This is Ray Bradbury. He’s 90 years old.
What is he doing?
He’s watching this video (which is still not safe for work).
Word from witnesses is that he loved it!
From John Pavlus:
How to make a Singularity
Step 1: “I wonder if brains are just like computers?”
Step 2: Add peta-thingies/giga-whatzits; say “Moore’s Law!” a lot at conferences
Step 3: ??????
Step 4: SINGULARITY!!!11!one
There are other, perhaps somewhat more serious, rebuttals at Rennie’s Last Nerve and A Fistful of Science.
Now run along, little obsessive Kurzweilians, there are many other blogs out there that regard your hero with derision, demanding your earnestly clueless rebuttals.
Remember that awful, terrible Templeton-funded prayer study that had no controls, was unblinded, and had nothing but subjective measurements of improvement? Now it’s being promoted on healthfinder.gov — with not a word of reservation, just a happy claim that prayer might help sight- and hearing-impaired people. It’s a beautiful example of bad science reporting, in which they’ll admit that maybe it’s just the placebo effect, but they still run out and get quotes from people saying this stuff might help.
Amnesty International reports that:
Reports say a court in Tabuk, in the north-west of the country, had approached a number of hospitals about the possibility of cutting the man’s spinal cord to carry out the punishment of qisas (retribution), as requested by the injured victim.
I don’t know how you find a doctor willing to commit such a violation of medical ethics, but then, I don’t understand how we can have doctors to carry out the death penalty, either.
I treated you to a very pretty song in the last instance of the perpetual conversation, so now let’s turn it over to a Christian to serenade you. I think you’ll learn that the grand days of Christian music are long dead.
(Current totals: 10,877 entries with 1,098,158 comments.)
This is revoltingly narrow-minded and stupid behavior by our military. We’ve got a Christian kook, a Major General James Chambers, who has mistaken morale and discipline for indoctrination in the Christian faith. He’s running a program called the Spiritual Fitness (whatever the hell that means) Concert Series at army posts in Virginia. This program brought in a Christian rock group to perform, which is annoying enough, but then attendance was optional in name only. At least one company was marched to the doors of the event, and then told they had a choice: attend or be disciplined.
Those of us that chose not to attend (about 80, or a little less that half) were marched back to the company area. At that point the NCO issued us a punishment. We were to be on lock-down in the company (not released from duty), could not go anywhere on post (no PX, no library, etc). We were to go to strictly to the barracks and contact maintenance. If we were caught sitting in our rooms, in our beds, or having/handling electronics (cell phones, laptops, games) and doing anything other than maintenance, we would further have our weekend passes revoked and continue barracks maintenance for the entirety of the weekend. At that point the implied message was clear in my mind ‘we gave you a choice to either satisfy us or disappoint us. Since you chose to disappoint us you will now have your freedoms suspended and contact chores while the rest of your buddies are enjoying a concert.
Not everyone in this company was Christian, by the way. Their clueless commander doesn’t care.
The Commanding General’s Spiritual Fitness Concert Series was the brainchild of Maj. Gen. James E. Chambers, who, according to an article on the Army.mil website, “was reborn as a Christian” at the age of sixteen. According to the article, Chambers held the first concert at Fort Lee within a month of becoming the commanding general of the Combined Arms Support Command and Fort Lee in June 2008. But he had already started the series at Fort Eustis, as the previous commanding general there. The concerts have continued at Fort Eustis under the new commanding general, as well as spreading to Fort Lee under Maj. Gen. Chambers. The concerts are also promoted to the airmen on Langley Air Force Base, which is now part of Joint Base Langley-Eustis.
In the Army.mil article, Maj. Gen. Chambers was quoted as saying, “The idea is not to be a proponent for any one religion. It’s to have a mix of different performers with different religious backgrounds.” But there has been no “mix of different performers with different religious backgrounds” at these concerts. Every one of them has had evangelical Christian performers, who typically not only perform their music but give their Christian testimony and read from the Bible in between songs.
It’s a waste of money (millions are being spent on “Spiritual Fitness” programs), it’s coercive, and it privileges evangelical Christianity over every other faith — or absence of faith — that recruits bring into the military. It’s un-American, or it should be.
Oh, nice. It looks like Chambers no longer holds his position.
I don’t watch Oprah enough, so I haven’t seen much open endorsement of the nonsense behind that unbelievable bestseller, The Secret. There must be a lot of closet believers, though, because that piece of well-whipped frothy BS sold 19 million copies. Now the author has cranked out another, similar excretion: The Power, nicely reviewed in Newsweek. Both have the same premise, that the Universe really, really loves you and wants to give you everything you wish for, if only you concentrate and ask.
The Power is a distillation of the central insight of The Secret: the “law of attraction.” It’s still true, apparently, that you can get anything you want, from parking spots to cures for obscure diseases, just by wishing for them and pretending they are already in your possession. But there are some new observations in The Power, such as the importance of being nice to your water. Researchers in several countries, she writes, “have discovered that when water is exposed to positive words and feelings such as love and gratitude, the energy level of the water not only increases, but the structure of the water changes, making it perfectly harmonious … When water is exposed to negative emotions, such as hate, the energy level of the water decreases and chaotic changes occur.” Since “the inside of your head is 80 percent water,” you can see how important this is.
It sounds like it’s been updated by tossing any ol’ recent woo claim into the stewpot, like that magic water silliness. She’s also added old stuff, like the patriarchs from the book of Genesis.
Death, like poverty, is subject to the law of attraction: “[P]eople once lived for hundreds and hundreds of years,” she writes, citing “ancient texts” as her authority. “So what’s happened? People changed what they believed.”
You know, some of the smartest people in history have asked what the core principles of the universe are, and they’ve often been people with deep cultural roots and an entirely human predisposition to hope that the cosmos revolves around them. And in every case, they’ve failed to find evidence of the beneficent love and charity that they had hoped would come sleeting in to Earth from the farthest reaches of the firmament, and instead found only impersonal forces like gravity and electromagnetism and cosmic rays and deep forces that draw particles together or fling them apart. We live in an impersonal universe where hydrogen vastly outweighs our brains and where the dominant environment is an icy cold emptiness filled with unbreathably attenuated gases and pierced by scattered photons and fleeting subatomic particles.
The real secret is that the universe doesn’t give a goddamn about us, doesn’t dream, doesn’t wish, doesn’t hope. The real power is that science gives us the tools to wrench the pointless detritus of reality into the shape that we dream of, to impose our wishes on the substrate. We don’t achieve that by lying abed and hoping really hard, though — we do it with work and real knowledge. The shortcuts of lotus eaters like Rhonda Byrne are entirely illusory.
Ray Kurzweil has responded to my criticisim of futurist fortune-telling. It really just compounds the problems, though, and gullible people who love Ray will think he’s answered me, while skeptical people who see through his hocus-pocus will be unimpressed. It’s kind of pointless to reply again, but here goes.
His first point is silly.
For starters, I said that we would be able to reverse-engineer the brain sufficiently to understand its basic principles of operation within two decades, not one decade, as Myers reports.
I don’t care.
I didn’t make an issue of his timescale in the first place; in fact, I said it made no difference. The problem is that he has provided no reason to specify a date, other than his vague mantra of “exponential growth”. Why not say 5 years? Why not 50? The heart of the Kurzweil method is to simply pick a date far enough in the future that we cannot predict what technological advances will occur, and also far enough forward that he isn’t likely to be confronted with his failure by people who remember what he said, and all is good. My complaint isn’t that he has set a date by which we’ll understand the brain, but that he has provided no baseline value for his exponential growth claim, and has no way to measure how much we know now, how much we need to know, and how rapidly we will acquire that knowledge. “Really fast” or “exponentially increasing” are not informative.
I mentioned the genome in a completely different context. I presented a number of arguments as to why the design of the brain is not as complex as some theorists have advocated. This is to respond to the notion that it would require trillions of lines of code to create a comparable system. The argument from the amount of information in the genome is one of several such arguments. It is not a proposed strategy for accomplishing reverse-engineering. It is an argument from information theory, which Myers obviously does not understand.
I think I understand it better than Kurzweil. If we have a seed of information that initiates a process, followed by many activities and interactions that add progressively more information to the process, you can’t use information theory to measure the amount of information in the seed and then announce that you’ve put an upper bound on the amount of complexity in the process.
For instance, you can’t measure the number of transistors in an Intel CPU and then announce, “A-ha! We now understand what a small amount of information is actually required to create all those operating systems and computer games and Microsoft Word, and it is much, much smaller than everyone is assuming.” Put it in those terms, and the Kurzweil fanboys would laugh at him; put it in terms of something they don’t understand at all, like the development and function of the brain, and they’re willing to go along with the pretense that the genome tells us that the whole organism is simpler than they thought.
I presume they understand that if you program a perfect Intel emulator, you don’t suddenly get Halo: Reach for free, as an emergent property of the system. You can buy the code and add it to the system, sure, but in this case, we can’t run down to GameStop and buy a DVD with the human OS in it and install it on our artificial brain. You’re going to have to do the hard work of figuring out how that works and reverse engineering it, as well. And understanding how the processor works is necessary to do that, but not sufficient.
Kurzweil does add another piece to his argument, although it doesn’t help: the modularity and repetitive organization of the human brain.
For example, the cerebellum (which has been modeled, simulated and tested) — the region responsible for part of our skill formation, like catching a fly ball — contains a module of four types of neurons. That module is repeated about ten billion times. The cortex, a region that only mammals have and that is responsible for our ability to think symbolically and in hierarchies of ideas, also has massive redundancy. It has a basic pattern-recognition module that is considerably more complex than the repeated module in the cerebellum, but that cortex module is repeated about a billion times. There is also information in the interconnections, but there is massive redundancy in the connection pattern as well.
This is true — the cortex is a layered structure with similar elements repeated over and over again, in broad arrays. Pyramidal neurons, for instance, are instantly recognizable and and share a whole suite of common morphological elements between each other — but each one is also as unique as a snowflake. Those differences matter, and they are not specified in the genome. (For that matter, you won’t find any blueprint in the genome for the dendrite pattern of pyramidal neurons, either). If you want to recreate a generic human brain, it won’t work if you just make every pyramidal neuron exactly identical; there have to be spatial differences and differences in connectivity. You especially won’t be able to carry out something far more specific, such as emulate Ray Kurzweil’s brain, if you decide to simplify and make his cortex a uniform array of identical modules.
In short, here’s Kurzweil’s claim: the brain is simpler than we think, and thanks to the accelerating rate of technological change, we will understand it’s basic principles of operation completely within a few decades. My counterargument, which he hasn’t addressed at all, is that 1) his argument for that simplicity is deeply flawed and irrelevant, 2) he has made no quantifiable argument about how much we know about the brain right now, and I argue that we’ve only scratched the surface in the last several decades of research, 3) “exponential” is not a magic word that solves all problems (if I put a penny in the bank today, it does not mean I will have a million dollars in my retirement fund in 20 years), and 4) Kurzweil has provided no explanation for how we’ll be ‘reverse engineering’ the human brain. He’s now at least clearly stating that decoding the genome does not generate the necessary information — it’s just an argument that the brain isn’t as complex as we thought, which I’ve already said is bogus — but left dangling is the question of methodology. I suggest that we need to have a combined strategy of digging into the brain from the perspectives of physiology, molecular biology, genetics, and development, and in all of those fields I see a long hard slog ahead. I also don’t see that noisemakers like Kurzweil, who know nothing of those fields, will be making any contribution at all.
So what exactly is the basis of Kurzweil’s expected magic great leap forward? And no, the miracle of exponential growth is not an answer. If all a futurist has to do is wave his hands and say things will change more rapidly than we expect, then futurists like Kurzweil are nothing but techno-gimmicky Criswells. Utterly useless.
Franklin Graham has said something stupid again. He has some peculiar ideas about inheritance.
I think the president’s problem is that he was born a Muslim, his father was a Muslim. The seed of Islam is passed through the father like the seed of Judaism is passed through the mother. He was born a Muslim, his father gave him an Islamic name. Now it’s obvious that the president has renounced the prophet Mohammed and he has renounced Islam and he has accepted Jesus Christ. That’s what he says he has done, I cannot say that he hasn’t. So I just have to believe that the president is what he has said.
So now religion is heritable factor, with a strange pattern of assortment where Islam is male and Judaism is female? That’s got me wondering about a cross between a Muslim man and a Jewish woman — what would the child be? Or how about a Muslim woman and a Jewish man — is that how we breed atheists? Crazy stuff.
You might be wondering how Christianity is inherited. That’s an exception: you become Christian by conscious choice, not by birth…
Well, you know, you can be born a Muslim, you can be born a Jew, but you can’t be born a Christian. The only way you can become a Christian is by confessing your sins to God, asking his forgiveness, and by receiving Jesus Christ by faith into your heart, that Christ died for your sins, shed his blood on Calvary’s Cross, and that God raised him to life. If you’re willing to accept that and believe that, and let Jesus Christ be the lord of your life, God will forgive your sins, he will heal your heart, and that’s the only way you can become a Christian. And so if the President has done that, then I would say he’s a Christian, if that’s what he has done.
…says Franklin, son of Billy, the well-known evangelical preacher.
Think, though, about Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, Louis Farrakhan, Muhammad Ali — I guess they acquired their Muslim faith, not by conscious decision, but by the seed passed on to them by their Christian fathers.
Oops.
I don’t think Graham meant much by it, he just didn’t think. What we see bubbling behind those blank eyes is simply mindless racism — he probably just sees Islam as the default religion for brown people, unless they’ve been instructed appropriately by good ol’ pale-skinned missionaries.
Check out scienceblogging.org — it looks useful. I do wonder if independent science blogs that aren’t part of a network will suffer, though — while The Panda’s Thumb makes the cut, Highly Allocthonous and a lot of other science blogs didn’t.
