4 ms·

What’s neurotrophic computation and substrate independence?

• AllegedAlec 7y ago
  > Substrate independence If I recall my terms correctly, substrate independence is the idea that creating intelligence is not dependent on using neurons, but that if you could model the required functionality of neurons in another substrate, an intelligence could also be housed in that substrate. > Neuromorphic computing Is basically modelling neurological architectures in computers.
• Veedrac 7y ago
  Neuro-morphic, having the form of neurons. Recently the buzz refers to circuits that perform neural network operations (the AI kind) using hardware properties directly, storing weights and performing inference or backprop with the computing substrate, which is potentially more efficient or faster than using SRAM and multipliers. It can also refer to hardware directly attempting to model biological neurons, which is more far-field research than the former. Substrate independence denotes a property being separable from its physical implementation. One could say Alan Turing showed that computation is substrate independent, since many machines all do the same sort of computation. It's often debated whether consciousness is substrate independent, whether a piece of silicon just simulating a human brain will actually have an internal experience of its own thoughts. People who believe in souls, dualism, or panpsychism tend to think it isn't (to different degrees), people who believe in reductionism or emergentism tend to think it is. The authors of this piece go so far as to say the stuff the brain does might not even be reproducible outside of flesh-and-blood, regardless of whether such a reproduction would have internal experience.