[airgapstopgap]

Comments like this are incredibly grating. You condescend to the interlocutor for making a mistake which only exists in your own mistaken world model. Your confidence that neurons and ANN weights and «pulleys and gears» are all equivalent because there is, in theory, an intention to instantiate some computation, and to think otherwise is tantamount to belief in magic and broken causality, is just confused and born out of perusing popular-scientific materials instead of relying on scientific literature or hands-on experience.

> The fire because of input.

No they do not fire because of input, they modulate their firing probability based on input, and there are different modalities of input with different effects. Neurons are self-contained biological units (descended, let me remind you, from standalone unicellular organisms, just like the rest of our cells), which actually have an independently developing internal state and even metabolic needs; they are not merely a system of logic gates even if you can approximate their role with a system of equations or an ANN. This is very different, mechanistically and teleologically. Hell, even spiking ANNs would be substantially different from currently dominant models.

> So what, magic ? a soul ? If the brain is computing then the substrate is entirely irrelevant

Stop dumbing down complex arguments to some low-status culture war opinion you find it easy to dunk on.

[famouswaffles]

>Your confidence that neurons and ANN weights and «pulleys and gears» are all equivalent because there is, in theory, an intention to instantiate some computation, and to think otherwise is tantamount to belief in magic and broken causality, is just confused and born out of perusing popular-scientific materials instead of relying on scientific literature or hands-on experience.

Computation is substrate independent. I'm not saying neurons and ANN weights and «pulleys and gears» are the same. I'm saying it does not matter because what you perform computation with does not change the results of the computation. If the brain computes, then it doesn't matter what is doing the computation.

>No they do not fire because of input, they modulate their firing probability based on input, and there are different modalities of input with different effects. Neurons are self-contained biological units (descended, let me remind you, from standalone unicellular organisms, just like the rest of our cells), which actually have an independently developing internal state and even metabolic needs; they are not merely a system of logic gates even if you can approximate their role with a system of equations or an ANN. This is very different, mechanistically and teleologically. Hell, even spiking ANNs would be substantially different from currently dominant models.

Yes, a neuron is firing because of input. To suggest otherwise is to suggest something beyond cause and effect directing the workings of the brain. If that is genuinely not the case then feel free to explain why, rather than an ad hominin attack on someone you don't even know.

> So what, magic ? a soul ? If the brain is computing then the substrate is entirely irrelevant

>Stop dumbing down complex arguments to some low-status culture war opinion you find it easy to dunk on.

I personally don't care if that's what anyone believes. The intention is not to attack anyone.

If you believe in a soul or the non religious equivalent, that's fine. We just have different axioms.

If you don't believe in a soul(or the equivalent) but somehow think substrate matters then you need to explain why because it makes no sense.

[kdmccormick]

I am not well versed in any of this, but from reading the counterarguments, I think two good points are being made:

* Analogies aside, neurons are quite different than NN nodes, because each neuron has an incredibly complex internal cellular state, whereas an NN node just has an integer for state.

* A brain is not a "function" in the way that a trained LLM model is. Human life is not a series of input prompts and output prompts. Rather, we experience a fluid stream of stimuli, which our brain multiplexes and reacts to in a variety of ways (speaking, moving, storing memories, moving our pupils, releasing hormones, etc). That is NOT TO SAY a brain violates causality; it's saying that the brain is mechanically doing so much more than an LLM, even if the LLM is better at raw computation.

None of this IMO precludes AGI from happening in the medium term future, but I do think we should be careful when making comparisons between AGI and the human brains.

Rather than comparing "apples to gorillas", I'd say it's like comparing a calculator to a tree. Yes, the calculator is SIGNIFICANTLY better at multiplication, but that doesn't make it "smarter" than a tree, whatever that means.

[airgapstopgap]

I do not even think any of this has much of impact on AGI timelines. Human brain cells are not a superior substrate for computing "intelligence". They just are what they are; individual cells can somewhat meaningfully "want" stuff and be quasi-agents unto themselves, they do much more than integrate and fire. Weights in an ANN are purely terms in an equation without any inner process or content.

[mistermann]

> Computation is substrate independent. I'm not saying neurons and ANN weights and «pulleys and gears» are the same. I'm saying it does not matter because what you perform computation with does not change the results of the computation. If the brain computes, then it doesn't matter what is doing the computation.

It's a tautology. If the substrate did change the computation, then it wouldn't be the computation.

Claims where it isn't possible for you to be incorrect may be less impressive than they seem.

[famouswaffles]

It's not a tautology. That you can go out tomorrow and buy a deluge of computers with different hardware and run the same software without change is exactly a demonstration of substrate independence.

https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27126

[mistermann]

And if one of those computers failed, it wouldn't classify as a (proper) computer.

You can move your pointer anywhere you'd like, it is ultimately tautological. Infinite regress is a bitch lol

Say, have you taken into consideration the role consciousness and culture are playing here? Like this "reality" you are describing, do you know what the actual, biological/scientific source of it is? :) But now I'm kind of cheating, aren't I...I think we're not supposed to say that part out loud! ;)

[FeepingCreature]

There are views where there is an implicit substrate that exists in another layer of reality, ie. dualism. That layer is generally not counted among the substrate. So a computation can be substrate dependent by introducing a non-material cause. (Disclaimer: I don't personally know anyone who believes anything like this, so this may be a bad paraphrasing.)

[mistermann]

If the computation doesn't compute completely and deterministically on all substrates, then it isn't substrate independent though is it?

Human cognition would be a good example of substrate dependent computation I'd think....it even varies per instance of substrate.

[red75prime]

> Stop dumbing down complex arguments

It's not dumbing down. It's extracting the crux of the matter that the complexity of arguments is trying to hide, perhaps unintentionally. Either the brain implements a function that can be approximated by a neural network thanks to universal approximation theorem, or the function cannot be approximated (you need arguments for why it is the case), or magic.

[morsecodist]

This is technically true but kind of misses the point in my opinion. A neural network can approximate any function in theory but that doesn't mean it has to do so in a reasonable amount of time and with a reasonable amount of resources. For example, take the function that gives you the prime factors of an integer. It is theoretically possible for a neural network to approximate this for an arbitrarily large fixed window but is provably infeasible to compute on current hardware. In theory, a quantum computer could compute this much faster.

This is not to say that the human brain leverages quantum effects. It's just a well known example where the hardware and a specific algorithm can be shown to matter.

I also think it's strange to describe the brain as implementing a function. Functions don't exist. We made them up to help us think about building useful circuits (among other things). In this scenario, we would be implementing functions to help us simulate what is going on in brains.

[mistermann]

> is just confused and born out of perusing popular-scientific materials instead of relying on scientific literature or hands-on experience.

I suspect there's some fundamental metaphysical framework protection in play here, the sort of language being used is pretty common, I believe it to be a learned cultural behavior (from consuming similar arguments).