[chx]

I feel this thought of AGI even possible stems from the deep , very deep , pervasive imagination of the human brain as a computer. But it's not. In other words, no matter how complex a program you write, it's still a Turing machine and humans are profoundly not it.

https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-informati...

> The information processing (IP) metaphor of human intelligence now dominates human thinking, both on the street and in the sciences. There is virtually no form of discourse about intelligent human behaviour that proceeds without employing this metaphor, just as no form of discourse about intelligent human behaviour could proceed in certain eras and cultures without reference to a spirit or deity. The validity of the IP metaphor in today’s world is generally assumed without question.

> But the IP metaphor is, after all, just another metaphor – a story we tell to make sense of something we don’t actually understand. And like all the metaphors that preceded it, it will certainly be cast aside at some point – either replaced by another metaphor or, in the end, replaced by actual knowledge.

> If you and I attend the same concert, the changes that occur in my brain when I listen to Beethoven’s 5th will almost certainly be completely different from the changes that occur in your brain. Those changes, whatever they are, are built on the unique neural structure that already exists, each structure having developed over a lifetime of unique experiences.

> no two people will repeat a story they have heard the same way and why, over time, their recitations of the story will diverge more and more. No ‘copy’ of the story is ever made; rather, each individual, upon hearing the story, changes to some extent

[andoando]

Its a bit ironic because Turing seems to have came up with the idea of the Turing machine precisely by thinking about how he computes numbers.

Now thats no proof, but I dont see any reason to think human intelligence isnt "computable".

[benlivengood]

I'm all ears if someone has a counterexample to the Church-Turing thesis. Humans definitely don't hypercompute so it seems reasonable that the physical processes in our brains are subject to computability arguments.

That said, we still can't simulate nematode brains accurately enough to reproduce their behavior so there is a lot of research to go before we get to that "actual knowledge".

[chx]

Why would we need one?

The Church Turing thesis is about computation. While the human brain is capable of computing, it is fundamentally not a computing device -- that's what the article I linked is about. You can't throw in all the paintings before 1872 into some algorithm that results in Impression, soleil levant. Or repeat the same but with 1937 and Guernica. The genes of the respective artists, the expression of those genes created their brain and then the sum of all their experiences changed it over their entire lifetime leading to these masterpieces.

[eru]

The human brain runs on physics. And as far as we know, physics is computable.

(Even more: If you have a quantum computer, all known physics is efficiently computable.)

I'm not quite sure what your sentence about some obscure pieces of visual media is supposed to say?

If you give the same prompt to ChatGPT twice, you typically don't get the same answer either. That doesn't mean ChatGPT ain't computable.

[sebzim4500]

>(Even more: If you have a quantum computer, all known physics is efficiently computable.)

This isn't known to be true. Simplifications of the standard model are known to be efficiently computable on a quantum computer, but the full model isn't.

Granted, I doubt this matters for simulating systems like the brain.

[eru]

> no two people will repeat a story they have heard the same way and why, over time, their recitations of the story will diverge more and more. No ‘copy’ of the story is ever made; rather, each individual, upon hearing the story, changes to some extent

You could say the same about an analogue tape recording. Doesn't mean that we can't simulate tape recorders with digital computers.

[chx]

Yeah, yeah, did you read the article or are just grasping at straws from the quotes I made?

[Eisenstein]

Honest question: if you expect people do read the link why make most of your comment quotes from it? The reason to do that is to give people enough context to be able to respond to you without having to read an entire essay first. If you want people to only be able to argue after reading the whole of the text, then unfortunately a forum with revolving front page posts based on temporary popularity is a bad place for long-form read-response discussions and you may want to adjust accordingly.

[eru]

See https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=2756 or https://www.brainpreservation.org/scott-aaronson-on-the-rele... and especially https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/philos.pdf for a response to similar theories like in the article by someone who has mare patience than me.

The article you linked, at best, argues against a straw man.

See eg https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40687064 for one possible reply that brings the whole thing down.

[chx]

> But despite being computational machines,

This is not true. His entire foundation is, as I mentioned, as the linked article explains, a metaphor but not the actual truth about how human brains work. This is the crux of the matter, this is why AGI is very obviously not possible on the track it is currently on. Problem is, as the article I linked notes:

> Just over a year ago, on a visit to one of the world’s most prestigious research institutes, I challenged researchers there to account for intelligent human behaviour without reference to any aspect of the IP metaphor. They couldn’t do it, and when I politely raised the issue in subsequent email communications, they still had nothing to offer months later. They saw the problem. They didn’t dismiss the challenge as trivial. But they couldn’t offer an alternative. In other words, the IP metaphor is ‘sticky’. It encumbers our thinking with language and ideas that are so powerful we have trouble thinking around them.

Almost all AI researchers are in this rut: "firmly rooted in the idea that humans are, like computers, information processors" -- but this is just not true, it's a metaphor to explain how the brain works.

> A few cognitive scientists – notably Anthony Chemero of the University of Cincinnati, the author of Radical Embodied Cognitive Science (2009) – now completely reject the view that the human brain works like a computer. The mainstream view is that we, like computers, make sense of the world by performing computations on mental representations of it, but Chemero and others describe another way of understanding intelligent behaviour – as a direct interaction between organisms and their world.

[Hugsun]

You shouldn't have included those quotes if you didn't want people responding to them.

[Hugsun]

> I feel this thought of AGI even possible stems from the deep , very deep , pervasive imagination of the human brain as a computer. But it's not. In other words, no matter how complex a program you write, it's still a Turing machine and humans are profoundly not it.

The (probably correct) assumed fact that the brain isn't a computer, doesn't preclude the possibility of a program to have AGI. A powerful enough computer could simulate a brain and use the simulation to perform tasks requiring general intelligence.

This analogy falls even more apart when you consider LLMs. They also are not Turing machines. They obviously only reside within computers, and are capable of _some_ human-like intelligence. They also are not well described using the IP metaphor.

I do have some contention (after reading most of the article) about this IP metaphor. We do know, scientifically, that brains process information. We know that neurons transmit signals and there are mechanisms that respond non-linearly to stimuli from other neurons. Therefore, brains do process information in a broad sense. It's true that brains have a very different structures to Von-Neuman machines and likely don't store, and process information statically like they do.

[_ugfj]

> This analogy falls even more apart when you consider LLMs. They also are not Turing machines.

Of course they are, everything that runs on a present day computer is a Turing machine.

> They obviously only reside within computers, and are capable of _some_ human-like intelligence.

They so obviously are not. As Raskin put it, LLMs are essentially a zero day on the human operating system. You are bamboozled because it is trained to produce plausible sentences. Read Thinking Fast And Slow why this fools you.

[Hugsun]

> Of course they are, everything that runs on a present day computer is a Turing machine.

A turing machine is by definition turing complete. You can run non-turing complete systems within turing machines. Thus your statement contains a contradiction.

> They so obviously are not.

I'm well aware of their limitations. But I'm also not blind to their intelligence. Producing unique coherent and factually accurate text is human-like intelligence. Powerful models practically only fail on factuality. Humans also do that, but for different reasons.

It is human-like intelligence because there are other entities with varying degrees of intelligence, but none of them have been able to reason about text and make logical inferences about it, except LLMs.

I know they aren't very reliable at it but they can do it in many out of distribution cases. It's fairly easy to verify.

I read that book some years ago but can't think of what you're referring to. Which chapter/idea is relevant?

[photonthug]

Sorry but to put it bluntly, this point of view is essentially mystical, anti-intellectual, anti-science, anti-materialist. If you really want to take that point of view, there's maybe a few consistent/coherent ways to do it, but in that case you probably still want to read philosophy. Not bad essays by psychologists that are fading into irrelevance.

This guy in particular made his name with wild speculation about How Creativity Works during the 80s when it was more of a frontier. Now he's lived long enough to see a world where people that have never heard of him or his theories made computers into at least somewhat competent artists/poets without even consulting him. He's retreating towards mysticism because he's mad that his "formal and learned" theses about stuff like creativity have so little apparent relevance to the real world.