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> previously: comparing brains and "electronic computers") Before that: comparing brain with hydraulic machines. There has been tendency to compare brain with

> previously: comparing brains and "electronic computers") Before that: comparing brain with hydraulic machines. There has been tendency to compare brain with most complex machine known to us at that particular time. "Descartes was impressed by the hydraulic figures in the royal gardens, and developed a hydraulic theory of the action of the brain. We have since had telephone theories, electrical field theories, and now theories based on computing machines… . We are more likely to find out how the brain works by studying the brain itself, and the phenomenon of behavior, than by indulging in far-fetched physical analogies." -- Karl Lashley 1951

spindle 3y ago
And also comparing brains to clockwork.
mjburgess 3y ago
I cannot agree enough with Karl here. What is the brain? An organic system with deep roots in the organic body, with deep causal connections with its environment. There's little sense in ignoring the whole basic mode of operation, physics, chemistry and biology of the brain in order to analogise it to another system without any of those properties. This, at best, provides a set of inspirations for engineers -- it does nothing for science.
- ben_w 3y ago
  I mildly disagree (although your final conclusion is correct: it indeed does nothing for science). The deepest fundamental structures in the brain[0] are quantum fields, which are also the deepest fundamental structures in everything else. There is no known quantum field of "soul" or "intelligence". The right abstraction is higher, and could still be a whole lot of things; but as maths can be implemented in logic, which can be implemented in electronics or clockwork or hydraulics, it doesn't matter what analogy is used — and my mild disagreement here is that such inspiration has been useful and gotten us this far. [0] that we know of
  - mjburgess 3y ago
    The process of evolution acts on organic systems, it doesn't act on quantum fields. I appreciate there's some (imv strange) sense of 'intelligence' where 'finding the right puzzle piece' counts. I cannot fathom why we care about such a notion, and it seems to have almost nothing to do with what we do care about re 'intelligence'. We care about that thing animals do, that thing which some do better than others. That thing which evolution brought about for (rapid) adaptive fitness to one's environment. 'Everything else is stamp collecting' We already have a perfectly good understanding of puzzles and their solutions -- animals are their inventors Intelligence isnt in the solution to a puzzle it's in its design, and especially, in what one does when one cannot solve it -- ie., how one adapts The csci view of 'intelligence' is an act of self-aggrandising, it turns out to be: csci! This is none-sense.
    - ben_w 3y ago
      We can simulate evolution in a computer, and this is used as a form of AI directly. That said, the way you're using biological evolution in your comment sounds as much like a strange analogy as all of the others: we may have some genetically programmed responses to snakes (bad) and potential mates (good), but we can also say that a loss of hydraulic pressure in our brain is a stroke, and use electrical signals to both read from and write to the brain. What we evolved to think, while interesting from a social perspective, seems to me like the least interesting part of our brains from an AI perspective — it's the bit that looks like a hard-coded computer program, not learning, on the scale of a human life and seen from within.
      - mjburgess 3y ago
        i'm referring to evolution as the process by which animals were built if aliens had come down and given us laptops, rather we invented digital machines, then likewise i'd be talking about the relevant materials science, physics etc. reverse engineering a laptop to figure out how it works would require extremely little computer science, and 'only at the end' the reason digital computers are interesting and useful is that they route electricity around devices which are designed to be responsive to one another. the patterns of activation, as managed by the CPU, are weakly describable by abstract algorithms like sorting starting with a laptop, and no further information, we'd be 100(s)+ years of research away from needing to understand that CPUs were implementing a sorting algorithm and importantly, that it is doing so has almost nothing to do with the value of the device -- which lies in its ability to provide 'dynamical power and modulation of operation' using electricity we're in the same situation with animals and people think that, what, understanding gradient descent or backprop is helpful? this is just some csci bs
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  > There's little sense in ignoring the whole basic mode of operation, physics, chemistry and biology of the brain in order to analogise it to another system without any of those properties. Sure there is. People had a feel for it back in "clockworks" times, nowadays we have a much better grasp because of progress of physics and math, particularly CS - mode of operation is an implementation detail. Whatever the mode, once you understand the behavior enough to model it in computational terms, you can implement it in anything you like - gears and levers, pistons, water flowing between buckets, electrons in silicon, photons going through lenses, photons diffusing through metamaterials, sound waves diffusing through metamaterials - and yes, also via a person locked in a room full of books telling them what to draw in response to a drawing they receive, and also via a billion kids following a game to the letter, via corporate bureaucracy, via board game rules, etc. Substrate. Does. Not. Matter. The only thing limiting your choice here is practical one. Humanity is getting a good mileage out of electrons in silicon, so that's the way to go for now. Gears would work too, they're just too annoying to handle at scale. Of course, today we don't have a full understanding of biological substrate - we can't model it fully in terms of computation, because it's a piece of spontaneously evolved nanotech and we barely begun being able to observe things at those scales. We have a lot of studying in front of us - but this is about learning how the gooey stuff ticks, what does it compute and how. But it's not about some new dimension of computation.
  - mjburgess 3y ago
    > Substrate. Does. Not. Matter. It only doesnt matter for counting a system as implementing a pure algorithm, ie., one with no device access. This is an irrelevant theoretical curiosity. Electronic computers are useful because they're electronic -- they can power devices, and modulate devices using that power. This cannot be done with wood, or most anything else. "Substrate doesnt matter" is, as a scientific doctrine pseudoscience, and as a philosophical one, theological. The causal properties of matter are essential to any really-existing system. Non-causal, purely formal properties of systems which can be modelled as functions from the naturals to the naturals (ie., those which are computable) are useless.
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
bondarchuk 3y ago
Electronic computers, artificial neural networks, hydraulic machines, clockworks etc... are all computationally equivalent to the brain. Anyone making such comparisons is grasping at the fact that the brain can be understood computationally. To complain that there are no pressure-driven pistons, rotating gears or whatever in the brain is missing the point of the analogy, IMHO, which is: all these systems perform computation on top of a physical substrate, and what we actually (should) care about is the computation itself and not the mechanical workings of the substrate.

spindle 3y ago

And also comparing brains to clockwork.

mjburgess 3y ago

I cannot agree enough with Karl here. What is the brain? An organic system with deep roots in the organic body, with deep causal connections with its environment. There's little sense in ignoring the whole basic mode of operation, physics, chemistry and biology of the brain in order to analogise it to another system without any of those properties. This, at best, provides a set of inspirations for engineers -- it does nothing for science.

ben_w 3y ago
I mildly disagree (although your final conclusion is correct: it indeed does nothing for science). The deepest fundamental structures in the brain[0] are quantum fields, which are also the deepest fundamental structures in everything else. There is no known quantum field of "soul" or "intelligence". The right abstraction is higher, and could still be a whole lot of things; but as maths can be implemented in logic, which can be implemented in electronics or clockwork or hydraulics, it doesn't matter what analogy is used — and my mild disagreement here is that such inspiration has been useful and gotten us this far. [0] that we know of
- mjburgess 3y ago
  The process of evolution acts on organic systems, it doesn't act on quantum fields. I appreciate there's some (imv strange) sense of 'intelligence' where 'finding the right puzzle piece' counts. I cannot fathom why we care about such a notion, and it seems to have almost nothing to do with what we do care about re 'intelligence'. We care about that thing animals do, that thing which some do better than others. That thing which evolution brought about for (rapid) adaptive fitness to one's environment. 'Everything else is stamp collecting' We already have a perfectly good understanding of puzzles and their solutions -- animals are their inventors Intelligence isnt in the solution to a puzzle it's in its design, and especially, in what one does when one cannot solve it -- ie., how one adapts The csci view of 'intelligence' is an act of self-aggrandising, it turns out to be: csci! This is none-sense.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    We can simulate evolution in a computer, and this is used as a form of AI directly. That said, the way you're using biological evolution in your comment sounds as much like a strange analogy as all of the others: we may have some genetically programmed responses to snakes (bad) and potential mates (good), but we can also say that a loss of hydraulic pressure in our brain is a stroke, and use electrical signals to both read from and write to the brain. What we evolved to think, while interesting from a social perspective, seems to me like the least interesting part of our brains from an AI perspective — it's the bit that looks like a hard-coded computer program, not learning, on the scale of a human life and seen from within.
    - mjburgess 3y ago
      i'm referring to evolution as the process by which animals were built if aliens had come down and given us laptops, rather we invented digital machines, then likewise i'd be talking about the relevant materials science, physics etc. reverse engineering a laptop to figure out how it works would require extremely little computer science, and 'only at the end' the reason digital computers are interesting and useful is that they route electricity around devices which are designed to be responsive to one another. the patterns of activation, as managed by the CPU, are weakly describable by abstract algorithms like sorting starting with a laptop, and no further information, we'd be 100(s)+ years of research away from needing to understand that CPUs were implementing a sorting algorithm and importantly, that it is doing so has almost nothing to do with the value of the device -- which lies in its ability to provide 'dynamical power and modulation of operation' using electricity we're in the same situation with animals and people think that, what, understanding gradient descent or backprop is helpful? this is just some csci bs
TeMPOraL 3y ago
> There's little sense in ignoring the whole basic mode of operation, physics, chemistry and biology of the brain in order to analogise it to another system without any of those properties. Sure there is. People had a feel for it back in "clockworks" times, nowadays we have a much better grasp because of progress of physics and math, particularly CS - mode of operation is an implementation detail. Whatever the mode, once you understand the behavior enough to model it in computational terms, you can implement it in anything you like - gears and levers, pistons, water flowing between buckets, electrons in silicon, photons going through lenses, photons diffusing through metamaterials, sound waves diffusing through metamaterials - and yes, also via a person locked in a room full of books telling them what to draw in response to a drawing they receive, and also via a billion kids following a game to the letter, via corporate bureaucracy, via board game rules, etc. Substrate. Does. Not. Matter. The only thing limiting your choice here is practical one. Humanity is getting a good mileage out of electrons in silicon, so that's the way to go for now. Gears would work too, they're just too annoying to handle at scale. Of course, today we don't have a full understanding of biological substrate - we can't model it fully in terms of computation, because it's a piece of spontaneously evolved nanotech and we barely begun being able to observe things at those scales. We have a lot of studying in front of us - but this is about learning how the gooey stuff ticks, what does it compute and how. But it's not about some new dimension of computation.
- mjburgess 3y ago
  > Substrate. Does. Not. Matter. It only doesnt matter for counting a system as implementing a pure algorithm, ie., one with no device access. This is an irrelevant theoretical curiosity. Electronic computers are useful because they're electronic -- they can power devices, and modulate devices using that power. This cannot be done with wood, or most anything else. "Substrate doesnt matter" is, as a scientific doctrine pseudoscience, and as a philosophical one, theological. The causal properties of matter are essential to any really-existing system. Non-causal, purely formal properties of systems which can be modelled as functions from the naturals to the naturals (ie., those which are computable) are useless.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago

bondarchuk 3y ago

Electronic computers, artificial neural networks, hydraulic machines, clockworks etc... are all computationally equivalent to the brain. Anyone making such comparisons is grasping at the fact that the brain can be understood computationally. To complain that there are no pressure-driven pistons, rotating gears or whatever in the brain is missing the point of the analogy, IMHO, which is: all these systems perform computation on top of a physical substrate, and what we actually (should) care about is the computation itself and not the mechanical workings of the substrate.