Philosophical ramblings on reverse engineering the human brain
Monday, January 7th, 2008I was going through my bedstand last night, and I found a yellow notebook. It contained the following:
The unconscious is a background service that is constantly on, even when asleep. It is extremely fast and can pull up millions of memories very quickly.
The conscious mind is an enormous engine that predicts the incoming input patterns by always keeping the most similar patterns within memory to compare to incoming patterns.
The Driver is an entity that can take control of the conscious and unconscious processes. It can command the conscious to predict incoming memory patterns in different ways, or even ignore processing the input patterns in order to pursue a train of predictions into a completely imaginary reality.
The filtered stack of memory patterns that the conscious mind processes would look like a landscape if visualized.
I was thinking of “Focal Points” as any inputs into a system. For humans, they would be our senses, but for a computer system, it could be any number of inputs. My main point was that intelligence is all about near-instantaneous pattern recognition, and the way our neocortex stores our memories allows our unconscious mind to be touching millions of stored patterns at once. Someday we’ll be able to replicate this storage/retrieval algorithm, enabling a processor to have data access to many data locations at once. That is the way our brain works. There are multiple parallel asynchronous retrievals occurring, yet slower than a computer processor retrieves data synchronously. But this benefits pattern recognition greatly because of the breadth of incoming data.
This is what happens when you read The Singularity is Near and On Intelligence simultaneously. I continue to have a deep fascination for the human brain and software, and I believe that we will eventually crack the intelligence algorithm. I just wish I had more time to pursue such trivial pursuits. But the individual development of my children’s brains is more important than working toward the singularity at this point in my life.
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