[herval]

Every new technology is always used as an analogy to describe how the brain functions. The brain is "a series of pipes", "a series of cogs", "an eletro-mechanical machine", "a computer", "a series of programs", "GANs", now "an LLM". I get a feeling it's as accurate a comparison with LLMs than with everything before.

[JoshCole]

While I’m not saying positively that LLM are the way a brain works, it is worth noticing that the meme argument structure you are using is very often absurd because Turing Machines can be made out of all the things people usually list. People trying to accuse of category shift are very strongly overestimating the strength of that argument in much the same way that people commenting that people who thinks money were cents, nickels, pesos, and dollars are not quite managing to articulate true dissent by pointing out the letters are different.

[herval]

oh yes, the brain is a Turing Machine! Forgot that one too

[JoshCole]

No you didn’t? You mentioned that argument many times? You can’t talk about pesos, then dollars, then yen, but pretend you forgot to talk about money.

[Kim_Bruning]

Well it's definitely true that the human brain is Turing complete.

(Trivial approach: It seems fairly unlikely that Alan Turing would not have been able to simulate Turing machine inside his head. :-P )

[Maursault]

> Well it's definitely true that the human brain is Turing complete.

That is definitely false. "In computability theory, a system of data-manipulation rules... is said to be Turing-complete... if it can be used to simulate any Turing machine." [0] A Turing machine has infinite memory; the human brain does not.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_completeness

[Kim_Bruning]

Technically correct, as expected from HN.

Of course, the technically correct definition would limit the usefulness of the term to just the field of mathematics.

Colloquially, people also say that systems that are obviously finite (due to having to exist in the real world) are also Turing complete. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_completeness#Non-mathem... (subsection of article you quoted)

[webmaven]

My intuition is that these analogies become increasingly accurate over time, but for relatively small values of "increasingly".

That is, a human brain (or mind) is more like an LLM than like clockwork, etc., but it still isn't all that much like an LLM.

[herval]

It’s not really though - your brain has a circadian rhythm, for instance, which is closer to a clock than to an LLM.

[kilgnad]

obviously he's talking about the part of the brain that matters. Nobody is comparing anything to say the part of the brain that controls your heart rate. You're just being pedantic here.

[herval]

you sound way too offended, go take a walk?

[tbrownaw]

Describing the brain as "a computer" can't really be wrong because computers are universal. But it's also not necessarily all that useful, because, well, computers are universal.

[detourdog]

Could be the inverse: We could make a brain that is a series of pipes, cogs, electro,...

We can only communicate technology through terms we collectively understand.

[kzrdude]

Every model is wrong but some are useful

[rzzzt]

A hard drive!

[FrustratedMonky]

a clock