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This is why people not trained in CS shouldn't speculate on it, when they do you get garbage like this. The brain performs computation, it is by definition a c

This is why people not trained in CS shouldn't speculate on it, when they do you get garbage like this. The brain performs computation, it is by definition a computer. Before modern computers there was a human job, called, computer. One who performs computations. The analogy of the brain to a computer is perfect, because the brain is a computer.

cheradenine01 11y ago
Nope. Go read Penrose. There are problems that the brain can solve, but you can (provably) show that an algorithm cannot. For example - tesselation on an infinite plane.
- innguest 11y ago
  I googled for tessellation infinite plane algorithm but could not find any pertinent information. There are problems that the brain can solve that one can prove an algorithm cannot. That to me is a bold claim. Could you point to material I could read on this?
  - yarrel 11y ago
    It's a confusion of the algorithm that the brain implements with the algorithm that implements the brain. Penrose fills in the gaps with quantum woo. He's much beloved by people who can't quite bring themselves to quote Deepak Chopra.
    - innguest 11y ago
      Thank you for the straight-shot no-nonsense clarification. :)
      - cgio 11y ago
        I would not discount Penrose with the ease the GP does. These themes are quite philosophical, therefore all sides are making some big assumptions. I would read Penrose, Dennett, Chalmers, Tononi, Searle, Putnam and many others. In philosophy the trick is to disagree with everyone.
        pjungwir 11y ago
        Agreed. I am very intrigued by Penrose but not convinced. In Scott Aaronson's online lectures for Quantum Computing since Democritus he is pretty dismissive of Penrose, but in the book he asks why a renowned Oxford scholar would insist on such a position, and that's a good question! In these arguments people are too willing to clamp shut their opinion and shut down wonder.
- cheradenine01 11y ago
  The Emperor's New Mind (and the followup whose name I forget). There's a rather scratchy recorded documentary here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVq39QbFQXE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVq39QbFQXE See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_tile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_tile n 1966, Wang's student Robert Berger solved the domino problem in the negative. He proved that no algorithm for the problem can exist, by showing how to translate any Turing machine into a set of Wang tiles that tiles the plane if and only if the Turing machine does not halt. The undecidability of the halting problem (the problem of testing whether a Turing machine eventually halts) then implies the undecidability of Wang's tiling problem.
- theaiguy 11y ago
  Nope. Can I suggest you read Penrose again with a little more critical thought. There are problems it is possible to prove are not computable. But can you prove that human beings can solve them? Tessellation of the infinite plane? Please demonstrate a person that can solve this (i.e. not that they have a > 99.9% chance of being able to do it, or that you can show they can start out pretty successfully and you assume they'll always stay ahead of the game). Bear in mind when working out if a computer can solve a given problem (i.e. is it mathematically computable), we're not trying to work out if it can ever solve it, or even if it can solve it in infinitely many cases, or even in an arbitrarily high proportion of cases. We're working out if it can be proven that it is (not) guaranteed to find a correct solution in all cases. There's just no way to make those judgements of a human being. So instead, mathematical analysis of computation is compared against intuition arguments from the evidence that human beings have good, reliable strategies for solving some of them. Unsurprisingly, the brain comes off pretty well in that comparison! Penrose was big on handwaving and appeal to quantum magic, but not very good on the specific arguments to back up his claim. I found this article to be a huge bag of misconceptions about AI, computation, and the actual claims of AI professionals. As an argument against hyperbolic media mischaracterisation, it might be reasonable. But like Penrose, it manages a long and condescending argument from intuition that fails to take seriously the actual claims being made. [Edit: for clarity and spelling]
  - wwweston 11y ago
    > But can you prove that human beings can solve them? > Tessellation of the infinite plane? Please demonstrate a person that can solve this Penrose himself would seem to be a demonstration that there is at least one person, IIRC. Is your argument that uncomputable really just means no guaranteed success, and that just because some human can get a solution to an uncomputable problem doesn't mean that it isn't following a set of algorithms?
    - theaiguy 11y ago
      You misunderstand the result Penrose has shown. There are plenty of aperiodic tessellations of the plane that can be computationally generated. The issue is whether a computer can, in all cases, determine if a set of shapes can tile aperiodically. I don't understand the second bit. But, no. Computability has very specific definition. Getting a solution to an uncomputable problem isn't generally hard. It is trivial to create a program that will solve the halting problem for an infinite class of cases. The issue is that such solutions can be shown not to be general over all cases.
- Sharlin 11y ago
  Such overconfidence. There is no generally accepted evidence that anything physical, whether brain or something else, can compute something a TM cannot compute. Penrose's claims are conjectures at best and pseudoscience at worst.
  - tjradcliffe 11y ago
    Since the brain is not just a Turing machine, it would be astonishing if it was limited to the capabilities of a Turning machine. The brain is capable of emulating a Turning machine, but that is just one of its capabilities. The things a Turing machine lacks are interupts and I/O. If you hook sensors up to a Turing machine and make the tape change depending on the state of those sensors, you don't have a Turing machine any more, in the sense that it is no longer bound by any of Turing's computability theorems. This insistence that the limits of the most limited model of computing (Turing machines) must be applicable to any machine that computes anything--including things that are not describe by any of the formal mathematical proofs on the limits of computability because they violate the most basic assumptions upon which those proofs depend--is one of the most curious aspects this debate. So not even computers are just Turing machines, because they too have I/O. Turing's theorems are useful and important when considering certain practical questions of computability within the limited circumstances of a computation whose inputs are entirely specified at the start and which can't be interrupted by new information coming from the outside, but they just don't apply to cases where there are cells whose values aren't known until reality provides them via some sensor mechanism. As such, it would be a little weird if we (and computers) can't compute things a Turing machine can't, given we have capabilities that a Turing machine doesn't have. There are even examples of such things. One due to Church (IIRC) that shows how we can solve certain instances of the halting problem that a Turing machine can't.
    - pjungwir 11y ago
      Actually Turing's paper "On Computable Numbers" distinguishes between "automatic machines" (a-machines) and "choice machines" (c-machines), where the latter can pause to ask for input. It seems to me this accounts for your I/O. (I think this is also how you'd add a RNG to a Turing machine.) His paper pretty much only considers a-machines, so I'm curious what is written about c-machines elsewhere. It's unclear to me how much c-machines "change the story." For instance you can't escape Godel's Incompleteness Theorem by adding a finite number of axioms to fill in all the unprovable statements, because there are infinitely many of them.
justinpaulson 11y ago
Except the author does in fact have a BS in CS. IMO, the brain does far more than performing computation. Sure humans were once "computers," but our ability to perform computation is not a valid argument to that computation, or the inner workings of our mind, being the same as digital computers performing computation. You failed to look up the author's credentials and I feel like you may have also failed to read the entire piece.
- theaiguy 11y ago
  > the brain does far more than performing computation In your opinion? Can you be more specific, and give examples of things the brain does that are not computable? This is trivially true in some senses, neurones have analogue responses, that the biology does a good (but not perfect) job of thresholding. But then, the same thing can be said of transistors. It's just we're able to engineer their analogue responses out much more successfully than evolution has. It is also true that the brain is connected to a much broader system which is undoubtedly analogue (i.e. the body), but then again, it isn't clear that isn't true of any non-abstracted computer. Comparing theoretical and idealised computing to embodied brains might feel insightful, but it doesn't actually resolve any of the real issues in the philosophy of AI. Also, a BS in CS isn't a good minimum qualification for competency in the philosophy of AI. I wouldn't read much into that.
  - justinpaulson 11y ago
    I was mainly commenting on the OP's position that the author was 'not trained in CS'. Here is a list of things I believe that the human brain performs outside of computation: The irrational motivations that take us over when we feel love. The way that our mood can affect a decision. Taking a walk to enjoy the beauty of the sunset. Writing a satirical short story to express a political fallacy. Painting an image that we saw in a dream. Using metaphors to explain an idea or to validate an argument. Telling a joke and understanding why it is funny. Buying a shirt because it looks cool. There are many more. But to me, there is definitely more to the mind than simple computation. There is a quality to our experience that is completely lost when our inputs and outputs are equated to the workings of a digital computer.
pjungwir 11y ago
It seems like you are the one speculating . . . about the author's credentials. Also, the fact that thinking includes computation does not imply that computation includes thinking. There is a strong case that the brain is a computer, but really no one knows. Even if the brain is 100% material, there are people who argue it cannot be simulated on a computer. In part what we're talking about is the Church-Turing Thesis, which is still just a conjecture.
wwweston 11y ago
It's not clear how much the brain is like most of the computers even CS specialists or engineers have encountered. Actually, that's putting it mildly. AFAICT it's pretty accurate to say that the brain is about as far from a Von Neumann computer as it is from older favorite analogies like clockwork. Also, while it's clear the brain can do computation, it's not clear that everything it does is computation.
- sudo_free_cake 11y ago
  If you take models of computation you will learn anything that can do computation is a computer. A bag of rocks is a computer, you can add and remove rocks to perform computation.
coldtea 11y ago
>The brain performs computation, it is by definition a computer. Citation needed. Actually that's the standard motto of any era -- the brain was like god (soul), then like gears in the early mechanical era, and so on to the computer analogy.

cheradenine01 11y ago

Nope. Go read Penrose. There are problems that the brain can solve, but you can (provably) show that an algorithm cannot. For example - tesselation on an infinite plane.

innguest 11y ago
I googled for tessellation infinite plane algorithm but could not find any pertinent information. There are problems that the brain can solve that one can prove an algorithm cannot. That to me is a bold claim. Could you point to material I could read on this?
- yarrel 11y ago
  It's a confusion of the algorithm that the brain implements with the algorithm that implements the brain. Penrose fills in the gaps with quantum woo. He's much beloved by people who can't quite bring themselves to quote Deepak Chopra.
  - innguest 11y ago
    Thank you for the straight-shot no-nonsense clarification. :)
    - cgio 11y ago
      I would not discount Penrose with the ease the GP does. These themes are quite philosophical, therefore all sides are making some big assumptions. I would read Penrose, Dennett, Chalmers, Tononi, Searle, Putnam and many others. In philosophy the trick is to disagree with everyone.
      - pjungwir 11y ago
        Agreed. I am very intrigued by Penrose but not convinced. In Scott Aaronson's online lectures for Quantum Computing since Democritus he is pretty dismissive of Penrose, but in the book he asks why a renowned Oxford scholar would insist on such a position, and that's a good question! In these arguments people are too willing to clamp shut their opinion and shut down wonder.
cheradenine01 11y ago
The Emperor's New Mind (and the followup whose name I forget). There's a rather scratchy recorded documentary here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVq39QbFQXE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVq39QbFQXE See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_tile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_tile n 1966, Wang's student Robert Berger solved the domino problem in the negative. He proved that no algorithm for the problem can exist, by showing how to translate any Turing machine into a set of Wang tiles that tiles the plane if and only if the Turing machine does not halt. The undecidability of the halting problem (the problem of testing whether a Turing machine eventually halts) then implies the undecidability of Wang's tiling problem.
theaiguy 11y ago
Nope. Can I suggest you read Penrose again with a little more critical thought. There are problems it is possible to prove are not computable. But can you prove that human beings can solve them? Tessellation of the infinite plane? Please demonstrate a person that can solve this (i.e. not that they have a > 99.9% chance of being able to do it, or that you can show they can start out pretty successfully and you assume they'll always stay ahead of the game). Bear in mind when working out if a computer can solve a given problem (i.e. is it mathematically computable), we're not trying to work out if it can ever solve it, or even if it can solve it in infinitely many cases, or even in an arbitrarily high proportion of cases. We're working out if it can be proven that it is (not) guaranteed to find a correct solution in all cases. There's just no way to make those judgements of a human being. So instead, mathematical analysis of computation is compared against intuition arguments from the evidence that human beings have good, reliable strategies for solving some of them. Unsurprisingly, the brain comes off pretty well in that comparison! Penrose was big on handwaving and appeal to quantum magic, but not very good on the specific arguments to back up his claim. I found this article to be a huge bag of misconceptions about AI, computation, and the actual claims of AI professionals. As an argument against hyperbolic media mischaracterisation, it might be reasonable. But like Penrose, it manages a long and condescending argument from intuition that fails to take seriously the actual claims being made. [Edit: for clarity and spelling]
- wwweston 11y ago
  > But can you prove that human beings can solve them? > Tessellation of the infinite plane? Please demonstrate a person that can solve this Penrose himself would seem to be a demonstration that there is at least one person, IIRC. Is your argument that uncomputable really just means no guaranteed success, and that just because some human can get a solution to an uncomputable problem doesn't mean that it isn't following a set of algorithms?
  - theaiguy 11y ago
    You misunderstand the result Penrose has shown. There are plenty of aperiodic tessellations of the plane that can be computationally generated. The issue is whether a computer can, in all cases, determine if a set of shapes can tile aperiodically. I don't understand the second bit. But, no. Computability has very specific definition. Getting a solution to an uncomputable problem isn't generally hard. It is trivial to create a program that will solve the halting problem for an infinite class of cases. The issue is that such solutions can be shown not to be general over all cases.
Sharlin 11y ago
Such overconfidence. There is no generally accepted evidence that anything physical, whether brain or something else, can compute something a TM cannot compute. Penrose's claims are conjectures at best and pseudoscience at worst.
- tjradcliffe 11y ago
  Since the brain is not just a Turing machine, it would be astonishing if it was limited to the capabilities of a Turning machine. The brain is capable of emulating a Turning machine, but that is just one of its capabilities. The things a Turing machine lacks are interupts and I/O. If you hook sensors up to a Turing machine and make the tape change depending on the state of those sensors, you don't have a Turing machine any more, in the sense that it is no longer bound by any of Turing's computability theorems. This insistence that the limits of the most limited model of computing (Turing machines) must be applicable to any machine that computes anything--including things that are not describe by any of the formal mathematical proofs on the limits of computability because they violate the most basic assumptions upon which those proofs depend--is one of the most curious aspects this debate. So not even computers are just Turing machines, because they too have I/O. Turing's theorems are useful and important when considering certain practical questions of computability within the limited circumstances of a computation whose inputs are entirely specified at the start and which can't be interrupted by new information coming from the outside, but they just don't apply to cases where there are cells whose values aren't known until reality provides them via some sensor mechanism. As such, it would be a little weird if we (and computers) can't compute things a Turing machine can't, given we have capabilities that a Turing machine doesn't have. There are even examples of such things. One due to Church (IIRC) that shows how we can solve certain instances of the halting problem that a Turing machine can't.
  - pjungwir 11y ago
    Actually Turing's paper "On Computable Numbers" distinguishes between "automatic machines" (a-machines) and "choice machines" (c-machines), where the latter can pause to ask for input. It seems to me this accounts for your I/O. (I think this is also how you'd add a RNG to a Turing machine.) His paper pretty much only considers a-machines, so I'm curious what is written about c-machines elsewhere. It's unclear to me how much c-machines "change the story." For instance you can't escape Godel's Incompleteness Theorem by adding a finite number of axioms to fill in all the unprovable statements, because there are infinitely many of them.

justinpaulson 11y ago

Except the author does in fact have a BS in CS. IMO, the brain does far more than performing computation. Sure humans were once "computers," but our ability to perform computation is not a valid argument to that computation, or the inner workings of our mind, being the same as digital computers performing computation. You failed to look up the author's credentials and I feel like you may have also failed to read the entire piece.

theaiguy 11y ago
> the brain does far more than performing computation In your opinion? Can you be more specific, and give examples of things the brain does that are not computable? This is trivially true in some senses, neurones have analogue responses, that the biology does a good (but not perfect) job of thresholding. But then, the same thing can be said of transistors. It's just we're able to engineer their analogue responses out much more successfully than evolution has. It is also true that the brain is connected to a much broader system which is undoubtedly analogue (i.e. the body), but then again, it isn't clear that isn't true of any non-abstracted computer. Comparing theoretical and idealised computing to embodied brains might feel insightful, but it doesn't actually resolve any of the real issues in the philosophy of AI. Also, a BS in CS isn't a good minimum qualification for competency in the philosophy of AI. I wouldn't read much into that.
- justinpaulson 11y ago
  I was mainly commenting on the OP's position that the author was 'not trained in CS'. Here is a list of things I believe that the human brain performs outside of computation: The irrational motivations that take us over when we feel love. The way that our mood can affect a decision. Taking a walk to enjoy the beauty of the sunset. Writing a satirical short story to express a political fallacy. Painting an image that we saw in a dream. Using metaphors to explain an idea or to validate an argument. Telling a joke and understanding why it is funny. Buying a shirt because it looks cool. There are many more. But to me, there is definitely more to the mind than simple computation. There is a quality to our experience that is completely lost when our inputs and outputs are equated to the workings of a digital computer.

pjungwir 11y ago

It seems like you are the one speculating . . . about the author's credentials. Also, the fact that thinking includes computation does not imply that computation includes thinking. There is a strong case that the brain is a computer, but really no one knows. Even if the brain is 100% material, there are people who argue it cannot be simulated on a computer. In part what we're talking about is the Church-Turing Thesis, which is still just a conjecture.

wwweston 11y ago

It's not clear how much the brain is like most of the computers even CS specialists or engineers have encountered. Actually, that's putting it mildly. AFAICT it's pretty accurate to say that the brain is about as far from a Von Neumann computer as it is from older favorite analogies like clockwork. Also, while it's clear the brain can do computation, it's not clear that everything it does is computation.

sudo_free_cake 11y ago
If you take models of computation you will learn anything that can do computation is a computer. A bag of rocks is a computer, you can add and remove rocks to perform computation.

coldtea 11y ago

>The brain performs computation, it is by definition a computer. Citation needed. Actually that's the standard motto of any era -- the brain was like god (soul), then like gears in the early mechanical era, and so on to the computer analogy.