Brains are not computers, and brains were not the model for computers.
Formal logic and the Turing machine were the model for computers.
Turing and Church did not invent computers based on their careful study of human biology and physiology.
Formal logic and the Turing machine were the model for computers.
Turing and Church did not invent computers based on their careful study of human biology and physiology.
Obviously, the Turing-Church thesis didn't have anything to do with brains. It does, however, have very important implications about our ambition to create human-like artificial minds.
Also, I'm sure that theoretically optimal "intelligence program" on silicon processors is vastly different from organic ones. They may share a lot, but the constraints are just so vastly different including the most important ones like energy efficiency or space availability.
That's not impossible! For example, it's easy to find algorithms that a computer can carry out without error that a human mind would really struggle with. Although this is a case of computational resources, rather than the expressive power of the computational apparatus, it's still the case that it's not always possible to find programs that both humans and computers can compute in practice.
So it may even be that, while computers can run some programs very efficiently, that humans can't, it's the other way around also and computers can't efficiently run the programs that humans can.
In which case of course, either the entire AI enterprise is doomed to failure, or we get lucky and there is some other way to do intelligence that is available to computers but not humans. Who knows!
Our current computers function almost nothing like human brains.
All we can say, is that we can write some programs now that give similar output to humans for certain well defined, limited problems. But even then, the mechanism via which those outputs are produced are very, very different.
The mistake is assuming machines that can perform tasks better than humans, will be essentially "like" humans in some fundamental, profound way. There is no reason to believe this is true. These machines may be able to mimic us very well, but their true underlying nature, their goals, ambitions, subjective experience, and values could be very, very different from us in ways that could be very unpleasant for us.
With respect, but I never said anything about computers functioning like human brains. What I said is that computers and minds can compute the same class of programs. I make no assumptions about underlying function.
>> The mistake is assuming machines that can perform tasks better than humans, will be essentially "like" humans in some fundamental, profound way.
I never stated any similar assumption either.
I think you're responding to some opinion that I didn't express.