▲ | JumpCrisscross a day 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. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
▲ | ben_w 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
> Straw man. Who said this? If anything, the symbolic linguists have been overpromising on this front since the 1980s. I'm sure I've seen people say this about language translation and playing go. Ditto chess, way back before Kasparov lost. I don't think I've seen anyone so specific as to say that about medical licensing exams, nor as vague as "write code", but on the latter point I do even now see people saying that software engineering is safe forever with various arguments given… | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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▲ | ctoth a day ago | parent | prev [-] | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Jonas & Kording showed that neuroscience methods couldn't reverse-engineer a simple 6502 processor [0]. If the tools can't crack a system we built and fully documented, our inability to simulate brains just means we're ignorant, not that substrate is magic. It also doesn't necessarily say great things for neuroscience! And "who said this?"... come on. Searle, Dreyfus, thirty years of "syntax isn't semantics," all the hand-wringing about how machines can't really understand because they lack intentionality. Now systems pass those benchmarks and suddenly it's "well nobody serious ever thought that mattered." This is the third? fourth? tenth? round of goalpost-moving while pretending the previous positions never existed. Pointing at "multidimensional electrochemical complexity" is just phlogiston with better vocabulary. Name something specific transformers can't do? [0] https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jo... | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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