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Exactly. I always have to make this clear to people. The conscious mind is incapable of fast arithmetic, but the subconscious mind is amazingly capable. It's do
by deaddodo 9y ago
Exactly. I always have to make this clear to people. The conscious mind is incapable of fast arithmetic, but the subconscious mind is amazingly capable. It's doing complex, freebase (relative vs static) calculations constantly. The ability to track and accurately move your limbs with a non-determined base point with a few hundred nanosecond-millesecond latency (proactive) or 150-250ms latency (responsive) is without compare.
Just look at machines that don't do precalculated movements (ASIMO, but even many of its patterns are prepared; Boston Dynamics robots, etc) versus those that do (industrial assembly line robots) and it gap is insanely wide. And even then, the dynamic bots are doing maybe one or two things at a time (walk, stop, pickup, walk, drop) nothing complex or integrated.
- pjc50 9y agoIs it? Is there any evidence that it's converting the signals to symbols and performing arithemtic on the symbols? Or is the signal processing being performed "directly", through the essentially analogue operation of the neurons? Otherwise you're asserting "doing arithmetic" as a property of any analogue system, and would say that a falling ball needs to understand calculus in order to make an arc. Downthread someone is saying that crystal formation is "doing arithmetic". While there may be a philosophical sense in saying that all actions of the universe are in some sense arithmetical as they obey physical laws, this is not a useful way to talk. (Repost of my comment above)
- heavenlyblue 9y agoIsn't a computer an essentially analogue operation of transistors restricted to a subset of it's states?
- fooker 9y ago>Or is the signal processing being performed "directly", through the essentially analogue operation of the neurons? You almost described a transistor. :) The physical world, at our scale in inherently analogue. (Might be digital at a quantum level, but we don't know that yet.)
- pjc50 9y agoThe point I'm trying to make is that computers "do arithmetic" through digital operations where there is a symbolic representation (through assigning analogue state to discrete symbolic values). Not through transistors operating continuously in their linear region. Inside neuronal systems there doesn't seem to be a direct symbolic representation - and if there is, the neuronal patterns of somebody doing calculus on paper versus e.g. catching a ball are entirely different.
- fooker 9y agoThe symbolic representation is just a language though. We might not be equipped to understand a language different from the formalisms we came up with.
- visarga 9y agoWhat's the difference between "crystal formation" and cpu processing? They are both physical processes that don't understand the mathematical concepts that underpin their functioning. Maybe they do computation, but not math. Only humans can do math so far, and maybe some AIs, in a limited sense. Understanding math is harder than computing.