[vidarh]

I wasn't responding to a moral and legal question. I was responding to a comment arguing that humans are some magical special case in nature.

If you want to argue it's a distraction, argue that with the person I replied to, who was the person who changed the focus.

[advael]

Yea I'll give you that. But many people seem to have the argument you've made - which is dubious on its own terms, by the way, as we don't really have a complete picture of human learning and the assumption that it simply follows the mechanisms we understand from machine learning is not a null hypothesis that doesn't demand justification - loaded up for these conversations, and it needs to be addressed wherever possible that the ontological question is not what matters here

[vidarh]

> which is dubious on its own terms, by the way, as we don't really have a complete picture of human learning and the assumption that it simply follows the mechanisms we understand from machine learning is not a null hypothesis that doesn't demand justification

The argument I made in no way rests on a "complete picture of human learning". The only thing they rest on is lack of evidence of computation exceeding the Turing computable set. Finding evidence of such computation would upend physics, symbolic logic, maths. It'd be a finding that'd guarantee a Nobel Prize.

I gave the justification. It's a simple one, and it stands on its own. There is no known computable function that exceeds the Turing computable, and all Turing computable functions can be computed on any Turing complete system. Per the extended Church Turing thesis this includes any natural system given the limitations of known physics. In other words: Unless you can show knew, unknown physics, human brains are computers with the same limitations as any electronic computer, and the notion of "something new" arising from humans, other than as a computation over pre-existing state, in a way an electronic computer can't also do, is an entirely unsupportable hypothesis.

> and it needs to be addressed wherever possible that the ontological question is not what matters here

It may not be what matters to you, but to me the question you clearly would prefer to discuss is largely uninteresting.

[advael]

Baking in the assumption that cognition is equivalent to computation will tautologically lead you to this result, but this assumption itself is unjustified. Of course if you start with the premise that the brain is a computer you will come to the conclusion that the brain is a computer. You haven't justified the most important part of your argument, so I have no reason to take it seriously