| Comparing Human Brain with a CPU is misconception. no it is not.
Yeah architecturally they are very different and CPU are arguably more programmable / general and less efficient. What does matter is whether CPUs are theoretically able to achieve all the things that a brain can do (and even more)
And indeed CPUs as turing complete, programmable machine are a strict superset of what brains can do.
The gap between what task and at which accuracy a brain achieve vs a CPU is decreasing each year as you can contemplate on the paperswithcode.com leaderboards.
The difficulty is in software, hardware through clusterisation has arguably order of magnitude more compute than a brain has. There are four big missing pieces to match human brain performance: 1) Matching its pattern recognition abilities
I believe that current statistical learning techniques of SOTA neural networks actually outperform humans on learning continuous data.
But humans outperforms by far current software at zero/few shot learning on sparse/discrete data (where gradient descent is not applicable)
I believe humans have this performance edge because of 2), 3) and 4): 2) humans can encode and decode meaning with great accuracy in a high level, descriptive complete declarative language called natural languages.
They are in many ways far superior to current GQL/datalog/SQL DB languages at encoding and retrieving meaning (that is an isomorphic description of a denoted thing).
The field of semantic parsing (+ question answering from the parsed knowledge) is the key to general language understanding and crucially lack funding.
Once machines will be able to understand language and retrieve all the knowledge of say Wikipedia, they will be able to transcend human performance on many intelligence/erudition tasks. 3) humans seems to be able to do meaningful runtime code generation. That is you can develop on demand new solutions to new problems: such as https://www.kaggle.com/c/abstraction-and-reasoning-challenge
The field of specification and implementation generation is too underfunded. 4) is the observation that
3) is probably a necessary key for unlocking 2) and that both 2) and 3) are needed to achieve this communication/feedback loop between high level semantic reasoning and statistical operations. As we can see, humanity overfocus funding on 1) despite being the most solved of all others necessary foundation's to achieve AGI and hence, as a side effect, empirically prove that CPUs superset brains |
This is a fundamental assertion that I do not believe you can make.
The brain cannot simulate a turing machine. It does not have infinite memory, which is a requirement for a turing machine. It can, however, stimulate a linearly bounded automata.
It is also not implicitly obvious that a turing machine can simulate a brain. The primary difficulty that I do not yet see a way around is the fact that a turing machine, which has as its control unit a finite State machine, is bound by the finiteness of those states (finiteness of representation, not of number). The brain has no such constraint. It is analog, and therefore infinite in State representation.
In my opinion, this is more akin to the P versus NP problem, and that we know what needs to be equivalent in order to say that P equals NP, but no one has proved it or disproved it yet. That's how I feel about the statement about Turing machines and the brain. I do not believe we can be dogmatic on that aspect yet either way. We may have opinions, just as we may have opinions about P vs NP, but we must also be careful about stating what is provable and what is opinion, and that is all I'm trying to do.
Of course, I am willing and very interested to gain more insight in this area, so discussion is welcome!