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Comment by Tao3300 | Hacker News Reader

> Hypothesis 1: Human-level intelligence is possible because brains are biological machines.

> Rejecting hypothesis 1 would require either some supernatural ingredient behind our intelligence or rejecting computational functionalism, the hypothesis that our intelligence and even our consciousness can be boiled down to causal relationships and computations that at some level are independent of the hardware substrate, the basic hypothesis behind computer science and its notion of universal Turing machines.

I think I'm going to stop there. I can reject that hypothesis without woo, and without rejecting the entirety of computer science. Maybe the rest of it is a decent read, but that run-on argument is confused/dishonest and makes a poor foundation to build his position on.

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You made no argument whatsoever. You just said that you reject it.

The reason that people reject this is almost always because of a worldview that incorporates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind%E2%80%93body_dualism

But you're stuck in sort of meta duality yourself: you assert a distinction between reality and phenomena (such as consciousness). Did we actually -prove- that consciousness can not be a property of reality and is mere emergent phenomenon as YB and company claim? (note: consciousness =/= intelligence. Our little black boxes are at best approaching 'intelligence'.)

YB starts off with ~'we all agree mind is a product of the brain'. No, we do not all agree. Did we ever find the 'bottom' of matter? Has are search to find 'irreducible particle' succeeded? Is it not the case that as we threw more energy into our apparatus we found more elementary matter? Did we in fact finally arrive at a coherent unified model that fully explains material reality without "mathematical woo"?

So the honest position is that we have patchwork understanding of reality at various scales, and the reductionist program of Democritus et al has not been conclusively shown to be the ultimate truth. It seems that mind is bounded by the body but that 'boundary condition' depends on various reductionist assumptions about materiality.

I didn't assert anything except for what was in the comment. I linked to the Wikipedia article which has a lot of different viewpoints.

If anything I was just trying to suggest that the mind (or soul) and body aren't completely separate things as some religious or pre-scientific viewpoints might hold (touched on in part of the Wikipedia article I linked to).

Maybe I didn't do a great job of stating where I was coming from.

You sound like Donald Hoffman when he was on the Lex podcast. I agreed with a lot of things he said.. I mean the idea that literally reducing things to smaller and smaller particles is not the ultimate explanation of things makes total sense. Along with the idea of using these mathematical exotic geometries instead or something.

Where he loses me is going from embryos to humans that are somehow dictating the shape of reality. We have great explanations for development and evolution. But there doesn't seem to be a good explanation at all for how fully formed minds somehow shape reality in the past. Or how this works with less intelligent life.

> I didn't assert anything except for what was in the comment.

That seems to be the case. I take that assert back.

p.s. just checked out the wiki for Donald Hoffman. Thank you for the reference, TIL. Have to listen to that podcast, but have some idea what are the problematic open Qs that you mention. [I'm not apparently not allowed to vote on hn so take my +1 in spirit ..]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36043188

The onus isn't on me, but the descendent comments from eternalban and azeirah have plenty of good argument.

Also, mochomocha underscores the more important half of it.

Yep. "confused" is also how most of his regular papers read to me anyway.

I didn't know what "computational functionalism" was, but after reading about it I don't see how it is remotely the "basic hypothesis behind computer science".

> can reject that hypothesis without woo, and without rejecting the entirety of computer science.

On what basis do you reject the hypothesis? You didn't say

Unfortunately, even if you take out "consciousness" the argument still holds. Reminds me of OpenAI's experiments in DotA when people claimed that the AI wasn't really playing that game. Fair enough in a sense, but if it was bots v. humans there was a 99% chance that humans lose.

It doesn't matter whether the opponent is "really" doing something. The humans are going to get crushed. Consolation prize that we can go to our doom claiming that the robot economy isn't as spiritual as its antecedents.

> I can reject that hypothesis without woo

How?

Some possibilities are

1) Complexity of the human brain is higher than we thought, reproducing the complexity necessary for human-level intelligence is further into the future than we initially expected.

2) Intelligence is bound by size/capabilities of a body. (ie, input & output). If you want human-level intelligence, you'll need a human-level robot too (not impossible).

That also means if you want a god-like AI, you need to have the inputs/outputs (body) of a god too.

3) Human brains are _not_ biological machines. They're biological -paradigm we have not discovered yet-. The idea of computation itself is limited by something we cannot "just" reproduce with engineering.

I doubt this, but it's not impossible that the brain employs totally physical phenomena that are basically impossible to reproduce outside of biology. Why? Because biology is something fundamentally different from engineering.

Doesn't mean we can't control biology, but still.

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The real hypothesis is: Human-level intelligence is possible because it exists. Our best understanding of how human-level intelligence works is with the model of a "biological machine". We assume that it is possible to replicate this biological machine in the near or somewhat distant future as our understanding of engineering, biology and intelligence grows. This replication will have the same or similar intelligence-characteristics as a human.

How do you reject it?

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