- For Kaku, the brain is a computer made of meat, and understanding the mind is just a really, really hard engineering problem.
- The problem is that we still don’t have much in the way of a working model of consciousness. With a physicist’s eye for economy, Kaku tries to provide one through what he calls a “space-time theory.” It’s a model of consciousness with a graded scale of awareness based on the number of feedback loops between environment and organism. Thus, in Kaku’s view, a thermostat has the lowest possible level of consciousness while humans, with our ability to move through space and project ourselves mentally backward and forward in time, represent the highest level currently known.
Interesting! My favourite line in the book review:
- it seems to me that Kaku has taken a metaphor and mistaken it for a mechanism.
The mistaken metaphor you quote is sadly all too common in neuroscience. The so called connectome project is a billion dollar joke. I'll write more tonight or tomorrow, when I'm in my home office and can correctly quote some texts I have there, but suffice it to say that people who think the a mind can be reverse engineered are charlatans.
I'm definitely interested in your reply, I think the connectome project and many of the futurist-oriented neuroscience pontificators end up writing checks science can't cash.
not meant as a confrontational reply, just curious. if the brain is made up of matter and follows the same physical laws as the rest of the universe whats to stop it from one day being understood? it certainly isn't likely to happen overnight but couldn’t it be at least conceivable that the connectome project has some potential to lead to further knowledge of and eventual replication of the human brain?
Solve the Schrodinger Equation for the human brain. We'll consider that "first order". Then do the human body. Then, include the surroundings, and eventually the cosmos. Good luck. Snark reply cuz inactivated user. And if you shall find revival, let this snark make thou cometh at me so.
I find the author has taken a cautionary tone with his review of Kaku's work, and while that may provide some small solace for those intimate with and concerned about those difficult problems that Frank points out - I am tempted to suggest that since we do not have a unified theory of everything any solution to scientific understanding of the being of our being remains beyond our grasp - but, as Frank overlooks - I, for example, perceive an overwhelming need to address the issue of Global Warming in much the same manner as we approached lunar landing - yet wealthy interests stand in the way. Please, permit me . . . and you will wake up to discover that each and every human being has become nothing more than a tool, entirely disposable, in the single minded effort to leverage these wealthy interests out of my way by whatever means possible. I would raise up, one by one, those individuals who wholeheartedly and without reservation support those wealthy interests as symbols to the sum of their brethren, symbols of terror, and of abject despair . . . People are not some pigment and while it may not exactly be new to treat them as if they were, it remains true that the potential that exists today, to divide self from self, remains not only unprecedented in human history, it brings into question the basic justification for our continued existence.Easy problems, according to Chalmers, were things like figuring out how the brain cycles through signals from the arm allowing you to pick up an object. Researchers developing the next generation of prosthetics will tell you this “easy” problem remains pretty hard, but as Chalmers rightly pointed out, control of the arm is nothing compared with developing a scientific account of the vividness of our own experience. It’s the internal luminosity — the “being” of our being — that constitutes Chalmers’s hard problem and that eludes Kaku’s engineering-based perspective.
Kaku believes the most important advances in silicon computing will still serve our needs and not the coming robot overlords (if we do create them).
there remains the question of needs and their definition. to reverse-engineer each and every person’s brain.