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Comments: 2 +-   God - hacker or engineer?-> on Wednesday June 04 2008, @12:15AM dwrugh

Submitted by dwrugh on Wednesday June 04 2008, @12:15AM
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dwrugh writes "With these new tools, [Kurzweil] says, by the 2020s we'll be adding computers to our brains and building machines as smart as ourselves. This serene confidence is not shared by neuroscientists like Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, who discussed future brains with Dr. Kurzweil at the festival. It might be possible to create a thinking, empathetic machine, Dr. Ramachandran said, but it might prove too difficult to reverse-engineer the brain's circuitry because it evolved so haphazardly. "My colleague Francis Crick used to say that God is a hacker, not an engineer," Dr. Ramachandran said. "You can do reverse engineering, but you can't do reverse hacking.""
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  • Hacking is merely a creatively advanced form of engineering. Of course you can reverse engineer a hack.
  • Jokester - see Platypus [wikipedia.org].

    This egg-laying, venomous, duck-billed, beaver-tailed, otter-footed mammal baffled European naturalists when they first encountered it, with some considering it an elaborate fraud. It is one of the few venomous mammals; the male Platypus has a spur on the hind foot that delivers a venom capable of causing severe pain to humans.
Man who arrives at party two hours late will find he has been beaten to the punch.