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Those are beautiful analogies. They might look good on a magazine, explaining layman how a computer behaves. However, science-wise, there's nothing to it. Or wi

Those are beautiful analogies. They might look good on a magazine, explaining layman how a computer behaves. However, science-wise, there's nothing to it. Or will the loss of a familiar trigger a psychiatric condition on the computer? > Beyond what instinct gives us, which is really just a pre defined set of conditionals, I don't think even neuroscientists have a definite answer to this. However, computer people - as always - do. That's, I think, the problem. A KISS approach is great; being oblivious of complexity isn't.

Tiksi 11y ago
Pull the cat5 from a critical nfs server and you'll see plenty of psychiatric conditions, both in computers and people. The analogies were a bit tongue in cheek, but I think they relate well enough. Why does a human have an urge to poop? Is it because of "human-ness" or because there's waste that needs to be disposed of. I don't think computer people think they have the definite answer, it's just easy to apply familiar abstractions to things when they map well. Plus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_action_pattern https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_action_pattern seems quite like a conditional to me, and neuroscientists seems to agree. Comparing things at a higher level doesn't mean being oblivious to the lower levels, it just means it's outside the scope you care about. If we could 1:1 replicate every single possible input/output/decision/etc that happens in the human brain with transistors and have the exact same properties as a human when interacting with it, does it really matter if the path to get to those interactions is different? To me, it doesn't. We don't define people by which neurons fire in their brain, we define them by the actions and decisions those chemical reactions cause, and I don't see why it should be any different if they're made of silicon.

Tiksi 11y ago

Pull the cat5 from a critical nfs server and you'll see plenty of psychiatric conditions, both in computers and people. The analogies were a bit tongue in cheek, but I think they relate well enough. Why does a human have an urge to poop? Is it because of "human-ness" or because there's waste that needs to be disposed of. I don't think computer people think they have the definite answer, it's just easy to apply familiar abstractions to things when they map well. Plus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_action_pattern https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_action_pattern seems quite like a conditional to me, and neuroscientists seems to agree. Comparing things at a higher level doesn't mean being oblivious to the lower levels, it just means it's outside the scope you care about. If we could 1:1 replicate every single possible input/output/decision/etc that happens in the human brain with transistors and have the exact same properties as a human when interacting with it, does it really matter if the path to get to those interactions is different? To me, it doesn't. We don't define people by which neurons fire in their brain, we define them by the actions and decisions those chemical reactions cause, and I don't see why it should be any different if they're made of silicon.