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Given that all human behavior can (very likely) be reduced to mathematical equations too, I'm not sure this is a convincing reductio. It certainly doesn't seem

Given that all human behavior can (very likely) be reduced to mathematical equations too, I'm not sure this is a convincing reductio. It certainly doesn't seem obvious that a rule like this could be consistently applied if, for example, AIs became as capable as humans — or far more so.

tired_and_awake 5y ago
> human behavior can ultimately be reduced to mathematical equations Wait what? Source?
mrbungie 5y ago
I think a lot of people would expect some evidence for your first phrase.
- edouard-harris 5y ago
  You're right. I'll edit the parent to soften the assertion, though I do consider it to be virtually certain. In terms of evidence: the simplest argument is probably that humans appear to consistently obey the laws of physics, and the laws of physics appear to be mathematical.
  - ars 5y ago
    Something can be mathematical and also not computable.
- canjobear 5y ago
  Given sufficiently powerful computers, human behavior could be simulated. The action of the computer would be describable as a (possibly enormously long and complicated) equation. I don't see how you can disagree with this unless you think there is something metaphysically inexplicable about human behavior.
  - reverend_gonzo 5y ago
    Sure, and those sufficiently powerful computers don’t exist yet.
    - canjobear 5y ago
      The actual existence of the actual machine is irrelevant for the claim that human behavior can be reduced to an equation. What is it about human behavior that you think could not be simulated by a machine?
  - 2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
    Basically this line of argument boils down to assuming something about something we don’t and may never have. Until we have this technology should we adjust laws for hypotheticals? No.
    - canjobear 5y ago
      Put another way: the claim that humans cannot be modeled as equations equates to the claim that humans cannot be modeled using physics. Do you want to defend that?
      - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
        > claim that humans cannot be modeled as equations equates to the claim that humans cannot be modeled using physics We don’t have a complete theory of physics. We don’t have any viable models of human thought. This is a non sequitur.
        canjobear 5y ago
        We do have a theory of physics which is likely to be able to cover all the phenomena of biology[1], but that is beside the point. If you think that human behavior cannot be reduced to equations, then you think it cannot be predicted mathematically. I can only interpret this as a claim that there is something about human behavior which is supernatural. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.07884 https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.07884
- lordlic 5y ago
  See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computationalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computationalism It's a very common worldview among the tech set. Edit: Uh, downvotes, really? I think it's totally reasonable to assume this as a given since it's, like, pretty obviously true. If anything the parent needs to provide their own extraordinary evidence for why consciousness would be non-computable. I'm just trying to provide some context for them to read up more on some stuff that apparently everyone but them (who has given it any thought) already knows about.
  - tremon 5y ago
    You're merely repeating the GP's assertion, and completely ignoring the parent's request for corroborating evidence. What you hold as self-evident is still just your anecdata, and cannot be extrapolated to "the tech set", unless the tech set includes only you.
    - lordlic 5y ago
      I'm just pointing out that it's a common belief (and it is, your ignorance notwithstanding) and giving them the search term to read more if they're interested. What's so difficult to understand about this? And it's the philosophy of mind; there's not really "corroborating evidence" to present so much as there are logical arguments that you need to read up on yourself.
  - karaterobot 5y ago
    Downvoted because the commenter asked for evidence, and you just provided a definition. The statement that it's "obviously true" is not evidence, or even an argument. If I said it's "obviously not true", would you consider yourself refuted? Probably not.
- robbedpeter 5y ago
  The brain is a biological system of interconnected neurons. Neuroscience has shown neurons operate digitally - on and off. The brain is a biological computer. There is no magic, no mystical quantum "thing" enabling human intelligence. We're not picking up some metaspectral soul transmission from an alternate universe. We're advanced binary pattern processors, and we're only a handful of orders of magnitude more powerful than consumer level hardware. The algorithm we run on is special, but it's physically encoded and self generating, based in our DNA and physical development. We're vastly complex but entirely built of relatively simple fundamental building blocks. We are computers, in the abstract sense of Turing machines and such concepts.
  - aaaaaaaaaaab 5y ago
    >Neuroscience has shown neurons operate digitally - on and off. [citation needed]
    - porkbrain 5y ago
      Parent refers to the behaviour of generating action potentials which travel to synapses connecting (mostly) axons with dendrites. The continuous (analogue) signal processing pre- and post- synapse seems to be a massive part of how neurons achieve the computation they do. A hypothesis I subscribe to claims that it is cheaper to compute locally with molecule gradients and protein folding than with spikes. Brains leverage that. The specific statement you quoted is to the best of my knowledge inaccurate. I am not an expert, my understanding of neurons is largely is based on [0], [1], [2]. [0]: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/principles-neural-design https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/principles-neural-design [1]: http://www.sci.utah.edu/~macleod/bioen/be6003/notes/W08-spruston_nature_2008.pdf http://www.sci.utah.edu/~macleod/bioen/be6003/notes/W08-spru... [2]: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/functional-connections-cortical-areas https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/functional-connections-cortic...
    - robbedpeter 5y ago
      A neuron fires, or it doesn't. The patterns received by neurons via synapses are binary. The synapses themselves are analog, and the activation can trigger in several ways, leading to complex behavior, but the signal each individual neuron receives from any and every other neuron in the brain is digital. Where an impulse comes from, when it is sent, the current charge state of the receiving neuron, the specific neurotransmitters released by the axons, and the efficiency of signal transmission at a given point in time all play a part in the signal sent along dendritic, but at any given point in time a neuron is firing or isn't, and that's the only state that matters to the other neurons it's connected to. The biggest difference between biological brains and artificial neural networks is the analog nature of biological timing compared to the arbitrary cycles of software. Spike timing dependent plasticity networks address some of the problem of variable timing and its impact on signaling. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spike-timing-dependent_plasticity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spike-timing-dependent_plastic... At any given moment, you could capture the state of a biological brain as a binary number. The model would need to account for all sorts of analog mechanisms and a huge, biologically messy graph of connections with dozens of variations across a handful of neuron types, and the length of a synapse and where it physically connects or touches other synapses without connecting directly and... lots of stuff that's hard to model and even hard to see. I'm not arguing that every part is digital or even equivalent to computers on silicon, simply that the basic mechanism of computation is itself digital pattern processing. It literally cannot be anything else. There is no evidence or theory to indicate any other plausible method of operation. All the analog stuff can be swapped out with an arbitrary bit length representation and the functionality is retained. Remove the digital assumption and everything breaks. You need magic or spirit to make it work, which is ridiculous because silicon computers proved that binary computation is a perfectly fine way to represent and process data. Quantum processing in biological brains is magical thinking performed in a desperate attempt to ascribe eminence to human cognition, because for some reason people don't like the idea that brains do digital processing. We are messy and vastly complex and sophisticated digital pattern processors. Which makes evolutionary sense, because that's how our predecessors work, all the way back to single cell organisms and self replicating DNA chemistry. Signals and patterns in the real world can be represented as binary to an arbitrary precision. The Planck length dictates the maximum level of precision relevant to our universe. https://www.researchgate.net/post/How-many-bits-of-information-can-be-contained-by-the-whole-universe https://www.researchgate.net/post/How-many-bits-of-informati... Human brains achieved a special state of depth and breadth of processing, concurrent with physically encoded, evolved algorithms in our neural architecture. The arrival of biology at human cognition affords us the privilege of deep reflection, the apparent subjective reality we experience, and the thus far unlimited scope of conception such that we can make approximations about the size of the universe or the mass of a photon. Or the operations of the minds we possess. We operate in binary - the explanation is sufficient, simple, and corresponds to all known evidence. There aren't any outstanding questions requiring that premise to be questioned.
Goety 5y ago
Human behavior is 100% able to be reduced to mathematical equations. Full stop. In aggregate and in day to day observation.
howaboutnope 5y ago
> Given that all human behavior can (very likely) be reduced to mathematical equations too I can reduce all the music in the history of the world to the phrase "rhythm, melodies and lyrics". So? That'd say nothing about all that music, it'd just say something unflattering about me. > It is not the greatest of modern scientists who feel most sure that the object, stripped of its qualitative properties and reduced to mere quantity, is wholly real. Little scientists, and little unscientific followers of science, may think so. The great minds know very well that the object, so treated, is an artificial abstraction, that something of its reality has been lost. -- C.S. Lewis
Valmar 5y ago
> Given that all human behavior can (very likely) be reduced to mathematical equations There is no scientific evidence whatsoever for this very bold claim.
naasking 5y ago
The Bekenstein Bound entails that people can be fully captured by a finite amount of information, and therefore a person is no more powerful than finite state automoton. Note that this is an upper bound, and refining our understanding of the the physics involved will only reduce the amount of information needed. The only escape hatch is to assert that humans can't be described by physics.
- mr_toad 5y ago
  > The only escape hatch is to assert that humans can't be described by physics. Or that there is some physics that can’t be described by computation. It seems vanishingly unlikely, but there is no actual proof that everything physical is computable. And even if there was, it probably has nothing do do with minds.
  - naasking 5y ago
    Right, not an escape hatch for human specialness though. We haven't seen anything that's uncomputable in physics yet either. Quantum computation "only" gives polynomial speedups so far.

tired_and_awake 5y ago

> human behavior can ultimately be reduced to mathematical equations Wait what? Source?

mrbungie 5y ago

I think a lot of people would expect some evidence for your first phrase.

edouard-harris 5y ago
You're right. I'll edit the parent to soften the assertion, though I do consider it to be virtually certain. In terms of evidence: the simplest argument is probably that humans appear to consistently obey the laws of physics, and the laws of physics appear to be mathematical.
- ars 5y ago
  Something can be mathematical and also not computable.
canjobear 5y ago
Given sufficiently powerful computers, human behavior could be simulated. The action of the computer would be describable as a (possibly enormously long and complicated) equation. I don't see how you can disagree with this unless you think there is something metaphysically inexplicable about human behavior.
- reverend_gonzo 5y ago
  Sure, and those sufficiently powerful computers don’t exist yet.
  - canjobear 5y ago
    The actual existence of the actual machine is irrelevant for the claim that human behavior can be reduced to an equation. What is it about human behavior that you think could not be simulated by a machine?
- 2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
  Basically this line of argument boils down to assuming something about something we don’t and may never have. Until we have this technology should we adjust laws for hypotheticals? No.
  - canjobear 5y ago
    Put another way: the claim that humans cannot be modeled as equations equates to the claim that humans cannot be modeled using physics. Do you want to defend that?
    - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
      > claim that humans cannot be modeled as equations equates to the claim that humans cannot be modeled using physics We don’t have a complete theory of physics. We don’t have any viable models of human thought. This is a non sequitur.
      - canjobear 5y ago
        We do have a theory of physics which is likely to be able to cover all the phenomena of biology[1], but that is beside the point. If you think that human behavior cannot be reduced to equations, then you think it cannot be predicted mathematically. I can only interpret this as a claim that there is something about human behavior which is supernatural. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.07884 https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.07884
lordlic 5y ago
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computationalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computationalism It's a very common worldview among the tech set. Edit: Uh, downvotes, really? I think it's totally reasonable to assume this as a given since it's, like, pretty obviously true. If anything the parent needs to provide their own extraordinary evidence for why consciousness would be non-computable. I'm just trying to provide some context for them to read up more on some stuff that apparently everyone but them (who has given it any thought) already knows about.
- tremon 5y ago
  You're merely repeating the GP's assertion, and completely ignoring the parent's request for corroborating evidence. What you hold as self-evident is still just your anecdata, and cannot be extrapolated to "the tech set", unless the tech set includes only you.
  - lordlic 5y ago
    I'm just pointing out that it's a common belief (and it is, your ignorance notwithstanding) and giving them the search term to read more if they're interested. What's so difficult to understand about this? And it's the philosophy of mind; there's not really "corroborating evidence" to present so much as there are logical arguments that you need to read up on yourself.
- karaterobot 5y ago
  Downvoted because the commenter asked for evidence, and you just provided a definition. The statement that it's "obviously true" is not evidence, or even an argument. If I said it's "obviously not true", would you consider yourself refuted? Probably not.
robbedpeter 5y ago
The brain is a biological system of interconnected neurons. Neuroscience has shown neurons operate digitally - on and off. The brain is a biological computer. There is no magic, no mystical quantum "thing" enabling human intelligence. We're not picking up some metaspectral soul transmission from an alternate universe. We're advanced binary pattern processors, and we're only a handful of orders of magnitude more powerful than consumer level hardware. The algorithm we run on is special, but it's physically encoded and self generating, based in our DNA and physical development. We're vastly complex but entirely built of relatively simple fundamental building blocks. We are computers, in the abstract sense of Turing machines and such concepts.
- aaaaaaaaaaab 5y ago
  >Neuroscience has shown neurons operate digitally - on and off. [citation needed]
  - porkbrain 5y ago
    Parent refers to the behaviour of generating action potentials which travel to synapses connecting (mostly) axons with dendrites. The continuous (analogue) signal processing pre- and post- synapse seems to be a massive part of how neurons achieve the computation they do. A hypothesis I subscribe to claims that it is cheaper to compute locally with molecule gradients and protein folding than with spikes. Brains leverage that. The specific statement you quoted is to the best of my knowledge inaccurate. I am not an expert, my understanding of neurons is largely is based on [0], [1], [2]. [0]: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/principles-neural-design https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/principles-neural-design [1]: http://www.sci.utah.edu/~macleod/bioen/be6003/notes/W08-spruston_nature_2008.pdf http://www.sci.utah.edu/~macleod/bioen/be6003/notes/W08-spru... [2]: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/functional-connections-cortical-areas https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/functional-connections-cortic...
  - robbedpeter 5y ago
    A neuron fires, or it doesn't. The patterns received by neurons via synapses are binary. The synapses themselves are analog, and the activation can trigger in several ways, leading to complex behavior, but the signal each individual neuron receives from any and every other neuron in the brain is digital. Where an impulse comes from, when it is sent, the current charge state of the receiving neuron, the specific neurotransmitters released by the axons, and the efficiency of signal transmission at a given point in time all play a part in the signal sent along dendritic, but at any given point in time a neuron is firing or isn't, and that's the only state that matters to the other neurons it's connected to. The biggest difference between biological brains and artificial neural networks is the analog nature of biological timing compared to the arbitrary cycles of software. Spike timing dependent plasticity networks address some of the problem of variable timing and its impact on signaling. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spike-timing-dependent_plasticity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spike-timing-dependent_plastic... At any given moment, you could capture the state of a biological brain as a binary number. The model would need to account for all sorts of analog mechanisms and a huge, biologically messy graph of connections with dozens of variations across a handful of neuron types, and the length of a synapse and where it physically connects or touches other synapses without connecting directly and... lots of stuff that's hard to model and even hard to see. I'm not arguing that every part is digital or even equivalent to computers on silicon, simply that the basic mechanism of computation is itself digital pattern processing. It literally cannot be anything else. There is no evidence or theory to indicate any other plausible method of operation. All the analog stuff can be swapped out with an arbitrary bit length representation and the functionality is retained. Remove the digital assumption and everything breaks. You need magic or spirit to make it work, which is ridiculous because silicon computers proved that binary computation is a perfectly fine way to represent and process data. Quantum processing in biological brains is magical thinking performed in a desperate attempt to ascribe eminence to human cognition, because for some reason people don't like the idea that brains do digital processing. We are messy and vastly complex and sophisticated digital pattern processors. Which makes evolutionary sense, because that's how our predecessors work, all the way back to single cell organisms and self replicating DNA chemistry. Signals and patterns in the real world can be represented as binary to an arbitrary precision. The Planck length dictates the maximum level of precision relevant to our universe. https://www.researchgate.net/post/How-many-bits-of-information-can-be-contained-by-the-whole-universe https://www.researchgate.net/post/How-many-bits-of-informati... Human brains achieved a special state of depth and breadth of processing, concurrent with physically encoded, evolved algorithms in our neural architecture. The arrival of biology at human cognition affords us the privilege of deep reflection, the apparent subjective reality we experience, and the thus far unlimited scope of conception such that we can make approximations about the size of the universe or the mass of a photon. Or the operations of the minds we possess. We operate in binary - the explanation is sufficient, simple, and corresponds to all known evidence. There aren't any outstanding questions requiring that premise to be questioned.

Goety 5y ago

Human behavior is 100% able to be reduced to mathematical equations. Full stop. In aggregate and in day to day observation.

howaboutnope 5y ago

> Given that all human behavior can (very likely) be reduced to mathematical equations too I can reduce all the music in the history of the world to the phrase "rhythm, melodies and lyrics". So? That'd say nothing about all that music, it'd just say something unflattering about me. > It is not the greatest of modern scientists who feel most sure that the object, stripped of its qualitative properties and reduced to mere quantity, is wholly real. Little scientists, and little unscientific followers of science, may think so. The great minds know very well that the object, so treated, is an artificial abstraction, that something of its reality has been lost. -- C.S. Lewis

Valmar 5y ago

> Given that all human behavior can (very likely) be reduced to mathematical equations There is no scientific evidence whatsoever for this very bold claim.

naasking 5y ago

The Bekenstein Bound entails that people can be fully captured by a finite amount of information, and therefore a person is no more powerful than finite state automoton. Note that this is an upper bound, and refining our understanding of the the physics involved will only reduce the amount of information needed. The only escape hatch is to assert that humans can't be described by physics.

mr_toad 5y ago
> The only escape hatch is to assert that humans can't be described by physics. Or that there is some physics that can’t be described by computation. It seems vanishingly unlikely, but there is no actual proof that everything physical is computable. And even if there was, it probably has nothing do do with minds.
- naasking 5y ago
  Right, not an escape hatch for human specialness though. We haven't seen anything that's uncomputable in physics yet either. Quantum computation "only" gives polynomial speedups so far.