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This article falls somewhere between a strawman argument and a deliberate misrepresentation of scientific understanding. > "But here is what we are not born wi
by Udo 10y ago
This article falls somewhere between a strawman argument and a deliberate misrepresentation of scientific understanding.
> "But here is what we are not born with: information, data, rules, software, knowledge, lexicons, representations, algorithms, programs, models, memories, images, processors, subroutines, encoders, decoders, symbols, or buffers"
We are born with most (if not) all of these things, and we develop more of them as we grow and learn. Sure, the nomenclature here was chosen for ridicule, but functionally those elements are present.
The brain is not a magical pudding that works in a completely occult and mysterious manner. While we do have a ways to go in deciphering the minutiae of its architecture and operation, the article engages in assertions that run completely counter to neurobiological facts we have already learned:
> "We don’t store words or the rules that tell us how to manipulate them. We don’t create representations of visual stimuli, store them in a short-term memory buffer, and then transfer the representation into a long-term memory device. We don’t retrieve information or images or words from memory registers. Computers do all of these things, but organisms do not."
This is at best a half-truthy strawman argument. Both our computer technology and the brain's architecture employ different mechanisms by virtue of their underlying implementation. However, the functions performed do converge if you look at what's actually being computed. There are entire fields of both CS and neuro research that are completely based on this overlap.
> "Forgive me for this introduction to computing, but I need to be clear: computers really do operate on symbolic representations of the world. They really store and retrieve. They really process. They really have physical memories. They really are guided in everything they do, without exception, by algorithms.
Humans, on the other hand, do not – never did, never will. "
This is utter bullshit. Humans totally operate on symbolic representations, decades of neuroscience has shown us that. Humans absolutely do store, process, and retrieve information. Humans possess without a doubt physical memories, just because they're not encoded byte-wise doesn't give you an excuse to make these garbage claims.
- fiatjaf 10y agoHumans do operate on symbolic representations, but also on concrete data -- and since you cannot think this data right now, because you can only think (or visualise in your mind) the symbolic representations of that same data -- you end up thinking you don't operate on concrete data.
- RGamma 10y agoTo add to the fallacy that to think that simply because computations by common computers are done with a bits-and-bytes approach hardware-wise and processes in the brain are not that computers wouldn't be able to express computation that comes very close to processes in the brain: This is exactly a mapping from one computational calculus (e.g. "brain calculus") to another (e.g. binary logic) with a compiler. While it still might be that the physical processes governing brain functioning somehow elude computational description with digital logic (i.e. such a compiler can not exist. Not sure how this could be the case given the notions of universality by way of Turing machines attached to that), surely this would mean we'd have a new class of computational power on our hands. And to say that brains are capable of more than Turing-complete (ignoring memory constraints) computation seems hard to believe (see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_physics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_physics). Now how to factor true randomness (if it exists in our universe) into this I don't know, and maybe it doesn't even play a role...
- nickpsecurity 10y agoWe do. Always have. See my main comment to OP on analog computation and its models that were used for NN's. Hint: One wafer (maybe 40 chips) of analog neurals takes almost 400,000 digital cores to emulate.
- wickedgain 10y ago> "Forgive me for this introduction to computing, but I need to be clear: computers really do operate on symbolic representations of the world. They really store and retrieve. They really process. They really have physical memories. They really are guided in everything they do, without exception, by algorithms. Humans, on the other hand, do not – never did, never will." In addition to neuroscience, going deeper to the atomic level and beyond, humans really do operate on symbolic representations of the world: representations that are stored as states of physical elements. And the algorithm that guides everything we do, would be the laws of physics.