Big Think | Ray Kurzweil: Your brain in the cloud
February 10, 2013
Source: Big Think — February 10, 2013 | Jonathan Fowler & Elizabeth Rodd
Transcript | Ray Kurzweil: Sometimes people think that emotion and art are sort of sideshows to human intelligence and the real essence of intelligence is thinking logically. If that were true, computers are already smarter than we are because they’re much better at logical thinking than we are. It’s actually things like being funny, being sexy or expressing a loving sentiment; maybe in a poem or in a musical piece. That’s the cutting edge of human intelligence.
It has to do with the hierarchy of the neocortex and at the low levels things might seem cold and mechanical because we’re – our neocortex can recognize very simple objects and make very simple decisions. At a high level, it’s dealing with concepts like the beauty of a poem by Emily Dickinson or the ability to create a poem like that. And we can come back to creativity I believe it’s an exercise in metaphors and the neocortex is a metaphor machine. [...]
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Comments (3)
by Cybernettr
“We have this big forehead that we can fit in the frontal cortex and, therefore, have a higher number of hierarchies – of levels of the hierarchy. And that was an enabling factor that permitted the evolution of language and technology and art and science.”
Look at the skull of a Neanderthal and notice how high his eyes are and how low and sloping his forehead, but many would have us believe you could dress him in a suit and he would fit right in at Harvard! Yet, we’re far better off for our interaction with the Neanderthals. Exponential advances in genetics are going to reveal a lot about mankind’s origins in the near future, and it’s very exciting!
by Anne Marie Tobias
Problem is intelligence is like water to fish. its so hard hard to distinguish it with the very thing doing the distinguishing. That said, the human mind and its amazing complexity, its ability to abstract, to even abstract abstraction, allows us to reduce our own intelligence to process, to metaprocess. In the inquiry we begin to bump up against what it means to be human. In the process we begin to see the inherent beauty and magnificence in our own machinery and how we can begin to manifest that externally. As we engineer intelligence, let us engineer our own intelligence so that we might ultimately be the best possible expression of our essential selves. Thanks Ray for being in this vital inquiry into the future of being human.
by Gabriel
What a wonderful post Anne! Indeed, it’s never an easy process trying to understand yourself, in really any sense I think, but when you do, you get a greater appreciation and respect, and even better, think of ways to better yourself…it’s something that really transcends boundaries; your own ways of thinking, behavior, relationship with others….everything; and when you continue to understand who you are, and why you are the way you are, and better yourself in every way you can….isn’t that what life is all about? about what being human is all about? Solving problems? Understanding and bettering things, not just for yourself but for the things around you?
Perhaps that what Kurzweil means about evolution being a spiritual process….and as we continue to learn more about ourselves in every faculty, and better that, we become even more human overtime; to create an ever-more better expression of ourselves and the world around us….one could say that’s what it means to be human.