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My point is that we know for a fact that our brain doesn't work anything like a Turing machine. Can a Turing machine simulate a brain - as in, create intelligen

My point is that we know for a fact that our brain doesn't work anything like a Turing machine. Can a Turing machine simulate a brain - as in, create intelligence like the one our brains expose? That's very much an open question, but you wrote as if it was an obvious conclusion.

currymj 8y ago
It's a pretty common assumption that any physical process could be simulated by a Turing machine (given infinite time and space etc.). We could probably never build such a Turing machine. I didn't mean to make any stronger claims than that. As I mentioned before, this is a pretty pedantic way of looking at the world.
- danmaz74 8y ago
  > We could probably never build such a Turing machine. I didn't mean to make any stronger claims than that Fair enough. I got a different impression from reading your original comment :)
edanm 8y ago
> My point is that we know for a fact that our brain doesn't work anything like a Turing machine. That's of course true, but then most computers aren't that similar to a classic Turing machine either. The idea of Turing machines is that they can simulate anything else that we mean when we say "computation". > Can a Turing machine simulate a brain - as in, create intelligence like the one our brains expose? Yes, it can. I mean, if it can't, that means there's some notion of "computability" that a Turing machine doesn't capture - this would violate the "Church-Turing" thesis. Such a thing is possible, of course, since we have no proof that a Turing machine is the limit of what we mean by "computable" - but it would be a completely revolutionary fact in Computer Science, and one that is very unlikely, considering how many years people have been trying to come up with alternative models of "computation" that all turn out to be equivalent to Turing machines. - The human brain isn't magic - it works according to the laws of physics like anything else. Either it is simulatable by a Turing machine, which would make the most sense, or it isn't, in which case we're missing something about how you can compute things, which would be surprising and amazing.

currymj 8y ago

It's a pretty common assumption that any physical process could be simulated by a Turing machine (given infinite time and space etc.). We could probably never build such a Turing machine. I didn't mean to make any stronger claims than that. As I mentioned before, this is a pretty pedantic way of looking at the world.

danmaz74 8y ago
> We could probably never build such a Turing machine. I didn't mean to make any stronger claims than that Fair enough. I got a different impression from reading your original comment :)

edanm 8y ago

> My point is that we know for a fact that our brain doesn't work anything like a Turing machine. That's of course true, but then most computers aren't that similar to a classic Turing machine either. The idea of Turing machines is that they can simulate anything else that we mean when we say "computation". > Can a Turing machine simulate a brain - as in, create intelligence like the one our brains expose? Yes, it can. I mean, if it can't, that means there's some notion of "computability" that a Turing machine doesn't capture - this would violate the "Church-Turing" thesis. Such a thing is possible, of course, since we have no proof that a Turing machine is the limit of what we mean by "computable" - but it would be a completely revolutionary fact in Computer Science, and one that is very unlikely, considering how many years people have been trying to come up with alternative models of "computation" that all turn out to be equivalent to Turing machines. - The human brain isn't magic - it works according to the laws of physics like anything else. Either it is simulatable by a Turing machine, which would make the most sense, or it isn't, in which case we're missing something about how you can compute things, which would be surprising and amazing.