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Are you saying neurotransmitter modulation and glial cells cannot be represented by electrical signals? Honestly, the root of all this is whether you were tryi

Are you saying neurotransmitter modulation and glial cells cannot be represented by electrical signals? Honestly, the root of all this is whether you were trying to claim that the brain is doing super-Turing computation or not. Either 1) it's not, then you can't tell me Turing machines cannot do the same computation (and by extension neural nets can approximate it) 2) it is, then prove it and congratulations you have made a extraordinarily important and fundamental step forward in computer science. My money is on 1.

hprotagonist 5y ago
> Are you saying neurotransmitter modulation and glial cells cannot be represented by electrical signals? Certainly neither of them are action potentials, which are usually the (exclusive and therefore imo incomplete) basis for the mental model of people who claim things like "the brain is just electrical signals." No. It's not. It's a vastly more complicated system of organ(s) than that even if you're willing to draw a line in the sand between brain and environment -- and that's no easy feat itself!
- kylevedder 5y ago
  At the end of the day, saying "it's just electrical signals" is a crude way of saying "it's using a model of computation that we understand and can replicate". The first claim may not be strictly true, but it seems you're implying second one is. This is relevant because the universal function approximaters we are training everyday are capable of representing this computational model, undermining the argument that there is somehow a difference between the model of computation done in the brain and the computation done by neural networks.
  - hprotagonist 5y ago
    > At the end of the day, saying "it's just electrical signals" is a crude way of saying "it's using a model of computation that we understand and can replicate". oh. well, that’s just a naive embrace of the andy grove fallacy. as of this moment, the brain’s computational model (and if there is one, and if so how many) is neither well understood nor replicable. it’s almost a category error to describe the process as “reverse engineering”, but even if that’s an appropriate mental model, it turns out that reverse engineering an evolved system that’s taken 4.5 billion years and has had no human design additions at all has very little in common with any similar approach you could take in, say, inspecting the trained weights of a neural network to back out what’s going on.
    - Dylan16807 5y ago
      > oh. well, that’s just a naive embrace of the andy grove fallacy. No it's not. That's about feasibility, and the comment was not about feasibility. It was about turing vs. super-turing. Go ahead and assume the reverse engineers get 4.5 trillion years or something. That wasn't the point of the "actually aware" rebuttal.

hprotagonist 5y ago

> Are you saying neurotransmitter modulation and glial cells cannot be represented by electrical signals? Certainly neither of them are action potentials, which are usually the (exclusive and therefore imo incomplete) basis for the mental model of people who claim things like "the brain is just electrical signals." No. It's not. It's a vastly more complicated system of organ(s) than that even if you're willing to draw a line in the sand between brain and environment -- and that's no easy feat itself!

kylevedder 5y ago
At the end of the day, saying "it's just electrical signals" is a crude way of saying "it's using a model of computation that we understand and can replicate". The first claim may not be strictly true, but it seems you're implying second one is. This is relevant because the universal function approximaters we are training everyday are capable of representing this computational model, undermining the argument that there is somehow a difference between the model of computation done in the brain and the computation done by neural networks.
- hprotagonist 5y ago
  > At the end of the day, saying "it's just electrical signals" is a crude way of saying "it's using a model of computation that we understand and can replicate". oh. well, that’s just a naive embrace of the andy grove fallacy. as of this moment, the brain’s computational model (and if there is one, and if so how many) is neither well understood nor replicable. it’s almost a category error to describe the process as “reverse engineering”, but even if that’s an appropriate mental model, it turns out that reverse engineering an evolved system that’s taken 4.5 billion years and has had no human design additions at all has very little in common with any similar approach you could take in, say, inspecting the trained weights of a neural network to back out what’s going on.
  - Dylan16807 5y ago
    > oh. well, that’s just a naive embrace of the andy grove fallacy. No it's not. That's about feasibility, and the comment was not about feasibility. It was about turing vs. super-turing. Go ahead and assume the reverse engineers get 4.5 trillion years or something. That wasn't the point of the "actually aware" rebuttal.