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You're technically correct. That said, our Turing Machine model of computation is discrete, and the Church-Turing thesis implies human thought is Turing Comple
by hnfong 3y ago
You're technically correct.
That said, our Turing Machine model of computation is discrete, and the Church-Turing thesis implies human thought is Turing Complete.
It's not empirical evidence, but it's something. (I really doubt an empirical test is possible at all, so it seems philosophizing is all we have, unfortunately.) I'm not aware of any (communicable) model of thought that actually can't be reduced to the Turing model (in fact, that AFAIK precisely the reason he proposed the model).
Analog signals can be approximated to arbitrary precision, so while we conventionally think of it as continuous, it doesn't imply our cognition really has infinite precision floats internally...
I think it's really unfair to only focus on half of the picture (saying there's no evidence for "Cognition is discrete") where in fact we actually have no evidence at all whether anything is fundamentally continuous or merely approximated as such with high precision.
Traditionally the math in physics is continuous, and the math in computing is mostly discrete. If people point to Hilbert space as some kind of justification for believing physics is continuous, then it seems equally valid (or invalid) to use the Turing model as justification to believe cognition is discrete. I think both approaches are misguided, but as I said, it's really unfair to point out only the convenient half of these invalid arguments.