It's probably already been discussed at length on this list, and if it has my apologies, but isn't the incredibly massive parallelism of the brains architecture a possible factor and that the mind is an emergent phenomena made possible by amongst other things the subtle interplay of neuron firing networks dynamically racing back and forth in the brain - all the time and on a scale that is hard to begin to even grasp. Can anyone really say that the possible transient branches a dynamic and itself transient network of neural activity can really be determined by any possible program no matter how detailed? Throw in mirror neurons and the subtle dynamic effects that these networks within networks produce as they interact with the other manifesting waves of neural activity that precede our conscious awareness.
Isn't it possible that very subtle and surprising unexpected effects can emerge from a network as vast and multi centered as the neural nets seem to be in brains. Brains also introduce the layer of chemical signal processing - neurotransmitters. A lot of subtle effects could emerge out of this interface (trillions of synaptic connections mediated by this very rapid wet chemical process). The mind emerges from the brain, but it is not reducible to the brain; as water emerges from the elements Oxygen and Hydrogen, but is not reducible to them - i.e. cannot be fully described only by knowing about its constituent atoms. When networks become vast and offer a huge number of paths by which signals may travel often subtle interactions can occur as messages are bounced around and changed from node to node. Different and often potentially random network paths enlisted in in participating in rapidly forming and dissolving massively parallel consensus building algorithms - which I believe is being shown to be an important factor in how the physical brain operates - could produce different outcomes that could affect whether and how a quorum is arrived at and the ultimate outcome of any given single dynamic instance of a thought wave (the waves upon waves, upon waves of synchronized neural firings that go into even a single simple thought is an astronomically huge number of atomic calculations and state changes) The brain is also very noisy place - the signal to noise ratio is low. A huge error rate, compared with computer architecture which wastes huge amounts of energy to achieve a very low error rate in its basic logic gates (a lot more energy is used than the threshold value for flipping a gate in order to lower the error rate to almost zero). The brain must be dealing with a lot of bad - or random - signals. And in general is not the brain computational architecture very different from computer machine architecture, and different on a lot of orthogonal levels. It seems like this is the place to begin looking; and as a corollary that one needs to be careful when using computational terminology for describing the brain/mind because computers are architecturally so very different from our 20 watt 100 trillion connection machines. -Chris From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of meekerdb Sent: Wednesday, August 21, 2013 3:32 PM To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: When will a computer pass the Turing Test? On 8/21/2013 2:42 PM, Quentin Anciaux wrote: Ok, and I'm fascinated by the question of why we haven't found viable algorithms in that class yet -- although we know has a fact that it must exist, because our brains contain it. We haven't proved our brain is computational in nature, if we had, then we would had proven computationalism to be true... it's not the case. Maybe our brain has some non computational shortcut for that, maybe that's why AI is not possible, maybe our brain has this "realness" ingredient that computations alone lack. I'm not saying AI is not possible, I'm just saying we haven't proved that "our brains contain it". There's another possibility: That our brains are computational in nature, but that they also depend on interactions with the environment (not necessarily quantum entanglement, but possibly). When Bruno has proposed replacing neurons with equivalent input-output circuits I have objected that while it might still in most cases compute the same function there are likely to be exceptional cases involving external (to the brain) events that would cause it to be different. This wouldn't prevent AI, but it would prevent exact duplication and hence throw doubt on ideas of duplication experiments and FPI. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
