[dkersten]

I agree. I think its very widely known that our ANN’s are only very rough approximations of how the brain actually works, I think the people who say its a computer implementation of the brain are either laypeople who don’t know much about machine learning or the brain, are people marketing the hype for personal gain or people without neuroscience knowledge who have bought into the hype.

I also recently heard an argument for why our ANN models won’t spontaneously become sentient: human brains don’t learn from just observation, but also interaction. A young child doesn’t learn abouthow blocks are stacked by looking at images of stacked boxes, they learn through experimentation, by stacking boxes and seeinghow their actions affect the world around them. For an AI, that means we either need to also work on robotics so the AI can interact with its environment, not just sense it, or we need to simulate an interactive virtual environment. Some people are working on this and making great strides, but your average toy ANN won’t exhibit human intelligence in isolation, in my opinion.

Combine those two things and we’re still quite a ways away from human-like intelligence or implementing a human (or animal)-like brain.

[martin-adams]

Interestingly, there are some studies that imply that intense thinking about doing an activity (such as a gym workout[1] or hitting a baseball) can improve your physical skills than if you didn't think about it. So this is supporting the notation that you can rewire your brain by thinking, as well as tactile input.

[1] http://nautil.us/blog/just-imagining-a-workout-can-make-you-...

[dkersten]

That’s not really what I’m referring to (or at least, only a little). Once you have a mental model of something, you can for sure think on it or build on it without interaction, but to initially set up our mental models (as children or whatever), I believe it takes interaction. Once we have a base, we can think abstractly about it and learn, but building that base..

Or, put another way, its my belief that you can “_improve_ your physical skills” by thinking, but to buildthe skill in the first place, interaction is necessary.

But even if its not true and interaction isn’t strictly necessary, I think (wrongly oerhaps) that few people would disagree that usually learning by doing is far superior that only learning by thinking/reading/listening/watching. So even if not neccesary, its at least more efficient (doing both together is probably most efficient).