There's a psychological principle that I've forgotten the name of that observes that by setting the stage correctly you can cause people to accept assumptions without even thinking about it by framing the debate correctly.
This conversation here on HN is a great example of that. Simply by the way the article is written, it is being taken nearly as fact by most participants that a human-scale AI simulation must work by physically simulating the brain. This may ultimately be true but there is no a priori reason to believe it. The brain may implement something that can be simulated "close enough" by a much simpler computation system.
Chaos is chaotic, obviously, but the human brain is a pretty fuzzy system too. It can't be too pathologically chaotic; people speak as if getting the 15th decimal place wrong will blow up the system but the brain simply can not be that sensitive or the removal of a single neuron would break our brains. Our brain state must be at least metastable to work at all. Removing a neuron or getting something wrong in the 15th decimal place may result in some small change of behavior three years later vs. not removing it or getting it right, but our brain states are already so fuzzy and noisy that's not going to be the stopper.
The stopper will be to see whether or not there is a higher-level simulation that can be run that is less complex that simulating the physics entirely. The secondary question is whether we can make something that we would call human-intelligent even if it turns out we can never "upload our brains" without critical data lossage occurring. That would be something as intelligent as us that is nevertheless fundamentally incompatible with human biology, with neither able to simulate or understand the other. I can make coherent arguments either way, as can many people, but by framing the question as physical simulation this has not been one of the more intelligent debates on the topic we've seen here. Physical simulation is one possible path, and not even the most likely or interesting, to AI and brain upload.
No, people are talking that way because it's obvious to the participants that no one knows how to do the higher level simulation. And there is no hope of anyone figuring it out any time soon.
So people figure why not "run the program" that already exists, and that's what this conversation is about.
This conversation here on HN is a great example of that. Simply by the way the article is written, it is being taken nearly as fact by most participants that a human-scale AI simulation must work by physically simulating the brain. This may ultimately be true but there is no a priori reason to believe it. The brain may implement something that can be simulated "close enough" by a much simpler computation system.
Chaos is chaotic, obviously, but the human brain is a pretty fuzzy system too. It can't be too pathologically chaotic; people speak as if getting the 15th decimal place wrong will blow up the system but the brain simply can not be that sensitive or the removal of a single neuron would break our brains. Our brain state must be at least metastable to work at all. Removing a neuron or getting something wrong in the 15th decimal place may result in some small change of behavior three years later vs. not removing it or getting it right, but our brain states are already so fuzzy and noisy that's not going to be the stopper.
The stopper will be to see whether or not there is a higher-level simulation that can be run that is less complex that simulating the physics entirely. The secondary question is whether we can make something that we would call human-intelligent even if it turns out we can never "upload our brains" without critical data lossage occurring. That would be something as intelligent as us that is nevertheless fundamentally incompatible with human biology, with neither able to simulate or understand the other. I can make coherent arguments either way, as can many people, but by framing the question as physical simulation this has not been one of the more intelligent debates on the topic we've seen here. Physical simulation is one possible path, and not even the most likely or interesting, to AI and brain upload.