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> There is no magic in the brain. The amount of hubris we have in our field is deeply embarrassing. Imagine a neuroscientists reading that. The thought makes m
by elktown 3y ago
> There is no magic in the brain.
The amount of hubris we have in our field is deeply embarrassing. Imagine a neuroscientists reading that. The thought makes me blush.
- lern_too_spel 3y agoNeuroscientists would agree with GP, otherwise they would be neuromystics instead of neuroscientists. There is no magic. It's all physical processes that we can eventually understand.
- elktown 3y agoThe entire point was that we do not understand it? That much of how the brain work is "magic" atm. It's our field that are the alchemist mystics, rambling about AGI/Philosopher's Stone in ever increasingly unhinged ways, while stirring our ML-pots that we have never even tried to prove have a chance to be anymore successful than the alchemists.
- lern_too_spel 3y agoJust because we don't understand it doesn't mean it's magic. That's the whole point of science. > It's _our field_ that are the alchemist mystics, rambling about AGI/Philosopher's Stone in ever increasingly unhinged ways, These "ramblings" are what scientists call hypotheses. The people making these hypotheses have even proposed how to test them.
- elktown 3y agoEven with added quotes you can't stop reading it literally? The total lack of critical thinking due to confirmation bias is just as embarrassing.
- lern_too_spel 3y agoVisarga used the word literally and stated in broad strokes what the brain does (process input, update state, emit outputs) without the details of how it does so. You're the one who misinterpreted that as meaning we already know exactly how the brain works.
- elktown 3y agoNo, not at all. The only thing I did was to react on how ridiculous that oversimplification is and how such a thing can only come about due to an embarrassing amount of hubris currently going around our field with relation to "AI". It's a hand-wavy "Eh, how hard can it be?" comment to rationalize ML being a pathway to AGI.
- lern_too_spel 3y agoThere is nothing oversimplified in that description at all. Here is an equivalent description from a neuroscience textbook: "Neuroscience is the study of the nervous system, the collection of nerve cells that interpret all sorts of information which allows the body to coordinate activity in response to the environment." https://openbooks.lib.msu.edu/introneuroscience1/chapter/what-is-neuroscience/ https://openbooks.lib.msu.edu/introneuroscience1/chapter/wha... This is even simpler than the RL agent description of the brain that visagra provided earlier, ignoring that the brain must have some internal state instead of being a pure function from each input to each response. Would you say that neuroscientists have even more hubris?
- elktown 3y agoYet again you just pick out a word, "oversimplified" in this case, ignores the rest of the reply - and more importantly, the entire context of all these replies - and goes on to make a nonsensical comparison with the ever-present one-liner that all textbooks of all academic disciplines have. Have you not understood by now that my critic of our field's AI-hubris is a general one - and thus not hinged on exact wordings? I could've written similar hubris related replies on multiple other comments in this thread. It's my reaction. It's my exasperation.