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Had the same thought. I think one other major difference between biological brains and computers, beyond the fact of having a body vs not, is that biology is a
by anyonecancode 4y ago
Had the same thought.
I think one other major difference between biological brains and computers, beyond the fact of having a body vs not, is that biology is analog and not digital. A signal going from cell to cell in a brain or up a spinal cord isn't just "on" or "off", but in any number of infinite states. No matter how many bits you manage to pack into a digital "brain," that's a fundamental difference.
Now I can't predict out to the future and say something like digital intelligence is "impossible" or that in the vast universe all life is analog. But from the vantage point of today and what we currently know, it feels that reality is fundamentally analog and so any digital brain can only ever hope to be a simulation of intelligence.
On the flip side, I think we vastly underestimate the various ways intelligence does and can exist amongst living creatures.
- tnzk 4y agoYeah if we hadn't go digital and built something equivalent to modern computers with super-dense analog circuits then it would've gain intelligence.
- mpoteat 4y agoNeural networks operate on floating point values. Are you saying that e.g. 64 bits of resolution isn't enough to accurately model a neuron? The idea of significant figures in physics puts a limit on what is useful in practice. I could be wrong, but I feel that digital vs analog is a pretty meaningless distinction in this case, as past a certain level of resolution in practice this is noise. This doesn't even get into the fact that we know the universe is quantum in nature and that systems have a finite amount of possible states. The universe does not have a "infinite" state resolution in the way you are talking about, merely a large one.