I have completed an interview with a neurosurgeon recently. I'm writing an article for a big magazine about AI and Brains, and I was given a chance to get some comments from a neurosurgeon about AI, thinkingness and how he things things work.

I can't disclose the contents of the interview, this is under NDA till published. But, gosh, was that bad.

I thought neurosurgeon would know something about thinking process, and stuff like that. The guy in a state of a total despair. When I was bashing him with questions about the purpose of a brain and all that stuff, he was almost crying.

He ended up telling me that he hopes that someone will find quantum entanglement in the brain, and everything will be fine after that. After he sent me to this from PBS Science.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xa2Kpkksf3k

Thinking is slippery as a concept, but feelings are what they’re usually after, and these can be remarkably deterministic by other than mental processes. The study of Israeli judges was debunked, but I think we all have experienced this at some level.

The NPR show This American Life had a segment years ago on the mind, “Life is a Coin with One Side.”[1] Producer David Kestenbaum provided his take, including that quantum effects can inject randomness but do not provide a complete explanation for thinking process or free will. He recounted the story of a friend who engaged in repetitive behaviors after a concussion, as an illustration that the mind is a machine, which like AI has wonderful emergent capabilities.

[1] https://www.thisamericanlife.org/662/where-there-is-a-will/a...

Ha. I think it's unlikely to involve entanglement myself and probably the closest model we have at the moment is LLMs but obviously those are different. I think a lot of what neurosurgeons do is things like removing tumors and dealing with burst or clogged blood vessels which don't require understanding how the actual thinking works.