By AI he means mathematical equation. When you reword this to "Mathematical equation cannot be the inventor of a patent" it sounds obvious and stupid. And that's because it is. Of course an equation can't patent something.
Wait what? Source?
In terms of evidence: the simplest argument is probably that humans appear to consistently obey the laws of physics, and the laws of physics appear to be mathematical.
Until we have this technology should we adjust laws for hypotheticals? No.
We don’t have a complete theory of physics. We don’t have any viable models of human thought. This is a non sequitur.
You’ve reduced the question of whether our universe is deterministic, something the greatest minds in physics have debated for a century and continue to debate, to a sound bite. That’s disingenuous. There may be phenomena we cannot accurately model and predict for fundamental reasons that have nothing to do with the supernatural.
We are so far from scientifically understanding consciousness that we don’t even have an agreed-upon empirical definition for it, let alone a way to measure it. That gap in understanding undermines any claim that it can be modelled this way or that.
Consciousness is more interesting, and it boils down to the claim that there is something metaphysically and unverifiably (from the outside) special about humans. That sounds supernatural to me.
If this is the case why are you arguing on HN? Is it possible for you to leave the discussion? Is talking to you the same as dropping a ball and watching gravity pull it downwards?
I'm a little skeptical of your stochastic model of humanity as well. Statistical mechanics works because oxygen molecules don't go off and start religions and convince other oxygen molecules to behave radically differently for thousands of years (or at least we haven't ever seen it). In fact our stoachstic physical models, classical, semi-classical and quantum, kinda specifically preclude this. How would you design an equation to capture this real phenomenon in humans?
No you cannot, quantum effects are way more complex than just random chance effects. The quantum waves are particles in their own rights that flows and interacts with each other and itself, if you treat it as just a stochastic variable you don't get quantum effects.
Even with indestructible information, combined with locality at the big-bang, combined with a perfect fundamental physics, is there enough time/energy to compute that? Perhaps this is grasping at straws.
With regards to the law, you’re saying, because we assume that one day we should have a complete simulation of humans, or at least a model, therefore, we should update our laws NOW, to prepare for this?
A story of premature optimisation if I ever heard one.
It is possible you can make a good simulation of human thought without all of that, but we can't be certain.
> At first it may appear unlikely that a complex system with many degrees of freedom like the brain could be modelled with the right causal dynamics, but without taking into account the smallest parts … However, state variables of complex systems can be quantitatively predicted when there is ‘scale separation’: when different aspects of the system exist on sufficiently (orders of magnitude) different scales (of size, energy, time etc), they can become uncoupled … [an] example is the scale separation between electric currents and logic operations in a computer …
> When there is no scale separation (such as in fluid turbulence) macroscale predictions become impossible without simulating the entire microscale. An important issue to be determined is whether such a cut‐off exists in the case of the human brain … if it could be demonstrated that there is no such scale, it would demonstrate the infeasibility of whole brain emulation.
The FHI is assuming scale invariance in order to test it experimentally. We shouldn’t assume it for the purpose of analysing the roles played by humans and AI under IP legislation.
[1]: https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/brain-emulation-roadmap-report.pdf
It's a very common worldview among the tech set.
Edit: Uh, downvotes, really? I think it's totally reasonable to assume this as a given since it's, like, pretty obviously true. If anything the parent needs to provide their own extraordinary evidence for why consciousness would be non-computable. I'm just trying to provide some context for them to read up more on some stuff that apparently everyone but them (who has given it any thought) already knows about.
The algorithm we run on is special, but it's physically encoded and self generating, based in our DNA and physical development. We're vastly complex but entirely built of relatively simple fundamental building blocks.
We are computers, in the abstract sense of Turing machines and such concepts.
[citation needed]
I am not an expert, my understanding of neurons is largely is based on [0], [1], [2].
[0]: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/principles-neural-design
[1]: http://www.sci.utah.edu/~macleod/bioen/be6003/notes/W08-spru...
[2]: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/functional-connections-cortic...
Where an impulse comes from, when it is sent, the current charge state of the receiving neuron, the specific neurotransmitters released by the axons, and the efficiency of signal transmission at a given point in time all play a part in the signal sent along dendritic, but at any given point in time a neuron is firing or isn't, and that's the only state that matters to the other neurons it's connected to.
The biggest difference between biological brains and artificial neural networks is the analog nature of biological timing compared to the arbitrary cycles of software.
Spike timing dependent plasticity networks address some of the problem of variable timing and its impact on signaling.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spike-timing-dependent_plastic...
At any given moment, you could capture the state of a biological brain as a binary number. The model would need to account for all sorts of analog mechanisms and a huge, biologically messy graph of connections with dozens of variations across a handful of neuron types, and the length of a synapse and where it physically connects or touches other synapses without connecting directly and... lots of stuff that's hard to model and even hard to see.
I'm not arguing that every part is digital or even equivalent to computers on silicon, simply that the basic mechanism of computation is itself digital pattern processing. It literally cannot be anything else.
There is no evidence or theory to indicate any other plausible method of operation. All the analog stuff can be swapped out with an arbitrary bit length representation and the functionality is retained. Remove the digital assumption and everything breaks. You need magic or spirit to make it work, which is ridiculous because silicon computers proved that binary computation is a perfectly fine way to represent and process data. Quantum processing in biological brains is magical thinking performed in a desperate attempt to ascribe eminence to human cognition, because for some reason people don't like the idea that brains do digital processing.
We are messy and vastly complex and sophisticated digital pattern processors. Which makes evolutionary sense, because that's how our predecessors work, all the way back to single cell organisms and self replicating DNA chemistry.
Signals and patterns in the real world can be represented as binary to an arbitrary precision. The Planck length dictates the maximum level of precision relevant to our universe.
https://www.researchgate.net/post/How-many-bits-of-informati...
Human brains achieved a special state of depth and breadth of processing, concurrent with physically encoded, evolved algorithms in our neural architecture. The arrival of biology at human cognition affords us the privilege of deep reflection, the apparent subjective reality we experience, and the thus far unlimited scope of conception such that we can make approximations about the size of the universe or the mass of a photon. Or the operations of the minds we possess.
We operate in binary - the explanation is sufficient, simple, and corresponds to all known evidence. There aren't any outstanding questions requiring that premise to be questioned.
It's a superficial and unfounded observation that tries to frame neural computation as a bias or conceit of modern culture. Not how science works, and the argument is condescending as hell.
But I agree that it's a really shallow way to dismiss arguments. In this case, it's basically just saying that a brain is deterministic and made out of parts. Clockwork and steam engines and circuits all work fine. I can't comment on the catapult without more elaboration.
Without getting into the weeds too much, I just find the certainty of the systems line of thinking a little unfounded.
Consciousness is an algorithm performed by a computer with messy biological parts, some of which are analog, which may have serious implications for the level of strictly digital computer power you need to successfully implement the algorithm in silicon. The same applies to intelligence, and it's an open question as to what exactly the relationship between subjective experience and intelligence is.
You are a brain in a bone vat experiencing a subjective construct produced by a biological computer processing binary states consisting of internal feedback and sensory streams made entirely of patterns distinguished at any moment in time by the presence or absence of electrical impulses. Each neuron can be receiving a pattern of up to ten thousand individual bits, and whether the neuron fires or not depends on the current state and precise pattern of inputs.
Everything you experience, think, or do, is determined by those electrical patterns.
However, the universe doesn’t run on math, it runs on itself. Math is the best way we have to describe it at the moment. It used to be that divination was the best method. Why are you so certain math in it’s recognizable form today will be the method used to describe the universe in 100k years?
Our brains certainly do not run on binary. I think you might be confusing the information content, represented in bits, with the actual implementation. At the very least dendrites take in and mix signals of various strengths. The threshold for triggering and strength of the action potential are dependent on many chemicals signals. And that’s even a dated understanding which gave rise to the ideas of artificial neural networks. I’m sure the current understanding is much more complex and nuanced.
You brush off the analog parts as an implementation detail, when it could have very real implications for the computability of consciousness. The thing is, we don’t know.
But even all that is besides the point. The main point is, we don’t have the slightest idea how consciousness works. To the point that no one can even figure out how to ask the right questions about it.
In the face of such great uncertainty, it is anti-scientific to state with such conviction that you have the correct model. It’s fine to present it as a hypothesis, but the certainty is unfounded.
https://www.julianjaynes.org/resources/books/ooc/en/introduc...
The way he does it is quite compelling - we do make metaphors of the mind to current tech. This was written well before current computer neural networks, and gives a good account of the sound version of this argument.
From now on, nothing is my fault any more.
I can reduce all the music in the history of the world to the phrase "rhythm, melodies and lyrics". So? That'd say nothing about all that music, it'd just say something unflattering about me.
> It is not the greatest of modern scientists who feel most sure that the object, stripped of its qualitative properties and reduced to mere quantity, is wholly real. Little scientists, and little unscientific followers of science, may think so. The great minds know very well that the object, so treated, is an artificial abstraction, that something of its reality has been lost.
-- C.S. Lewis
There is no scientific evidence whatsoever for this very bold claim.
The only escape hatch is to assert that humans can't be described by physics.
Or that there is some physics that can’t be described by computation. It seems vanishingly unlikely, but there is no actual proof that everything physical is computable. And even if there was, it probably has nothing do do with minds.