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I am using computation in the strictly mathematical sense. As in dealing with numbers. I do not think that our minds operate through a constant stream of number
by pokkanome 11y ago
I am using computation in the strictly mathematical sense. As in dealing with numbers. I do not think that our minds operate through a constant stream of numbers that become thoughts.
In that way, a computer and a human are fundamentally different. You cannot stimulate human thoughts as pure numbers. I think we need some extra layer of yet-to-be-invented abstraction to achieve that goal.
Of course, we could go the route of trying to create a new model of thought based around numbers, but that is proving to be difficult to understand. It would not be a good idea to try to build an intelligent system that we cannot completely understand because then all we could do is hope it works as we intended.
- ThrustVectoring 11y agoThe map is not the territory. "Computation" is fundamentally an abstraction for talking about that which various algorithms have in common. Algorithms themselves are a high-level description of a series of well-defined tasks. Computers aren't literally doing computation in the sense you are describing. What they're doing is simple physics with lots of voltage levels. The "computation" is a useful high-level description of what the computer is doing. I agree that there's a missing abstraction for talking about human thought - it's a terribly complicated subject that isn't well understood. That doesn't mean that the human brain is doing anything that's different on a fundamental level than what computers can do. We don't have a high-level description of how human though works like we do with a computer, but it doesn't mean that human though has some kind of magic.