Mastodawn

Blake Richards Sep 11, 2023

@NicoleCRust @awaisaftab @summerfieldlab @knutson_brain @Neurograce @eikofried

Fascinating discussion! Thanks for sharing this.

But, I can't help myself, I have to engage in my usual refrain here (sorry, lol), since it comes up in the second paragraph:

Brains are *literally* computers and information processing devices, it's not a metaphor!!! 🙂

CJ Stevens - Metaphysiology Sep 13, 2023

@tyrell_turing @NicoleCRust @awaisaftab @summerfieldlab @knutson_brain @Neurograce @eikofried
Is that an "are" of strict identity? Or do you believe brains also have functions outside of computing/information processing..?

Blake Richards Sep 13, 2023

@WorldImagining @NicoleCRust @awaisaftab @summerfieldlab @knutson_brain @Neurograce @eikofried

Strict identity - if we're using the broad definitions of computing and info processing from computer science, anything else implies magic/spirit.

Yogi Jaeger Sep 13, 2023

Cognition is not computation. It is an elaboration of organismic agency, which is not of an algorithmic nature. There is nothing magical about that.

You're fundamentally misinterpreting Turing's theory of computation, which was always about the human act of computing, not about the brain or the world. Turing would turn in his grave if he would hear you.

Some historical context: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/church-turing.

This may also help: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.07515.
Longer paper coming soon!

The Church-Turing Thesis (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Blake Richards Sep 13, 2023

@yoginho

Respectfully, I disagree. I don't think you're accurately summarising computability theory, nor the implications for neuroscience.

As Yoshua Bengio once said to someone at a workshop I was at (paraphrasing):

"Computation just means physics. Saying the brain is a computer is just a way of saying that it is a physical device. I don't even know what a non-computational theory of the brain means, unless you're talking about magic."

Blake Richards Sep 13, 2023

@yoginho

Remember, as the very article from the Philosophy Encyclopedia describes, the original goal of both Turing and Church was simply to formalise the idea of an "effective method", i.e. a mechanical way of solving a problem.

If the Church-Turing thesis holds, then any problem that a mechanical (i.e. purely physical) system can solve represents a computable function, and the object implementing it is engaged in a computation.

Did you know that this argument only came up with Deutsch and Lloyd in the 1980/90s? Before that, nobody (including Church & Turing) ever thought that it would be reasonable to apply the term "computation" to physics.

So, no: it's you, not me who's misreading Turing. Effective computation means literally "something a human being can do by rote" (i.e. calculating, scheduling, optimizing). In Church & Turing's 30s papers, a computer is a (usually underpaid, female) human.

Yogi Jaeger

Church & Turing, as long as they lived, were fiercely opposed to applying the theory of computation to the brain or physics.

Computation is a tiny fraction of what our human brain does, and is not at all what the brain evolved for.

Is physics computation? No! You fail to see the difference between simulating a mechanism (a model of the world) and the claim that the world *is* a computer. The latter implies that physical mechanisms have symbolic content, which is absurd.

Plus (and that is the argument in my upcoming paper): organisms use their brains to deal with a large world, in which most problems are not formally defined (hence not computable), Before you can solve a problem using computation, you need to formalize it. This is called relevance realization. This process cannot itself be formalized. This is why how we come to know the world is fundamentally different from how algorithms solve problems.

Basically, the category mistake you make (it's called the equivalence fallacy) is that you mistake the map for the territory, your model for the real world.

That's what computationalism is. Since the 1980s (no earlier) we've slid into the deluded opinion (esp. in the fields of cognitive neuroscience & AI) that the world is a computer.

It's a dangerous view, that leads people like Bengio & many others to take on really foolish views about AGI.

Ultimately, it is computationalism (and its other reductionist-mechanistic relatives) that are causing our delusion that we can control and manipulate a predictable world.

I may sound a little hyperbolic, but the kind of worldview you are propagating here is likely to kill us all, unless we learn to realize the world for what it is, large, ill-defined, fundamentally unpredictable & beyond our grasp.

Computationalism is delusion of grandeur. The ultimate human foolishness.

P.S. I find it really difficult to discuss this with computationalists.

Since you live inside your model, and think there is nothing outside (see also your Bengio quote), you are completely blind to what is obviously quite a different reality your live in.

Computationalism is a comforting illusion for those who like their world tidy & predictable. They tend to fiercely refuse to embrace the fact that there is so much beyond mechanism in the world.