In spite of all those advances, neuroscientists still do not understand at all how a brain (the squishy agglomeration of tissue and neurons) makes a conscious mind (the intangible entity that enables you to fall in love, find irony in a novel, and appreciate the elegance of a circuit design). ”No one has the foggiest notion,” says the neuroscientist Eric Kandel of Columbia University Medical Center, in New York City. ”At the moment all you can get are informed, intelligent opinions.”
Adding to the complexity, synaptic connections constantly form, strengthen, weaken, and dissolve. Old neurons die and--evidence now indicates, overturning decades of dogma--new ones are born.
Within a decade or so, computers will surpass the computational power of brains, many singularitarians say.
We've heard such prophesies before.
predicted that computers would exceed human intelligence within a generation.
But even Minsky admits that computers are still idiot savants.
clipped from: www.spectrum.ieee.org