Re: Human minds on Windows(?) (was Re: Web site up! (GUI vs. CLI))

Darin Sunley (rsunley@escape.ca)
Wed, 07 Jul 1999 23:19:55 -0500

"Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" wrote:

> Billy Brown wrote:
> >At the opposite end of the spectrum you arrive at
> > software that elegantly models the abstract processes of the mind,

[snip]

> (maybe 10^13 LOC?).
>
> Disagreement - a truly elegant description of the algorithms, perhaps as
> instructions to genetic-algorithm "compilers" or self-modifying code,
> shouldn't be using any more information than there is in our DNA: 750M, tops.

One problem. Our DNA code only describes a human infant given a human adult.

  1. The genetic code doesn't describe the human adult required to "compile" the DNA.
  2. A human infant isn't even a human adult. As I understand it, a human infant IS hardwired to learn LOTS of environmental stuff very quickly, but you need the description of the whole environment, as well, as (presumably) human quality agents already in the environment.

This is the major problem, that the development of a mind from infant to human quality requires existing human quality minds.

Piaget established reasonably firmly that human infants, at various stages up to about 7-8 years, are not merely less knowledgeable adults, but their brains (basic operations like perception, causal analysis) work in completely different ways then adults. To describe an adult brain with adult knowledge/perceptual structures probably requires a lot more data then to describe an infant's mind, which (as I understand it) is array upon array of undifferentiated "learning" structures.

Darin Sunley
rsunley@escape.ca