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by chx 730 days ago
> 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.