Great post. Sorry I missed it earlier..
My personal belief is that all biological systems incorporate a degree of randomness or chaos into their normal operation.
This by it's very nature is not desired and is eliminated (as far as possible) in modern electronic devices where reliability is required.
A lot of this is still speculation though because we can only observe handfuls of functional neurones interacting in laboratory conditions. The technology needed to examine a living, functioning brain on a cellular or deeper level is still just a dream. The complexity is beyond anything we can envisage and it may well be (if some modern neuroscience papers are to be believed) that quantum effects might well be at play. In which case we would need to look at some things on the sub atomic level to truly understand what is going on.
Either way, one this is clear: We are really ignorant. :)
That's why I like reading people like Nick Bostrom and Ray Kurzweil. They at least help me hope something amazing is about to happen in the next few decades.
Yes we are only really starting to take the first steps in understanding the brain.
Not familiar with Bostrom but am a big fan of Ray Kurzweil. I don't necessarily accept his views on how quickly the singularity will occur but who knows really?
I recently finished Nick Bostrom's book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. I highly recommend it. If you don't buy Kurzeil's predictions, check out Bostrom's survey of all the experts in the field, which I mentioned here. Exponential growth is something we're really bad at because we didn't encounter it in nature in order to evolve hardware to handle it. We might all be surprised with how quickly things happen. Kurzweil's prediction accuracy over multiple decades up to this point is, IMO, astounding.
Yes I think we generally don't predict these things things very well but Kurzweil has a good record. I will check out Bostrom's book. Thanks for the recommendation:)