The End of the Beginning for the Brain
Halle Mason Y11
VOCABULARY
Eschatological -
relating to death, judgement, and the final
destiny of the soul and of humankind.
Rapture -
a feeling of intense pleasure or joy.
Parse -
resolve (a sentence) into its component
parts and describe their syntactic roles.
Phonemes -
any of the perceptually distinct units of
sound in a specified language that
distinguish one word from another, for
example p, b, d, and t in the English words
pad, pat, bad, and bat.
Neocortical -
relating to the part of the cerebral cortex
concerned with sight and hearing in
mammals.
Buttress -
increase the strength of or justification for;
reinforce.
Continuum -
a continuous sequence in which
adjacent elements are not perceptibly
different from each other, but the
extremes are quite distinct.
Chauvinism -
excessive or prejudiced support for
one's own cause, group, or sex.
Baroque -
highly ornate and extravagant in style.
Begets -
cause; bring about.
Laureate -
a person who is honoured with an
award for outstanding creative or
intellectual achievement.
Morphology -
the study of the forms of things.
 TRANSHUMANISM
Transhumanists believe that the human condition can and will be improved by
the implementation of technology into every aspect of daily life. They believe that
humans have “biological limitations” and that nanotechnology and artificial intelligence
will “transcend” these limitations.

RAY KURZWEIL
Kurzweil is an engineer, inventor, and pioneer of artificial intelligence. He has
had numerous achievements, including the creation of Deep Blue, Wolfram Alpha, and
an intelligent robot named Watson. He has many strong, futurist beliefs about the future
of humanity and technology, notably that computers will become “smarter” than
humans and that this singularity will doom humanity.

THE SINGULARITY
The singularity is a point in time at which transhumanists (including Ray
Kurzweil) believe computers will surpass human intelligence, hence ending human
history.

THE END OF THE BEGINNING FOR THE BRAIN

This paper, written by Christof Koch and published in 2013, details
transhumanism itself and a notable figure at the head of the belief; Ray Kurzweil. The
main issue raised in this paper is that while Kurzweil has undeniable expertise in his
field of engineering, his knowledge of neuroscience is “inadequate” when it comes to
supporting his belief that computers will become more intelligent than humans, and
perhaps even develop feelings and consciousness. Kurzweil fails to support his theories
with scientific evidence, only citing the few papers that support his ideas. His genius in
the field of engineering does not make up for a lack of understanding of biology and
psychology, meaning many of his ideas are unsupported and/or contradictory to the
common knowledge within the neuroscience community.
 LEARNINGS AND REFLECTIONS
This text is full of very specific terms and academic vocabulary which I had to
research in order to improve my understanding of the paper. I also learned a lot about
what transhumanism is and the beliefs of its followers, as well as the complications that
lie within the philosophy.

WILL AI SOON BECOME SMARTER THAN HUMANS?

I do not believe that AI will soon surpass human intelligence. This is due to the
fact that it would be impossible to create technology that could simulate a human mind
when we have very little idea of what actually happens in our minds. The main issues
outlined in Koch’s paper are the reasons why AI will not surpass human intelligence in
the near future. While it is a distant possibility to take into consideration, creating
intelligent computers is not a current global focus and the existing biological hurdles
will take more than a decade or two to overcome. The transhumanists are the main
believers of this singularity, but their “prophet” Ray Kurzweil has apparent
discrepancies in his statements that further distance us from computers reaching their
“human variant” and humanity reaching its demise.