No intelligence allowed

Believe it or not, I occasionally receive email from actual people. It seems Mr. Slaughter found my earlier update about Sibology:

From: ELDON SLAUGHTER <admin@gods-images.com>
To: rmuser@emptv.com
Subject: YOUR INSANE RANTING ABOUT SIBOLOGY

R. MUSER,

  Just finished reading your -- appears to be -- insane ranting about SIBOLOGY. Even though SIBOLOGY is entirely true, with your current extremely closed mind attitude, you will never be capable of understanding it. Try it again and again each time with whatever intelligence you can devote to it. Just someday, you may learn.
  Learn and understand the universe and those who are creating it, the SIBs. You have misinterpreted much of it. THINK, THINK, THINK.

  Eldon Slaughter, SIBOLOGY.COM

There's not much I can add to this, I'm just grateful to have received a personalized piece of Sibology. I hope he continues weaving the freaky tapestry that comprises his unique, obscure, and mostly harmless version of reality, because it's pretty entertaining. Meanwhile, I'm more concerned about a crazy old guy whose bizarre and stupid ideas are actually getting attention: Ben Stein. Some people, myself included, were under the impression that he's not an idiot, but that possibility has now been dispelled—or expelled. I'd say it's a pretty safe bet that nearly everyone reading this site is aware that "intelligent design", which I've covered briefly in an earlier update, is nothing more than dominionist political maneuvering cloaked in faux-scientific language. If you are, you're light years ahead of Ben Stein. As evidenced by a recent interview on the Trinity Broadcasting Network, he seems to have completely lost the ability to think rationally, or just plain think.

Paul Crouch: What can people of faith do? What do you hope comes from this film?

Ben Stein: Well, we hope that people who have children in schools will tell their children that if the teacher says Darwinism created everything and that there is no explanation for anything in the scientific world except Darwinism, that the student will say, well, Ms. Smith—or whatever the teacher's name is—how did life begin? What keeps the planets in their orbits? Is there any proof of a separate species ever being seen to evolve?

Stein: We're saying teach what is... what the evidence takes you to. I mean, the evidence does not take you to Darwinism about, uh, about, uh, as to the foundations of life. Darwin just had nothing to say about that. The evidence doesn't take you to Darwinism about astronomy or about the laws of physics or of thermodynamics.

Stein: Love of God and compassion and empathy leads you to a very glorious place, and science leads you to killing people.

I can scarcely comprehend how or why anyone would attempt to connect evolutionary theory to abiogenesis, gravitation, physics or thermodynamics, all of which are entirely outside its scope. To claim otherwise would indicate that either every word coming out of his mouth is a lie, or his beliefs are so utterly grounded in ignorance that he has no standing to offer his opinion on any of these topics. In any case, he has misunderstood science at the most basic level, and mistaken it for religion. Science, the systematic acquisition and verification of knowledge, merely attempts to describe reality, rather than prescribe morality. Religion won't hesitate to take on the latter. Science shapes itself around the universe as it is, while religion attempts to shape the universe around itself. The irony is so dense you could choke on it—Stein certainly ought to.

There are multiple levels of errors at play here. If science did lead to killing people—a uselessly vague and misguided assertion—that would have no bearing on the validity of its results. Facts don't concern Stein, though; this much is obvious from his implication that while science leads to killing people, religion doesn't. Along with his ignorance on the subject of evolution and the nature of science in general, we can now add the Bible, and its accompanying death toll. Those in glass houses shouldn't throw stones, but it's not like he needs to—God is perfectly capable of handling that. Of course, he's saying all this on the largest Christian TV network, so he's almost literally preaching to the choir. Should we even be surprised to hear such nonsense from someone who thinks (and I use the term lightly) morality is derived from a deity who once killed everything on earth? Can anyone take Ben Stein seriously when he so flippantly rejects the fruits of science, and nevertheless wears glasses and sits in front of a camera? Anyone?

Anyone?

Amazingly, he's not quite dumb enough to leave a child in a hot car. That much can't be said for the mother of Myles Gailey, an 18-month-old boy who died after she left him in her car for three hours with the windows rolled up. No charges have been filed and no arrests have been made; it's being written off as a "mistake". She has three remaining children. At this point, I don't even know what to say. This is idiocy on a level I'm simply incapable of comprehending. I haven't even been keeping on top of all the recent incidents of thermo-automotive neglect, which is fucked up enough in its own right, because this isn't something that should happen so often it can pass unnoticed. There have been at least four more non-fatal TANnings, and I'm this fucking close to drafting some posters and pamphlets and affixing them to bulletin boards at local businesses. It'd be a hell of a lot more productive than those promotional materials for the Lemon Party I've been working on.

Aside from all that, I recently got an awesome new keyboard. People who have used those of its type will understand why it's worth raving over. I'm currently around 750th place on WhatPulse, having typed 31.3 million keys over the past 53 months (around 19,000 a day), so this is actually pretty important. Also, I've realized that my planned brain simulation post incorporates so many interrelated concepts that the traditional narrative structure may not even be adequate to fully actualize it, and requires comprehension of them at a level of detail that will cause it to splinter off into a thousand directions. I've really underestimated the scope involved, and it may well end up being far longer than my usual updates, assuming I'm able to wedge it into the standard format. Here's a wholly inadequate short preview of one section of an early draft, which will almost certainly be entirely revised. It should give you a taste of what it'll be about.

Recommended reading: Meet the Singularity

Suppose you intended to develop a greater-than-human intelligence, an entity with all the capabilities of the human mind, but vastly improved in every way. Where do you begin? You could start from scratch, and attempt to build a wholly synthetic intelligence (SI)^[1], recreating the processes of learning, reasoning, prediction, creativity, and other aspects of cognition native to humans, and then enhancing them to a superhuman level. This would require a significant amount of time and effort, if it's ever completed. Alternately, you can avoid reinventing the wheel, and use a platform that's already demonstrated these abilities: the human mind itself, the most intelligent system we know of. For decades, we've analyzed evolutionary processes and reverse-engineered biological systems, and used this information to duplicate their functions. Rough approximations of neurons can work together in networks and actually learn to recognize patterns, pilot airplanes, filter spam, and perform other tasks that previously required human workers. Reasonably accurate models of certain biological neurons have also been developed. Given that this is possible, why can't we use vast quantities of simulated neurons to reconstruct a human brain? For this to become feasible, there must be significant progress in three fields:

1. Mapping of the structure and activity of the human brain at all levels of detail, and analysis of the functions and behavior of the different types of neurons that comprise it.
2. Biologically accurate modeling of every type of neuron and neural configuration found in the brain.
3. The development of hardware capable of running billions of neuron models in parallel at real-time speeds.

The regions of the brain, and their corresponding functionality, have been studied extensively. One of these regions, the neocortex, is specific to mammals and enables consciousness, reasoning, language and other higher functions. It is the outermost and most recently evolved layer of the cerebral cortex, about 2–4 mm thick. In smaller mammals such as rodents, the neocortex is smooth, but in primates and other larger mammals, it's extensively wrinkled, providing significantly more surface area. There are six distinct layers to the human neocortex, containing different types and concentrations of neurons, but it uses the same building block: the neocortical column. Neocortical columns are clusters of 10,000–70,000 neurons, about 0.5 mm wide by 2 mm deep, repeating millions of times. These columns are the reason you can understand the ideas presented here and comprehend the functioning of your own brain.

The neocortex is a critical component of intelligence, but it's still only one region of the brain. Suppose you wanted to obtain a complete map of the neurons and synapses in a particular brain. No current neuroimaging technologies have the resolution necessary to observe brain structure and activity at the cellular level, and they will not achieve that level of resolution for some time, if ever. However, this resolution can be achieved with serial sectioning, in which a brain is sliced into ultra-thin layers and microscopically analyzed. This could theoretically provide a complete image, but practical considerations make manual analysis impossible: it took a decade to map the 300 nerve cells of a roundworm. The cutting-edge field of connectomics, named by analogy to genomics, aims to automate sectioning and analysis to digitally reconstruct a brain in a fraction of the time. Unfortunately, the source brain is still destroyed. It's possible that future advances in nanotechnology will allow mass quantities of nanobots to be introduced into a brain, scanning its neurons and synapses individually.

You can write a program, but whether it will run is a separate matter, especially when it's a program as complex as a brain. Once a complete brain map is constructed, can it be accurately modeled? Yes, almost certainly. The Blue Brain Project, a joint initiative of IBM and the Brain Mind Institute at EPFL, has already run biologically realistic cellular-level simulations of a single neocortical column from a two-week-old rat, containing 10,000 neurons and 30 million synapses. These simulations are so accurate, they've been used to verify the results of actual neurobiological experiments. Individual columns are similar across species, differing mainly in quantity: humans have millions more columns than rats. A human column will eventually be modeled, and the Blue Brain Project claims there are no major obstacles to modeling other types of neurons, neurotransmitters and neural structures. Its ultimate goal is to create a molecular-level simulation of the entire human brain.

So, what kind of computing power is required to simulate a single neocortical column?

This isn't EPFL's supercomputer, but it's the same architecture. EPFL's system is half as large.

Some computers still take up an entire room. EPFL's Blue Gene/L supercomputer is the 54th most powerful in the world, reaching 18 teraflops with 8,192 processors. The fastest supercomputer in the world, a larger Blue Gene/L, is about 25 times faster. Currently, the Blue Brain Project can only simulate a neocortical column at a speed two orders of magnitude slower than real time. Obviously, whole brain simulation won't be feasible for many years, but it may not be as long as you think. Moore's Law accurately predicts that the computational capacity available for a given price will double about every two years. Computers have always become faster, smaller and cheaper. For example, Intel recently produced the first chip to contain over two billion transistors. Two years earlier, they produced the first chip containing over one billion transistors. Four years earlier, 592 million transistors. Consider the 1988 Cray Y-MP, a top-of-the-line supercomputer with a peak performance of 333 megaflops for each of its 2–8 processors. Contemporary high-end desktop CPUs exceed 30 gigaflops, and in 20 years, our best Blue Gene systems will be useful only as museum exhibits.

Experimental evidence indicates that, barring unforeseen difficulties, whole brain simulation is theoretically possible. Within decades, it will become a reality, and this raises one very important question: If a computer executes the same operations that are performed by a biological human brain, is it conscious?

1. When I use this term, it means what most people would consider artificial intelligence, but I believe SI is more accurate for this topic. Applications of AI are typically limited to very narrow and specific domains, such as games, financial trading, knowledge of certain subjects (expert systems), and speech/facial recognition. These systems have no comprehension of the information they process. SI differs in that it exhibits the general intelligence found in human minds, and functions as a comprehensive, self-aware intellect competent enough to expand its capabilities beyond limited fields, integrate learned skills with the rest of its abilities, and even generate new ideas. John Haugeland compared the difference between artificial and synthetic intelligence to the difference between artificial and synthetic diamonds. An artificial diamond is designed to closely resemble a natural diamond, but its structure is nothing like that of a diamond. A synthetic diamond is an actual diamond, with the same structure and properties as a natural diamond, just created using a different process.

I don't typically do this sort of thing, but I'm trying to work past the pathological manifestation of perfectionism that, rather than driving me to new heights of achievement, paralyzes me for fear of not living up to my (most likely very unrealistic) self-imposed standards of quality. Enjoy!

-R. MUSER, EMPTV.COM