RE: Scientific evidence of God by an atheist
November 7, 2016 at 9:38 am
(This post was last modified: November 7, 2016 at 9:50 am by I_am_not_mafia.)
(November 7, 2016 at 8:33 am)chimp3 Wrote: I recently read a book on AI and it said that we have yet to produce anything as intelligent as the insect. I am not very knowledable on this subject but this does not merit god status to me. Nature does a much better job with random mutation and natural selection.
Eric Kandel spent a large part of his career mapping out each of the 18,000 neurons of sea slugs in order to understand memory formation. He won the Nobel prize for it. A fruit fly has about 250,000 neurons. Compare this with the human brain which has about 86 billion neurons. Each neuron is more than a simple integrating unit that most artificial neural networks use. Each neuron has significant computational power compared to an entire artificial neural network. For example, dendritic trees can encode binary logic.
What ProgrammingGodJordan hasn't taken into account is though that any strong AI, any artificial general intelligence needs to be self organising.
To explain this, think of what computers are and what they can do.
They're super fast idiots.
They need explicit instructions in heavily constrained environments without any noise. Absolutely everything has to be made explicit. Animals and humans on the other hand are autonomous and do not need to be micro-managed. The field of AI is about taking this ability of natural intelligence and giving it to computers to make them more autonomous. You could create a program for a robot to build a car. Everything would have to be in the exact place because if something is even slightly off then the robot will fail and won't be able to correct itself. AI would allow it to adapt, like how a human worker does not have to care where the screwdriver is, they see it, pick it up, rotate it and then use it.
But here's the difficulty. How do you encode explicit instructions for noisy environments that you yourself do not know about in advance? The more explicit your instruction, the less robust it is to the noisy real world. Whereas if a system is completely self organising then it is shaped solely by its environment. A wholly self organising system can then adapt to other environments without depending on any instructions explicitly coupled to one specific environment. If all a neural network adapts to is a continuous signal that changes over time for example, then it does not matter what's causing that signal to change.
Take humans and animals for example. No one opens up our heads and directly injects an electrical current into our brains in order to teach us. We learn from our environment. We sense it, we interpret those senses, choose an action, act within an environment and then sense that the changes in that environment. We are part of a sensory / action loop. We are a part of our own environment.
But this opens up another can of worms, how do you engineer self organising systems? To put this in context, a good analogy for electricity and voltage is to think of water and pressure. So using nothing but water pumps, pipes, cisterns and valves, how would you arrange them in a network to naturally adapt to the water that you feed into it? How would you set it up to remember previous water pressures? Or to regulate its water pressure over time to remove spikes and cope with reduced input? Or to select the best source of water? All without any explicit instructions to do so. After all, a simple model of a neuron builds up voltage over time from input signals until it reaches a threshold and fires. This is a glimpse of the challenge that lays ahead in AGI.
Now we're moving away from computational and informational systems but physical systems. In fact most research in the field of self organisation is still performed by physicists. But that's what the brain is. A wholly self organising biophysical system. And if you want an artificial general intelligence that robustly adapts to new environments, you need to remove explicit encoding and instructions.
