(1) But computers only do what you program them to do so they cant possibly be more intelligent than the programmer.

(2) And you cant program consciousness because it arises from quantum mechanics.

QED

I think that is a bit too strict. According to (1) a child could not possibly ever become more intelligent than its parents and its teachers at school. At least the second part of that is demonstrably wrong. A lot of children become adults that are more intelligent (and more knowledgeable) than their school teachers. One of the big differences between a computer and a child is that eventually a child will decide to do something else than what it's told. Also, it will eventually realize that not everything it is told is necessarily true.

Though what you are saying is somewhat correct, nevertheless. Although things like fuzzy matching exist, computers are generally very inflexible in doing any such thing, or in doing meaningful things on their own, without an a-priori well-defined set of rules for every possible case. But I think it is this ability to take a decision (not simply by following a programmed ruleset, but really taking a decision) which is what distinguishes an intelligent being.

About (2), I daresay that nobobdy knows where consciousness comes from (or what exactly "makes" intelligence). Nobody even knows even remotely how our brain works.

Sure, we know there are synapses and stuff, and we kind of know how they work and how they react to certain chemicals, from a bird's eye perspective. We also have a somewhat rough overview of what regions in the brain are connected to what others, and what they most probably do. Or, we think that we know that -- what we really know is that there is electrical activity in certain regions when a person does certain things, and that non-lethal defects in certain regions tend to have certain failures (but with a huge variance and a huge regeative ability in using different regions). Everything else is just conclusions and theories, but not something that we truly know.

None of what we know happens in the brain can't be simulated. The only thing that is still forbidding is the immense complexity of the brain.

However, it it was really that simple, someone would have created a very simple artificial brain with a concience a long time ago. It needed not be the fastest, most brilliant brain in the world, as long as it has a concience. Maybe an artificial brain that has half the intelligence of a very stupid dog. It would even be enough of a sensation if such a brain placed into a robot with some unknown wiring learned that being shown a red triangle means it's going to be beaten in a moment (which gives a "negative" stimulus) and if it learned to walk away without someone telling it how to do that -- solely by observation and learning that sending certain impulses will move a "thing" in its body and create a certain stimulus, which corresponds to where it is in the world. Alas, no such thing has happened.

Simulating a neural population that represents a neo-cortical column needs a super-computer...

Saying we have to simulate neurons to simulate intelligence is like saying that we need to simulate what every transistor is doing in order to make a SNES emulator. We can do things as differently as we want, as long as the resulting behavior does what we want it to. It does not need to be identical in every way.

The people who are making neuron simulations are doing it to better analyze and understand biological brains, not because they want to make an AI by simulating neurons. They're really just doing reverse engineering at this point.

Saying we have to simulate neurons to simulate intelligence is like saying that we need to simulate what every transistor is doing in order to make a SNES emulator.

How to do reverse ingeneering if we can't say nowadays if neurons are communicationg via frequence of spikes or by delaies between spikes ?

If Nature, through Evolution, is using neuron to manifest intelligence, it should be probably for a good reason. Even if we can't understand why yet.

The question is : What do you mean when you are talking about intelligence ?

Is it the ability to do something, or the ability to learn something ?

How to do reverse ingeneering if we can't say nowadays if neurons are communicationg via frequence of spikes or by delaies between spikes ?

The purpose of reverse engineering is to find out how something's implemented. You can discover novel tricks and interesting deficiencies in systems this way. Another goal of making biological models is to identify new ways of treating people with hard-to-understand disorders.

If Nature, through Evolution, is using neuron to manifest intelligence, it should be probably for a good reason. Even if we can't understand why yet.

The reason things exist in evolution is because they work. Not necessarily because they are the best. Evolution works if the offspring of an organism survive. Drastic mutations that completely change the architecture of any organ are unlikely to survive. Neurons haven't been replaced with semiconducting transistors because there hasn't been an evolutionary path to do so - not because either method is superior.

If you think about evolution as if it were a software design process, the method is "randomly change a few lines of code and hope it outperforms its peers" rather than "OK, this system is turning out to be inefficient - rewrite the whole thing from scratch".

Although if you consider computers to be an indirect form of human offspring (because we create them), then computer development could be considered an unusual form of evolution...

The question is : What do you mean when you are talking about intelligence ?
Is it the ability to do something, or the ability to learn something ?

To me, "intelligence" just means "data processing". To other people, it means something different. It's an extremely overloaded term, which makes its actual meaning in a conversation vague. Since it's vague, each person is free to interpret it based on their own understanding.

Discussions about intelligence which don't burrow down into the more specific and clearly defined topics are doomed to make hasty generalizations and use overly simplified words that don't have a concise meaning. That's why in my first post, I focused on a few specific topics which could be discussed more clearly, and broken down further if the conversation wants to focus on any of them.

If Nature, through Evolution, is using neuron to manifest intelligence, it should be probably for a good reason. Even if we can't understand why yet.

Exactly. It's the same with legs, and this is why a vehicle that travels on wheels will never be successful. Nature knows you need legs for that.

[/sarcasm]

Obvious reaons.

Nature already had to "invent" specialized cells that are contractile for multi-cell organisms, otherwise no blood circulation would be possible (this is the moment where creationists have to chime in and ask for who gave nature that ingenious "idea" -- no really, please don't).

Specialized muscle cells are only a minor modification of single-cell organisms that have a flagella. Building legs (or fins) from muscles and tendons is trivial.

Building wheels from cells is... super hard, especially when it comes to growing arteries and veins into the the ball bearings to nourish them. Rotating a wheel with muscles (which only have a notion of "contract in one way") is sheer impossible.

For an engineer, on the other hand, a wheel is the obvious thing to build, and motors that rotate a wheel any way you want are readily available. Making something that behaves like "muscle" is much, much harder and consumes a lot more power.

Same for cells that can depolarize upon request. Nature already needed to invent these to make the heart beat. Which, again, is a prerequisite to growing bigger than a few dozen cells.

It's only a minor modification of what some bacteria are already able to do, too. Given a cell that depolarizes itself upon stimulus and its neighbours is only a small step from a cell that grows dentrites and uses a slightly more advanced chemical (which isn't as likely to misfire) and a slightly more complicated thresholding.

For an engineer, such a thing is sheer impossible to build (at least in large quantities, and cheap, and in confined space) whereas millions of transistors are trivial to place on a silicon disc, and simulating what the thing that's sheer impossible to build does is a lot more feasible (once you have understood what it is that this thing does).

If you think you can do better than Nature can do through billions years of evolution, this is your problem

Edit : and about wheels ...

The only thing you can do with wheels is to go ahead on a plane surface.

Legs are polyvalent. Why do you think nowadays research in robotic is about motion using legs ?

After that, I don't like being the target of sarcasm, because I don't think I'm mean in my comments

"Brain is to a CPU as bird wing is to a jet engine"

"human intelligence can be reduced to: given an input find the most repeated patterns related to reward and accommodate the output to it" (the input has reward data too)

what do you think about that?