[johnnyworker]

snippet from the WP article on the book:

> Weizenbaum makes the crucial distinction between deciding and choosing. Deciding is a computational activity, something that can ultimately be programmed. It is the capacity to choose that ultimately makes one a human being. Choice, however, is the product of judgment, not calculation. Comprehensive human judgment is able to include non-mathematical factors such as emotions. Judgment can compare apples and oranges, and can do so without quantifying each fruit type and then reductively quantifying each to factors necessary for mathematical comparison.

Okay, so what is judgement? I haven't read that particular book and I don't quite remember his argument from interviews and lectures I saw, so this might be wrong, but I'd say it's for example saying "this is fair" when you measure the slices of pie you cut a cake into. That is, calculating that they're of equal size is pure computation; but there is no way to compute that when sharing cake with your friends, the slices should be equal.

Just like you can compute how much clean drinking water an average or specific person needs a day, with at least some accuracy, but when it comes to the question "should there be life in the universe" or "should people die of thirst", no computation could answer it. You could choose to write a program that decides it based on a random seed or a super complex algorithm taking a billion factors into account, but and then that program would decide the question, but it's essentially still something you did / chose.

[vidarh]

It's basically a religious view. For a "judgement" to be non-computable, it'd need to come from some factor in the human brain which violates know physics and can't be reproduced outside a human brain.

It's little more than arguing for a "soul" with no evidence for any effect that can't be explained by cause and effect.

[johnnyworker]

> For a "judgement" to be non-computable, it'd need to come from some factor in the human brain which violates know physics and can't be reproduced outside a human brain.

You say this as if we are even close to understanding much less reproducing the human brain completely, which probably would have to include the web of relations with all sorts of other living things that also go into the judgements we make, and the emotions we have while making them. Until you actually do draw the rest of the owl, it's not exactly "religious" to say there's no owl.

[vidarh]

No, it's an argument from logic that applies to any claim that any given entity can do things that are not computable.

> Until you actually do draw the rest of the owl, it's not exactly "religious" to say there's no owl.

The "real owl" here is to assume the human brain does something non-computable, in violation of all known physics and logic.

[johnnyworker]

You cannot compute what you don't understand, and even if you did by accident, you wouldn't know you computed it, as long as you don't understand what you're trying to do. That seems obvious to me.

And "computable" and "computable for us" are very different things. It's not about the machines or algorithms we might make one day, provided that we fully understand everything that goes into our our thoughts and emotions with nothing left unaccounted for, and everything turning out to be countable; it's about the ones we are actually making, back then and today, and then in some cases outsource our decisions to.

[vidarh]

You're misunderstanding the terms. For something to be computable is very different from whether or not we know or are presently able to compute it.

For something to be computable, it only needs to be possible to show that it is logically possible, by e.g. decomposing the problem into elements we know are computable or showing an example.

The existence of the human brain absent any evidence of any supernatural element is strong evidence that human reasoning is computable, and it's a reasonable, testable, falsifiable hypothesis to make: If you want to counter it "all" you need to do is to show evidence of any state transition in even a single brain that does not follow known laws of physics. Just one.

Alternatively, even just coherently describing a decision-making process that it is possible to construct a proof wouldn't be computable using known logic.

Either would get you a Nobel Prize, in either physics or maths. Absent that, even just a testable hypothesis that if proven would increase the likelihood of finding either of the above would be a huge step.

In the absence of all of that, it's pure faith to presume human reasoning isn't computable.

[johnnyworker]

You are talking about "comprehensive calculation indistinguishable from human judgment with the ability to include factors such as emotions". Even if that might be possible once we can fully compute all of physics (that in itself I wouldn't assume), that's just not what we're actually dealing with.