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Extremely weird to me when people compare themselves to computers. What is that philosophical stance called and do you have any references for long form writing
by soist 2y ago
Extremely weird to me when people compare themselves to computers. What is that philosophical stance called and do you have any references for long form writing which makes the case for why people are "just" computers?
- radarsat1 2y agoIt's definitely a philosophical position that exists beyond a random HN poster. See for example computational theory of mind https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/computational-mind/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/computational-mind/
- soist 2y agoI am familiar with the computational theory of cognition. What I wanted to know was whether there were any people who actually claimed their thinking is nothing more than programmed computation. I am very curious to know if they have mapped out the instruction set for their mind along the lines of something like the SKI combinators.
- kybernetikos 2y agoA mental instruction set would be extremely interesting. Unfortunately, nobody has that level of understanding of brain processes (and it might be quite difficult to formulate in such a linear way since the underlying mechanism is so very parallel), but the idea that human cognition is computable falls pretty naturally out of the idea that nature is computable which I think is a common position (sometimes called the Church Turing Deutsch principle).
- soist 2y agoYes, I understand why some scientists claim that nature is "just" some computer but no one still has given an answer to my very basic question: what is the instruction set that the people who claim they are computers are using to think? Surely there must be one if they are nothing more than programmable computers as they claim.
- vidarh 2y agoWhy do you think there would need to be an instruction set? And why do you think we'd need to know of one to conclude we're all computers?
- soist 2y agoJust trying to figure out how rigorously people have thought about this. A computer with an undefined instruction set seems somewhat useless as a computer.
- vidarh 2y agoWhether or not we can discern an instruction set is entirely orthogonal to whether or not something can compute.
- soist 2y agoOh I see, so it's magic.
- vidarh 2y agoIf you don't know how something works, do you assume it is magic? Why? It's a wildly irrational assumption to assume that it is magic rather than assume absent evidence to the contrary that it works according to known physics.
- soist 2y agoWell, that's essentially a logical tautology. Everything works according to the known laws of physics but it's certainly true that everything must also work with unknown laws of physics because of basic human ignorance.
- vidarh 2y agoNo it is not. The argument is that absent any evidence of the existence of such unknown physics happening in the brain the most logical assumption is to assume there isn't any, rather that presuming the existence of something we've never observed any hint of.
- prometheus76 2y agoAnd wouldn't that language need to be able to account for different physiological states? Thinking when one is hungry or sleepy is quite different than thinking when one is well-fed or fully rested.
- soist 2y agoYes. To validate the claim would require not only a formal instruction set but also the code to account for all sorts of cognitive states and processes. I'm not ruling out that some people are indeed programmable computers but I would like to see some actual evidence presented by the people who make these claims about themselves.
- baq 2y agoOccam’s razor - ‘just computers’ is enough to explain the mind, so why bother with more?
- prometheus76 2y agoDoes your computer supply different answers if it is hungry, or tired?
- vidarh 2y agoIt would if it was programmed to. Modern OSs certainly takes into account environmental factors.
- soist 2y agoSteam engines and gears were used for explaining the mind as well but those turned out to be incorrect metaphors.
- vidarh 2y agoSteam engines and gears are a specific physical manifestation of computation. Computation does not have a single, specific physical manifestation - it can, and has, been done with organic matter, electronics, gears, pipes of water, light. Per the Church-Turing thesis these can all compute the same set of functions, and unless you can demonstrate that brains and only brains can evoke unknown physics that allows brains to compute a set of functions that can not be computed by other means, the most logical assumption is that it holds, including for brains. Especially given how much we measure brains without seeing any signs of unusual physics.
- soist 2y agoI think I understand. So what you're saying is that every function that can be implemented with computers must be computable. Your claim is that the brain is actually a computable function, can you tell me which one it is using your favorite version of a Turing complete instruction set? Or maybe I misunderstood and what you're saying is that the brain is not the function but what it does is compute a specific function called your mind in some unknown instruction set?
- vidarh 2y agoFor us to not be would require brains to be able to compute functions that can not be computed by an artificial computer. That would seem to be an extraordinary suggestion given we have no indication of unusual physics in the brain.
- soist 2y agoYou'll have to define your terms first. Physicists now believe there is such a thing as dark matter and that there are objects so massive that no amount of observation can ever make sense of how massive they are because it is impossible to model it mathematically. I am not the one making any extraordinary claims. Physicists themselves admit there are aspects of reality with no computational basis.
- vidarh 2y agoThese terms have well understood meanings, and dark matter or black holes are entirely irrelevant to what I said. For brains not to be computers would mean the physical Church-Turing thesis is invalid, and proof of that would be extraordinary enough to be Nobel Prize material.
- soist 2y agoWhether something is physical or not is orthognal to whether it computes or not. You're the one who brought up physics so that's why I showed why your logic was invalid. My contention was that calling something a computer without providing an instruction set was nonsensical and I wanted to know if someone had actually spent the time to rigorously think about what a computer without an instruction set would entail. So far it seems like no one has spent any time really thinking about it but that's probably for the best anyway. I'm sure an LLM will eventually figure out an instruction set for programming people and then take over the world.
- vidarh 2y agoThe idea that a discernable instruction set is needed for something to compute suggests you don't understand how fundamental computation is. We have built computers without instruction sets, e.g. in the form of mechanical devices to carry out calculations. Fairly complex computations were done that way before general purpose programmable computers, but even many early programmable computers had no fixed instruction set. There is a rich history of computation through wiring up calculations without any instructions involved. And for that matter of mechanical computation. Here's an outline for a simple computational device: A bucket. Pour predefined quantities of water into a bucket, and you can compute a threshold. Use buckets of different size and overflows, and you can separate a numeral into binary digits. Drain them into containers of different sizes and you can carry out logical operations. (Actual computation has been done this way - fluidics is one way, which dates back to the Tesla valve in 1920). Every physical interaction is computation, whether or not it is useful computation. The notion computation requires an instruction set is confusing a very limited notion of classical programmable computers with the general concept of computation. It is also a notion contradicted by the history of computation, which is full of computation without an instruction set, and of implementing computers with instruction sets in terms of computations of fixed function devices without one. E.g. it's not turtles all the way down - that instruction set runs on a CPU that ultimately is built of fixed function logic. Instruction sets are an optional high level abstraction.