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The author's analogy at the beginning involving birds, airplanes, and flying machines seems pretty spot on to me, but it's a double edged sword the author appar
by wwweston 10y ago
The author's analogy at the beginning involving birds, airplanes, and flying machines seems pretty spot on to me, but it's a double edged sword the author apparently hasn't thought much about.
Ask yourself if it's apt to call a bird a flying machine.
You likely see the problem right away. That description is at least accurate within limits, but it's also reductive to the point where it will induce blindness if you don't recognize its limits. A "flying machine" is only one of the things a bird is. And if you were trying to figure out how to make something very much like a bird, you wouldn't get very far by focusing on the idea that a bird is an flying machine like an airplane.
Similarly, it's true enough that the brain is a computer in the sense that it does computation. That description is at least accurate within limits. But brains do things that we don't know how to get computers to do yet (yes, we're getting better at creating systems that have capacity for performing/optimizing tasks with less explicitly pre-encoded domain logic, but we're still doing that, and as far as I can tell nobody has demonstrated any testable or practically applicable idea of what constitutes consciousness). It's reasonable to assume that a computer might be only one of the things a brain is, and it seems likely that you won't get far by focusing on the idea that a brain is like a present-day von neumann digital computer in the same way a bird is like an airplane.
- bytefactory 10y agoI agree with you completely! At the same time, it's worth noting that it makes sense to approach the problem in a reductive (using the word loosely, not sure if it's completely accurate) manner, i.e., keep replicating features and capabilities of human brains until we possibly hit a wall in the form of consciousness, although it's quite possible that it turns out to be an emergent property [1], although I suspect it's a bit more complicated than that. [1] It seems to me that most explanations that consciousness is "emergent" or an "illusion" would never _predict_ the experiences we actually consider consciousness, like "fire is caused by phlogiston": http://lesswrong.com/lw/ip/fake_explanations/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/ip/fake_explanations/. At the same time, I recognize that I couldn't tell the difference between this world and one populated by philosophical zombies (http://lesswrong.com/lw/p7/zombies_zombies/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/p7/zombies_zombies/). Edit: I should clarify regarding my footnote that I don't believe in epiphenomenalism, I believe consciousness is a purely material phenomenon, I like to think of it as an overview process running in the brain, responding to the other stimulus to take appropriate action.
- noobiemcfoob 10y agoI found myself agreeing at first, but today, you could make much the same argument about computers, by which I mean the term "computer" is so overloaded from the original definition of a "machine to compute numbers/equations". If you approach a more general definition, something like "a computer is machine capable of interpreting arbitrary instructions in arbitrary ways that as long as those instructions follow arbitrary rules can achieve arbitrary ends", saying a brain is an equivalent machine hardly seems reductive. It mainly seems pointless.