12 ms·

>Why is there a presumption that we (as people who have only studied CS) know enough about biology/neuroscience/evolution to make these comparisons? Hubris.

rootusrootus 1y ago
Exactly. Someone way back when decided to call them neural networks, and now a lot of people think that they are a good representation of the real thing. If we make them fast enough, powerful enough, we'll end up with a brain! Or not.
- voidhorse 1y ago
  I wish McCulloch and Pitts could see how much intellectual damage that wildly bold analogy they made would do. (though seeing as they seemingly had no qualms with issuing such a wildly unjustified analogy with the absolute paucity of scientific information they had at the time, I guess they'd be happy about it overall).
  - __loam 1y ago
    Computational neurons were developed with the express intent of studying models of the brain based on the contemporary understanding of neuroscience. That understanding has evolved massively over the last 7 decades and meanwhile the concept of the perceptron has proven to be a useful mathematical construct in machine learning and statistical computing. I blame the modern business culture if software development more than I blame dead scientists for the misunderstanding being peddled to the public.
    - voidhorse 1y ago
      I also blame the modern business culture more, but we shouldn't act like McCulloch and Pitts were innocent. They well could have introduced neural nets without making the wild claims they did about actual neural equivalence. They are largely responsible for much of the brain = computer naivety and, in my view, they put forward this claim with shockingly little justification. The reasoned analogically without actually understanding the things they were trying to analogize. They basically took something that had the status of hypothesis at best and used it in the same manner one might if one had understanding. To be clear, I'm not at all criticizing their technical contribution. Neural nets obviously are an important technical approach to computation—however we should criticize the attendant philosophical and neurological and biological claims they attached to their study, which lacked sufficient justification.
- karmakaze 1y ago
  There was an actual simulation of a brain that could respond appropriately to stimuli. It ran many orders of magnitude slower than real-time but demonstrated the correlation. Probably not using the DNNs that we use now, but still a machine.
ctoth 1y ago
The hubris here isn't CS people making comparisons, it's assuming biological substrate matters. Your brain is doing computation with neurotransmitters instead of transistors. So what? The "chemicals not electricity" distinction is pure carbon chauvinism, like insisting hydraulic computers can't be compared to electronic ones because water isn't electricity. Evolution didn't discover some mystical process that imbues meat with special properties; it just hill-climbed to a solution using whatever materials were available. Brains work despite being kludges of evolutionary baggage, not because biology unlocked some deeper truth about intelligence. Meanwhile, these systems translate languages, write code, play Go at superhuman levels, and pass medical licensing exams... all tasks you'd have sworn required "real understanding" a decade ago. At some point, look at the goddamn scoreboard. If you think there's something brains can do that these architectures fundamentally can't, name it specifically instead of gesturing vaguely at "inscrutability." The list of "things only biological brains can do" keeps shrinking, and your objection keeps sounding like "but my substrate is special!!1111"
- jjulius 1y ago
  Case in point.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > Your brain is doing computation with neurotransmitters instead of transistors If it is, sure. But this isn't a given. We don't actually understand how the brain computes, as evidenced by our inability to simulate it. > Evolution didn't discover some mystical process that imbues meat with special properties Sure. But the complexity remains beyond our comprehension. Against the (nearly) binary action potential of a transmitter we have a multidimensional electrochemical system in the brain which isn't trivially reduced to code resembling anything we can currently execute on a transistor substrate. > hese systems translate languages, write code, play Go at superhuman levels, and pass medical licensing exams... all tasks you'd have sworn required "real understanding" a decade ago Straw man. Who said this? If anything, the symbolic linguists have been overpromising on this front since the 1980s.
  - ctoth 1y ago

rootusrootus 1y ago

Exactly. Someone way back when decided to call them neural networks, and now a lot of people think that they are a good representation of the real thing. If we make them fast enough, powerful enough, we'll end up with a brain! Or not.

voidhorse 1y ago
I wish McCulloch and Pitts could see how much intellectual damage that wildly bold analogy they made would do. (though seeing as they seemingly had no qualms with issuing such a wildly unjustified analogy with the absolute paucity of scientific information they had at the time, I guess they'd be happy about it overall).
- __loam 1y ago
  Computational neurons were developed with the express intent of studying models of the brain based on the contemporary understanding of neuroscience. That understanding has evolved massively over the last 7 decades and meanwhile the concept of the perceptron has proven to be a useful mathematical construct in machine learning and statistical computing. I blame the modern business culture if software development more than I blame dead scientists for the misunderstanding being peddled to the public.
  - voidhorse 1y ago
    I also blame the modern business culture more, but we shouldn't act like McCulloch and Pitts were innocent. They well could have introduced neural nets without making the wild claims they did about actual neural equivalence. They are largely responsible for much of the brain = computer naivety and, in my view, they put forward this claim with shockingly little justification. The reasoned analogically without actually understanding the things they were trying to analogize. They basically took something that had the status of hypothesis at best and used it in the same manner one might if one had understanding. To be clear, I'm not at all criticizing their technical contribution. Neural nets obviously are an important technical approach to computation—however we should criticize the attendant philosophical and neurological and biological claims they attached to their study, which lacked sufficient justification.
karmakaze 1y ago
There was an actual simulation of a brain that could respond appropriately to stimuli. It ran many orders of magnitude slower than real-time but demonstrated the correlation. Probably not using the DNNs that we use now, but still a machine.

ctoth 1y ago

The hubris here isn't CS people making comparisons, it's assuming biological substrate matters. Your brain is doing computation with neurotransmitters instead of transistors. So what? The "chemicals not electricity" distinction is pure carbon chauvinism, like insisting hydraulic computers can't be compared to electronic ones because water isn't electricity. Evolution didn't discover some mystical process that imbues meat with special properties; it just hill-climbed to a solution using whatever materials were available. Brains work despite being kludges of evolutionary baggage, not because biology unlocked some deeper truth about intelligence. Meanwhile, these systems translate languages, write code, play Go at superhuman levels, and pass medical licensing exams... all tasks you'd have sworn required "real understanding" a decade ago. At some point, look at the goddamn scoreboard. If you think there's something brains can do that these architectures fundamentally can't, name it specifically instead of gesturing vaguely at "inscrutability." The list of "things only biological brains can do" keeps shrinking, and your objection keeps sounding like "but my substrate is special!!1111"

jjulius 1y ago
Case in point.
JumpCrisscross 1y ago
> Your brain is doing computation with neurotransmitters instead of transistors If it is, sure. But this isn't a given. We don't actually understand how the brain computes, as evidenced by our inability to simulate it. > Evolution didn't discover some mystical process that imbues meat with special properties Sure. But the complexity remains beyond our comprehension. Against the (nearly) binary action potential of a transmitter we have a multidimensional electrochemical system in the brain which isn't trivially reduced to code resembling anything we can currently execute on a transistor substrate. > hese systems translate languages, write code, play Go at superhuman levels, and pass medical licensing exams... all tasks you'd have sworn required "real understanding" a decade ago Straw man. Who said this? If anything, the symbolic linguists have been overpromising on this front since the 1980s.
- ctoth 1y ago