- cross-posted to:
- morewrite@awful.systems
- cross-posted to:
- morewrite@awful.systems
guy recently linked this essay, its old, but i don’t think its significantly wrong (despite gpt evangelists) also read weizenbaum, libs, for the other side of the coin
because that’s a task for computer, my second example: giving you two words, it would be slower for computer than arriving at 300 th word, while for you it would be significantly faster than counting.
fundamentally a question is brain a turing machine? I rather think not, but it could be simulated as such with some untold complexity.
Firstly, I want to say it’s cool you’re positively engaging and stimulating a lot of conversation around this.
As far turing machines go - It’s only a concept that’s meant to show a fundamental “level” of computing (“turing completeness”), what a computing device can or cannot achieve. As you agree a turing machine could ‘simulate’ a brain (and we know brains can simulate a turing machine - we invented them!), then conceptually, yes, the brain is computationally equivalent, it is ‘turing complete’, albeit with some randomness thrown in.
I remain extremely mad at the Quantum jerks for demonstrating that the universe is almost certainly not deterministic. I refuse to be cool about it.
We can simulate a water molecule, does it make a turing machine then? Is single protein? A whole cell? 1000 cells in some invertebrate?
Simulation doesn’t work backwards, it’s not an implied equivalency of turing completeness for both directions. If brain is a turing machine we can map one to one it’s whole function to any existing turing machine, not simulate it with some degree of accuracy.
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Have you read Göedel, Escher, Bach? It’s a cool book, I recommend it!
If your thesis is that human brains do not work perfectly the same way, and not that the analogy with computers in general is wrong, then sure, but nobody disagrees with that thesis, then. I don’t think that any adult alive has proposed that a human brain is just a conventional binary computer.
However, this argument fails when it comes to the thesis of analogy with computers in general. Not sure how it is even supposed to be addressing it.
Well, firstly, a Turing machine is an idea, and not an actual device or a type of device.
Secondly, if your thesis is that Turing machine does not model how brains work, then what’s your argument here?
of course I can’t prove that brain is not a turing machine, I would be world famous if I could. Computers are turing machines yes? They cannot do non-Turing machines operations (decisions or whatever that’s called)
What comparing computer with brain gives to science, I’m asking again for third time in this thread. What insight it provides, aside from mechanizing us to the world? That short term memory exists? a stone age child could tell you that. That information goes from the eyes as bits like a camera? That’s already significantly wrong. That you recall like a photograph read out from your computer? Also very likely wrong
Okay, so, what is your basis for thinking that, for example, if a brain was given some set of rules such as ‘if you are given the symbol “A”, think of number 1 and go to the next symbol’ and ‘if you are given the symbol “B” and are thinking of number 1, think of number 2 and go back by two symbols’ and some sequence of symbols, that that brain wouldn’t be capable of working with those rules?
As in, they are modelled by Turing machines sufficiently well in some sense? Sure.
What? What are ‘non-Turing machines operations’? The term ‘Turing machine’ refers to generalisations of finite automata. In this context, what they are doing is receiving input and reacting to it depending on their current state. I can provide some examples of finite automata implementations in Python code, if you want me to.
The word ‘decision’ doesn’t carry any meaning in this context.
I don’t recall you asking this question before, and I do not have an answer. I also don’t see the question as relevant to the exchange so far.
A bit is a unit of information. If we treat the signal that the eyes send to the brain as carrying any sort of information, you can’t argue that the brain doesn’t (EDIT: I initially forgot to include the word 'doesn’t) receive the information in bits. If you claim otherwise, you don’t understand what information is and/or what bits are.
Nobody is claiming, however, that your brain pulls up an analogue of a
.bmpwhen you recall an image. You likely remember some details of an image, and ‘subconsciously’ reconstruct the ‘gaps’. Computers can handle such tasks just fine, as well.Information goes in to the optic nerve as electrical signals, which is why we can glue wires to the optic nerve and use a camera to send visual information to the brain. I think wek?e been able to do that for twenty years. We just need a computer to change the bits from the camera in to the correct electric impulses.
I didn’t use words optic nerve by chance, you can find out it’s retina excitation, not the nerve itself. Because the eye already does pre processing. But that reminded me that here actually informational understanding helped cause they couldn’t understand how could it send that much data (turn out it doesn’t). So one win for informational theory by showing something couldn’t be 🥰