[nathan_compton]

Our brains are subject to very different design constraints. Wheels are very efficient, but nature doesn't use them because the environment and the exigencies of biological reproduction and repair indicate other strategies.

It really isn't a simple thing.

[giladvdn]

Interesting analogy, and I see your point. What I'm trying to say is, we know that there's way to perform certain computations that's orders of magnitude more efficient than we've ever achieved. We have a working example of it. And yet, we choose to develop a wholly different technology, from scratch, that's unproven, instead of trying to emulate or understand what already have.

[pjerem]

We are far from having a model of how the brain really works.

Furthermore, i know it's a really common analogy but the brain is not really comparable to a computer. The brain is not programmable, it only have a single function which is "given x input, what output is more likely to keep the organism alive and well". It's a complex task, for sure.

But that's not a computer.

A computer is a machine on which you can run arbitrary programs. I can't plug some wires in your brain and program it to do what I want. It's not that the sockets for my wires are missing, it's just that the physical structure doesn't allow generic computing. If you really wanted to make an analogy, you could say that the brain is an electric circuit. You cannot program an electric circuit. It does what it's wired to do. You can't say that your electrical circuit is faster than a computer. It makes no sense.

So it's a false assumption to say that brains are faster than computers because it's just something that you cannot compare.

[krisoft]

> The brain is not programmable

But that is not true, is it? You take a person and train him/her the right way and you will get a fighter pilot, or an equestrian or a poet. The difference between your fingers and the fingers of the finest goldsmith or cellist is thousands of hours of practice. And that didn't change their fingers, it reprogrammed their brain.

So yeah, you can't upload a new program to it with a USB port, but it definitely can be programmed.

[pjerem]

No, training is not programming.

Training is feeding the "complex electrical circuit" some input data, repeating it as nauseam in hope that somehow, the machine manages to store and interpret enough of this knowledge to do something with it.

Programming is just throwing data somewhere into some memory and instructing the processor to interpret this data as instructions to follow.

There is no such thing as a processor in the brain that somehow would read some memory somewhere and execute a set of actions.

It’s just « eyes see cake. I know that grabbing it and eating it releases dopamine so I’ll send the required signals to get this into mouth » it’s not ./eat_cake -f --ignore-consequences

I doubt that computers would be as useful as they are if some coach had to train brain-based computers what is Excel and how it should work.

[nathan_compton]

This feels a little bit like a rhetorical trick. You're right that there is _something_ similar about training a person and programming a computer, but I'd hardly call the two things directly analogous. It strains the definition of the word train to say you trained a computer with a python script and it strains the definition of the word programmed to say you programmed a person to play the cello.

Tech people see everything as essentially similar to tech, but its come to be my understanding that biological systems are a fundamentally different kind of thing than technological ones.