[kvdveer]

I feel the author is comparing an abstract representation of the brain to a mechanical representation of a computer. This is not a fair or useful comparison.

If a computer does not understand words, neither does your brain. While electromagnetic charge in the brain does not at all correspond with electromagnetic charge in a GPU, they do share an abstraction level, unlike words vs bits.

[shkkmo]

Becareful with mixing up 'can' and 'does'.

Computers right now do not understand language, but that does not mean that they cannot. We don't know what it takes to bridge the gap from stochastic parrot to understanding in computers, however from the mistakes LLMs make right now, it appears we have not found it yet.

It is possible that silicon based computer architecture cannot support the processing and information storage density/latency to support understanding. It's hard to guage the likelihood this is true given how little we know about how understanding works in the brain.

[mati365]

The brain translates words into a matrix of cortical column neurons activations. So there are similarities to our naive implementation of such "thinking".

[Synaesthesia]

No, only a brain can "think" and be original. A computer is limited to what we input to it. An "AI" simply recapitulates what it was trained on.

[ben_w]

A brain is an electrochemical network made of cells; artificial neural networks are a toy model of these.

Each neurone is itself a complex combination of chemicals cycles; these can be, and have been, simulated.

The most complex chemicals in biology are proteins; these can be directly simulated with great difficulty, and we've now got AI that have learned to predict them much faster than the direct simulations on a classical computer ever could.

Those direct simulations are based on quantum mechanics, or at least computationally tractable approximations of it; QM is lots of linear algebra and either a random number generator or superdeterminism, either of which is still a thing a computer can do (even if the former requires a connection to a quantum-random source).

The open question is not "can computers think?", but rather "how detailed does the simulation have to be in order for it to think?"

[thfuran]

I think the real question is "How can we make a computer think without trying to fully simulate a brain?"

[gizmo]

And what gives brains this unique power? Do brains of lesser animals also have this unique “thinking” property? Is this “thinking” a result of how the brain is architected out of atoms and if so why can’t other machines emulate it?

Our brains are the product of the same dumb evolutionary process that made every other plant and animal and fungus and virus. We evolved from animals capable of only the most basic form of pattern recognition. Humans in the absence of education are not capable of even the most basic reasoning. It took us untold thousands of years to figure out that “try things and measure if it works” is a good way to learn about the world. An intelligent species would be able to figure things out by itself our ancestors, who have the same brain architecture we do, were not able to figure anything out for generation after generation. So much for our ability to do original independent thinking.

[jeffhuys]

You’re holding on to a lost battle. We are biological computers. Maybe there’s something deeper behind it, like what some call a soul, but that’s hard to impossible to prove.

[scotty79]

Do a little exercise for me. Try to be as creative as you can be and imagine how a space alien might look.

It's a combination of what you have already seen, read about or heard of, isn't it?

[CuriouslyC]

There are a finite number of physical forms, and those forms are stable for different types of environments.

That being said, you are assuming that something alien is from space, and that they would be something that could even be visually experienced.

[Synaesthesia]

I’m not saying we don’t have limitations, we clearly do. There are limits to our intellectual capacity and creativity.

ChatGPT can exceed humans in its knowledge store. It is excellent at doing research. But it’s not thinking it is merely selecting the most likely nest words based on some algorithm.

[scotty79]

I wouldn't even give as much appreciation to chatgpt as you do. But I don't see it doing anything different than human brains do. It's just still not very good at it.

If it were up to me I'd try to give it another representation than just words. I think those models should be trained to represent text as relationship graphs of objects. There's not much natural data lole that, but it should be fairly rasy to create vast amounts of synthetic data, text generated from relationship graphs. Model should be able to make the connection to natural language.

Once models are taught this representation they might learn how the graphs transform during reasoning just by training on natural language reasoning.

[abecedarius]

You might find Drexler's "Quasilinguistic Neural Representations" stimulating.

[Jensson]

People come up with stuff like this: https://i.redd.it/oenn6vi61ag21.png

Or this: https://preview.redd.it/finally-made-my-scientist-species-to...

Humans are capable of thinking and fleshing out novel concepts, current AI are not. Sure your first thing will greatly resemble current things, but as you iterate and get further and further away from existing things what you do stops being an imitation and starts being its onw thing. Current AI can't do that.

Then when you got an initial concept, you can start adding more similar things and now you have built a whole new world or ecosystem. That is where all the wondrous things we have in our current images and stories comes from. An AI that is to replace us must be able to achieve similar things.

[scotty79]

Thanks for providing examples of combinations of things already seen.

[Jensson]

I was dumb to even try, you would just say basically "that is a combination of red green and blue dots in a new pattern, not really novel!" regardless what it was.

The wealth of things you see around you doesn't exist in nature. Stick figures doesn't exist in nature, things in nature doesn't have black outlines yet we draw that everywhere in cartoons etc. Human have proven we have imagined many entirely novel things that doesn't exist in nature. And the creatures I posted have many aspects to them that are entirely unnatural, you clearly know that there are no animals like that even without knowing about all animals, so clearly they are something novel and not just more of the same.

Anyway, whenever you put yourself in a position where you can say "nuh uh, to me that isn't like that!" to everything, you are just tricking yourself when you do so.

[scotty79]

What is the reason that you believe computer wouldn't be able to make such Spore alien and it is somehow display of unique Human creativity? There are games with procedurally generated animals glued together from parts exactly like that.

Humans imagination can only split, deform and glue. Computer are perfectly capable of doing that.

[bamboozled]

I see it quite differently, we don't have to be so creative, we need to get better at appreciating what already exists. Think about how far out most sea creatures really are, a bluebottle, a starfish for example...

Personally I think there is a bit of evidence in your comment that we don't really understand our minds or cognition very well.

[CuriouslyC]

We unquestionably as a species do not understand our minds, and that will always be an unpopular opinion because people want certainty and control.

[bamboozled]

I see a lot of "fashionable" thinking in these comments personally.

[throwAGIway]

I have heard this exact sentence so many times already. Are you sure? I'd take a good look inside myself now if I were in your shoes.

[exe34]

that's incredible! how did you put the confetti back in the canon?

[LtWorf]

I wonder which american guy went to italy, found out that there are almond candies called confetti and thought: "I'll do the same in my country, but made out of paper instead!"

[belter]

Clearly he/she...is a previous LLM version...it will get updates next month....