[tsimionescu]

That's essentially like asking "how is it that human feet can walk up mountain slopes, but car wheels can't?"

That is, there is no relation between human brains and artificial neural networks, other than them serving similar purposes in particular environments.

[mpoteat]

I respectfully disagree - I believe this is a philosophical viewpoint that shouldn't be presented as a straightforward truth.

Unless you are a dualist, I would say that it's reasonable to view that it is in principle possible to produce an artificial network accurately emulating the function and behavior of a human brain.

If you are a dualist, then there is no further discussion to be had as we are very unlikely to ever be able to prove anything like the existence of a soul.

Apologies if you were speaking to some more subtle nuance that I was unable to pick up.

[tsimionescu]

TL; DR: I'm saying that there is no structural resemblance between the human brain and artificial neural networks specifically (even though there likely is a strucutral resemblance between the human mind/brain and a computer in the general sense). You can believe in AGI and not believe it will be achieved with ANNs.

> I would say that it's reasonable to view that it is in principle possible to produce an artificial network accurately emulating the function and behavior of a human brain.

I think that claim is far too strong. As a non-dualist, I do believe that it is possible to create an artificial "brain" that has the same cognition as a human brain. However, simply rejecting dualism does not tell you anything about what the artificial brain has to be.

You can further say that a non-dualist who accepts the Church-Turing thesis must accept that there must exist a Turing machine which has the same cognition as the human brain. Since the PCs we use are Turing machines, it follows that we should be able to program one to behave like a human brain, in theory at least (disregarding hardware requirements, of course).

Still, that does not mean that a brain Turing machine has to look anything like a neural network trained through gradient descent & back propagation. This was my point: artificial neural networks and the methods we use to train them have no resemblance to the human brain, and there is no reason to believe that they are the way to create an artificial general intelligence. So, there is no reason to be surprised that a neural network, especially one as small as any of the ones we have realized so far, doesn't exhibit complex properties of the human brain.

Artificial neural networks are just a statistical model that was once inspired by a very, very simplistic idea of what biological neural networks are. As we have discovered more about biological neural networks, we've abandoned any notion of comparing ANNs with biological neural networks in terms of actual structure.

This is all not to say that it's impossible for a complex enough ANN to actually be an AGI. It's just not going to be that surprising if it won't be, if an AGI program will look significantly different, and will be trained in completely different ways.