3 ms·

I don't agree with the article, but hold on -- you don't need to buy "intelligence -> soul" for this. There are plenty of things that can't (or can't efficient

I don't agree with the article, but hold on -- you don't need to buy "intelligence -> soul" for this. There are plenty of things that can't (or can't efficiently) be represented in a single agent. This is (for example) Hayek's main critique of central planning: "[price] understanding cannot occur in an isolated computation or behavior"; there are simply too many necessary details to fit into any one head/computer, and therefore we should prefer markets. (Markets being definitionally not located in any one isolated computation/behavior, but inter-agentially in lots of them.)

jimmaswell 5y ago
I don't see any fundamental reason a human brain couldn't be simulated at the atomic level by a turing machine, so it follows intelligence should be able to come from a machine, as far as it can come from a human.
- majormajor 5y ago
  Simulating that brain will require you to provide some sort of inputs and do something with the outputs. Which gets you into questions of "what does this simulated brain want" once again. How much of human desire and behavior comes from the body? I want to avoid pain (signals that my body sends to my brain). I want to experience pleasure (also signals that my body sends to my brain). If you simulate a body with the same inputs as the existing brain, do you just have a "faster horse" problem, where you have a brain that could possibly perceive/process information faster (or slower) than a real human depending on the speed of the simulation? That could be useful, but sounds potentially rather bleak, especially if we limit what it can do to change its environment. It also seems limited for e.g. central planning - it can do planning faster than any individual, but likely will still have working memory size limitations, if it's just a simulation of a human brain. So it may not be so much better than parallelizing tasks across a bunch of humans. More interesting, probably, then, than the "super human" style, is giving a new sort of intelligence different and additional senses, so that it doesn't want or need the same sort of physical embodiment we have, a la the "set sets" in the Terra Ignota series. But then we have to figure out what separates abstract intelligence from our own senses, and how to usefully augment it with new senses for a data-based world...
  - lolwut987 5y ago
    Yes, I often have to consider the context of the excel spreadsheets on my VMs, because you can’t know how to run a machine without knowing what it wants at a high level.
    - jacobr1 5y ago
      Given this is HN, I honestly can't tell if you are being genuine or snarky.

jimmaswell 5y ago

I don't see any fundamental reason a human brain couldn't be simulated at the atomic level by a turing machine, so it follows intelligence should be able to come from a machine, as far as it can come from a human.

majormajor 5y ago
Simulating that brain will require you to provide some sort of inputs and do something with the outputs. Which gets you into questions of "what does this simulated brain want" once again. How much of human desire and behavior comes from the body? I want to avoid pain (signals that my body sends to my brain). I want to experience pleasure (also signals that my body sends to my brain). If you simulate a body with the same inputs as the existing brain, do you just have a "faster horse" problem, where you have a brain that could possibly perceive/process information faster (or slower) than a real human depending on the speed of the simulation? That could be useful, but sounds potentially rather bleak, especially if we limit what it can do to change its environment. It also seems limited for e.g. central planning - it can do planning faster than any individual, but likely will still have working memory size limitations, if it's just a simulation of a human brain. So it may not be so much better than parallelizing tasks across a bunch of humans. More interesting, probably, then, than the "super human" style, is giving a new sort of intelligence different and additional senses, so that it doesn't want or need the same sort of physical embodiment we have, a la the "set sets" in the Terra Ignota series. But then we have to figure out what separates abstract intelligence from our own senses, and how to usefully augment it with new senses for a data-based world...
- lolwut987 5y ago
  Yes, I often have to consider the context of the excel spreadsheets on my VMs, because you can’t know how to run a machine without knowing what it wants at a high level.
  - jacobr1 5y ago
    Given this is HN, I honestly can't tell if you are being genuine or snarky.