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by gf000 223 days ago
Game of life, PowerPoint, and a bunch of non-PL stuff are all Turing-complete. I don't mix up terms, I did use a slightly sloppy terminology but it is the correct concept - and my point is that we don't know of a computational model that can't be expressed by a Turing-machine, humans are a physical "machine", ergo we must also fall into that category.

Give my comment another read, but it was quite understandable from context. (Also, you may want to give a read to the Turing paper because being executable by a person as well was an important concept within)
2 comments
DanHulton 223 days ago
Again, you're going wildly off the rails in your logic. Sure, "executable by a human" is part of the definition for Turing machines, but that's only talking about Turing-specific capabilities. If you want to argue that a Turing machine can emulate the specific definition of Turing machine capabilities that humans can perform, that's fine. But you're saying that because humans can ACT LIKE Turing machines, they must BE Turing machines, and are therefore emulatable.

This is the equivalent of saying "I have set up a complex mechanical computer powered by water that is Turing complete. Since any Turing complete system can emulate another one, it means that any other Turing complete system can also make things wet and irrigate farms.

Human intelligence is not understood. It can be made to do Turing complete things, but you can't invert that and say that because you've read the paper on Turing completeness, you now understand human intelligence.

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coopierez 223 days ago
But humans can do things Turing machines cannot. Such as eating a sandwich.
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gf000 223 days ago
That's not a computation, it's a side effect. It just depends on what you wire your "computer" up to. A Turing machine in itself is just a (potentially non-returning) mathematical function, but you are free to map any input/output to it.

Actually, the way LLMs are extended with tools is a pretty much the same (an LLM itself has no access to the internet, but if it returns some specific symbols, the external "glue" will do a search and then the LLM is free to use the results)

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