4 ms·
They are still big state-machines, unlike the human brain.
by tus666 4y ago
They are still big state-machines, unlike the human brain.
- naasking 4y ago> They are still big state-machines, unlike the human brain. The human brain can also be captured by a big state machine. See the Bekenstein Bound.
- brookst 4y agoCertainly they are big state machines, but is there any proof that we are not?
- ImHereToVote 4y agoBecause if we were, it would hurt my feefees.
- Tao3300 4y agoIn other words, the state of your feelings would be negatively altered as a side effect.
- avgcorrection 4y agoOr it would hurt your feelings to consider that you might not intuitively understand something. Hah! And yet you gloat.
- mensetmanusman 4y agoYou might be flipping the burden of proof :). We know very little about the mind.
- brookst 4y agoWell, on the one hand it’s hard to prove a negative, but on the other hand we don’t know much so it seems questionable to assert a negative without knowledge.
- Tao3300 4y agoYMMV, but I read it with a /s
- tialaramex 4y agoInsistence that the brain just isn't a computer is extremely widespread among those who are experts in the brain and know little about computers. As someone in the opposite situation I must say that their observations about what's special about the brain fit most closely to what I understand about computers and bring me to exactly the opposite conclusion. If the brain is not a computer, it's frankly eerie how similar they are.
- avgcorrection 4y agoOf course metaphor trumps domain expertise.
- tialaramex 4y agoThe trouble is domain expertise in what domain. The "Brains aren't computers" rants are predominantly from Psychologists who I agree have domain expertise when it comes to the brain but know very little about computers. An example would be the problem of understanding. The Psychologists are confident we can't expect to fully understand our own minds. But, they are also confident we can expect to understand any possible Computer Program. And they're just wrong about that, that's the implication of Kurt Gödel's work, we definitely can't expect to understand arbitrary Computer Programs, we have instead chosen to mostly try to write programs from a narrow set we can understand, although not altogether successfully. Thus, the Psychologist thinks they've found an obvious difference, but I think they found an obvious similarity!
- freejazz 4y agoPeople ask this question like it's meaningful... is there any proof that we are? No. Then stop asking it as if it sheds light into the similarities between humans and machines... it doesn't and it's obfuscating to that extent.
- brookst 4y agoHuh. And here I thought best practice in the absence of evidence was to keep an open mind rather than asserting one extreme or the other.
- freejazz 4y agoWell my intuition is that the machines aren't performing comparable processes, and I'm totally open to information going the other way. I'm not open to baseless assertions otherwise.
- lib-dev 4y agoState machines cannot change the semantics of themselves. We can. We are like state machines most of the time but we can switch into "developer mode" and deploy updates whenever we choose to :)
- brookst 4y ago> State machines cannot change the semantics of themselves. That's not true at all. There are many, many state machine implementations where the machine's states and paths are altered by the machine itself. See for instance https://digitalcommons.trinity.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1008&context=compsci_honors https://digitalcommons.trinity.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...
- shawnz 4y agoEven if something can change its semantics, you can still represent it as a state machine if you just make a copy of every state for every possible set of semantics. The semantic state can just be another part of the state machine's overall state.
- shawnz 4y agoEverything in the entire universe can be described as a big state machine
- manv1 4y agoYou could argue that human brains are actually big state machines, at least for 90% of humanity.