part the Earth is causally isolated from the rest of the universe.
Now which parts of the Earth can we safely omit simulating is a harder question as there’s more causal interactions going on. I can make some guesses around parts of the earths environment that can be ignored by the simulation, but they’ll be guesses only.
Yes gradient descent is likely a faster search algorithm, but IMO you’re still using it to search the big search space that evolution searched through, not the smaller one a human brain searches through after being born.