[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.