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by johnnyworker 895 days ago
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.

1 comments

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.

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.