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There’s something in the human brain that can’t be replicated?
by melling 8y ago
There’s something in the human brain that can’t be replicated?
- nine_k 8y agoWhen we will have created human-level AI, changes in language translation will likely be a minor detail on the background of other changes in the world.
- ekianjo 8y agoYour question sounds like you assume we have a perfect understanding of the brain. At best, our understanding is still very much peripheral. We have no idea how consciousness forms, even if we roughly know where it is located.
- frostburg 8y agoNo, there is no reason to think that the human brain is capable of computing anything that isn't Church-Turing computable. Luckily no translation actually requires a "general solution" of the problem formally.
- yters 8y agoHow do you know this is true?
- frostburg 8y agoTexts have finite length.
- yters 8y agoCan you expand the missing premise? 1. Texts have finite length. 2. ____ 3. Therefore, the halting problem does not impact machine translation.
- frostburg 8y agoSorry, missed this. I'll try to explain. A real computer doesn't actually have an infinite tape (memory) like a canonical Turing Machine, it's actually a finite state machine with a vast amount of possible states that we conveniently think about as analogous to a Turing machine, hence the the halting problem is actually solvable (just not in practice) for real hardware. Given content that can be expressed in two languages in a text of finite length, you could in theory enumerate all the possible translated texts.
- yters 8y agoIf it is not solvable in practice, I don't see how finiteness addresses my objection...
- adrianN 8y agoMaybe there are examples of texts that can't be translated even by humans? Language Log has discussions about so-called words that can't be translated regularly and generally rejects that concept, but maybe whole texts are more difficult. The I-Ching has several translations that don't resemble each other very much and it's common knowledge that a translation can be either accurate or beautiful but rarely both.
- yters 8y agoIf the human mind is non physical, then it is might be a halting oracle.
- adrianN 8y agoIf the moon is made of cheese, then 1=2. What does non-physical even mean?
- yters 8y agoIt is hard to say what the non-physical is. However, it can be detected. For example, if we could, say, solve the halting problem, then whatever part of us is doing the solving cannot be physical, since everything physical can be computed by a Turing machine. So, in general the non-physical is defined negatively. The physical is defined by physical limitations, i.e. the laws of physics and computation, and thus anything that surpasses those limitations is non-physical.
- adrianN 8y agoThere is no algorithm for checking whether a system can solve the halting problem or not, the reduction to the halting problem is quite simple. But that's besides the point. If you found something that could solve the halting problem and you're lucky enough to be able to prove it for this special case, that would just mean that the assumption that everything physical can be computed by a Turing machine is wrong. It works the same way with anything else that we think of as "impossible". If you observed an apple falling towards the sky that doesn't mean that the apple is non-physical, it just points to a serious flaw in our understanding of gravity. Experiments trump all physical theories.
- yters 8y agoThat makes the term 'physical' vacuous. Technically, we already recognize the world is non-physical. Materialists defined materialism to things bumping into each other. Now we know there are things like field effects, attraction, and action at a distance. So there is a non-bumping substrate that the bumping things exist within. Thus, strict physicalism is already known to be false.