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> The second premise is that the brain is an ordinary configuration of matter, albeit an extraordinarily complicated one. This is the part I doubt is true. Th
by jcoffland 8y ago
> The second premise is that the brain is an ordinary configuration of matter, albeit an extraordinarily complicated one.
This is the part I doubt is true. There was a time when humans thought brains were very complex systems of microscopic clockwork because gears were the pinnacle of technology.
How do people keep mistaking pattern matching with intelligence?
- kowdermeister 8y ago> How do people keep mistaking pattern matching with intelligence? Isn't that true? At what level you call something intelligent rather than just a clever pattern recognition?
- jcoffland 8y agoMaking inferences is beyond pattern matching.
- bryanrasmussen 8y agohow do you know? some things that were thought of as inferences in the past have been shown to be clever pattern matching.
- jcoffland 8y agoCan you provide an example?
- bryanrasmussen 8y agoI believe chess prodigies were supposed to derive their superiority by inference but studies have shown that a large portion of that superiority was due to superior pattern matching.
- randomsearch 8y agoLearning chess recently, I think it’s a terrible example for AI. I don’t understand why it was ever targeted or trumpeted. To become good at chess you have to memorise the responses to tons of situations, simple pattern matching. It seems to me that chess is more about memory than about reasoning, in the same surprising way that scrabble is more about maths than words.
- solveit 8y agoI'm sure both operations, suitably formulated, are Turing complete, so I'm not sure what distinction you're trying to make.
- GolDDranks 8y agoBecause we have things like Quantum Field Theory that tells us the energy scales it's valid for, and it's experimentally checked to be valid for those scales. Since the brain doesn't presumably contain supernovas, black holes or particle accelerators, that means that we have a basic theory covering the mechanics down.
- jcoffland 8y agoOne thing we do know is that we don't yet fully comprehend how the brain works. It's a little early to say it contains nothing we cannot simulate. Quantum interactions do not require high energy physics.
- quanticle 8y ago> It's a little early to say it contains nothing we cannot simulate. Suggesting that AIs have to look or behave like human brains in order to have human level intelligence is like suggesting that airplanes must flap their wings in order to fly. It seems far more plausible to me that any AI we build will be as alien to our way of thinking as a F-15 Eagle is to a bald eagle. Given that, I think it's important that we think about how we communicate with this AI, and how we ensure that it follows what we command it to do, rather than going off in its own direction, with negative consequences for human civilization. I think that the negative consequences of current AI should be warning enough that we need to worry about future, more capable AI.
- krisoft 8y agoSo what is the brain if not just matter?
- jcoffland 8y agoI agree. It's likely just matter. But we still don't know everything about matter.
- fungiblecog 8y agoAt the scale of the brain we do.
- pdkl95 8y agoSean Carroll explaining why "the laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely understood". (renormalization group, pair production at human energy scales) https://youtu.be/Vrs-Azp0i3k?t=2046 https://youtu.be/Vrs-Azp0i3k?t=2046 (this specific explanation starts at 34:06, but earlier parts are worth watching if anybody wants a nice introduction to the Standard Model and QFT)
- pas 8y agoThe threshold is protein folding. Anything lower level than that is noise, but folding itself is important, as it can go wrong sometimes and kill you. (Prions.) And things can be approximated, sometimes very close to the real thing. Hence the connectome. Synapses are the interconnects and neurons are tiny networks of very simple computers on their own. And it's not "just" pattern matching, it's very very likely Turing complete. (You can do counting networks, you can do conditionals, you don't really need anything else to learn, match, execute simple programs.) We know enough to claim that it's increasingly unlikely that we are missing any relevant physical phenomena for understanding the brain and the mind. (So no quantum woo is required.) Sure, it that unlikeliness is not zero, and it might turn out that some kind of quantum effect is important for some very strange step in the workings of the brain, but even then it's very likely that we can classically model it with good approximation. (Because as others mentioned, energy scales, and other fundamental things constrain any process going on there.)
- jayd16 8y ago>There was a time when humans thought brains were very complex systems of microscopic clockwork because gears were the pinnacle of technology. In a general sense, microscopic clockwork isn't an incorrect way to put it. Any known chemical or biological reaction is just some microscopic physical reaction. We know about more subatomic structures but I think the crux of the argument is about the same.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago> There was a time when humans thought brains were very complex systems of microscopic clockwork because gears were the pinnacle of technology. This is a really bad argument against anything. People always use what they know as a reference, but as our understanding grew over time, we had better things to refer to, creating more and more apt comparisons. People back then comparing brain to clockwork were already expressing the suspicion that the brain is a) a machine, b) transforming inputs to outputs in very complex way. People today comparing brain to a computer express that intelligence must be contained within what we know about computation theory. These days, we actually have a sound theory that bounds the problem space, and we haven't so far seen evidence that the brain exceeds those bounds.