Humans are very good at pretending we are more than just biological machines acting according to genetically imposed network structure refined by lifetime history of training inputs.
By using “just” you’ve already asserted that there is nothing more of relative importance to figure out—it’s done, figured out.
Contrast that with the arrogance of creating a neural network in your garage and thinking to yourself: “well I guess as a side-effect of this all of existence makes sense now.”
If they do research and this viewpoint works for them then who am I to judge.
I’m more used to this viewpoint being presented when someone who doesn’t work in some area expresses some opinion (hot take) on it. That could be a physicist expressing an opinion on cognitive science e.g. (whatever cognitive science is about).
> Physicalists do continue to do research of the natural world, in fact, that is actually what drives them more toward physicalism!
I don’t understand what physicalism is supposed to be about[1] beyond explicitly denying God-of-the-gaps.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsLOVYTLt90
> I think you are arguing a strawman, since no one said anything about being arrogant.
Just like no one identified themselves as being arrogant because they believe that they are more than physical structures. Or even claimed that they believe that they are more than physical structures. (The reductionists will often barge in an identify anyone who disagrees with their opinion as someone who believes in the supra-physical, based on nothing.)
Seems like your comments are responding to a point in your head without anyone expressing such points. No one here is like the physicist in your example, so I am not even sure against whom you are arguing here.
Again I urge the reductionists[1] to look in the mirror.
> No one here is like the physicist in your example, so I am not even sure against whom you are arguing here.
Unless the original poster is a relevant expert like a biologist[2] the point stands.
You already agreed that it is thought-terminating—and justifiably so. I don’t get why you are still here.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41054500
[2] Or could range all the way to a psychologist because it’s a pretty broad topic.
And if the point is so narrow as to be about Free Will then I don’t know why people are being coy and talking about input-output machines, washing machines and whatever. Just say that Free Will is not real. Then you get 70% less pushback.
[1] No one here is going to argue for Cartesian Dualism. So the only way that it will come up as a supposedly “live” belief is if someone else accuses them of being a crypto-cartesian because of whatever reasons…
The discovery of evolution in nature, for example, could be seen (and was seen by Darwin as) an increase in the wonder and awe we can find in the world.
Dualism is probably one of the most intellectually destructive ideas we've managed to come up with.
Using that as a metaphor is telling in itself, as we're far from being (just) "biological computers".
What part is? Or rather, how can you show that we are not? Note that I use "computer" in the general sense, that which computes, by taking in input and emitting output.
> The focus of research at BCL was systems theory and specifically the area of self-organizing systems, bionics, and bio-inspired computing; that is, analyzing, formalizing, and implementing biological processes using computers. BCL was inspired by the ideas of Warren McCulloch and the Macy Conferences, as well as many other thinkers in the field of cybernetics.
1969 zine from BCL students, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34825918
2003 essay collection, "Understanding Understanding", http://www.alice.id.tue.nl/references/foerster-2003.pdf
In the late 1940s a group of people had begun meeting every year in New York under the auspices of the Josiah Macy Foundation to discuss “circular causal and feedback mechanisms” .. The group included Norbert Wiener, who had coined the term “cybernetics”; Claude Shannon, the inventor of information theory; Warren McCullough, one of the leading neuropsychiatrists—he called himself an “experimental epistemologist”; Gregory Bateson, the philosopher and anthropologist; his wife Margaret Mead, the anthropologist who made Samoa famous; John von Neuman, one of the people who started the computer revolution..Trying to come up with a compelling reason for why we're not "biological computers" (and this "trying" in itself is half-giving away of one's point in this types of discussions) would involve long discussions going all the way back to the French Enlightenment and the likes of La Mettrie, not sure any online discussion would get to the end of it.
This is part of why I don't see any compelling evidence why we are not biological computers, much as it pains people to admit so.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set_theory
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necessity_and_sufficiency
Plus, there are identifiable differences (disproving the "just as"): LLM's can reliably acknowledge epistemic unsoundness in their prior claims without aversion and rhetoric.
You have not actually answered my question however, your comment is a deflection of what I'm asking, so I will ask again, why are biological beings not considered computational? They do the same thing a general computer can do. And again, by "computer," I do not necessarily mean silicon-based, Von Neumann architecture computers.
1. What a strange comment.
2. They do support my answer to your question: "how one cannot say that biological machines compute "just as"(!) silicon based computers do"
> Yes, while you can repeat something often enough for it to appear true, it may not actually be true; this is a vacuous statement that does not need to be stated
It is directly related to your question, and the underlying phenomenon: human belief (more popularly known as: truth, the reality, etc).
> You have not actually answered my question however, your comment is a deflection of what I'm asking, so I will ask again, why are biological beings not considered computational?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41056319
"I am asking in the general sense how one cannot say that biological machines compute just as silicon based computers do."
That is the question I answered.
As for "Why are biological beings not considered computational?"
Well, consciousness (which implements "considering") is not understood, so it is unknown. But as my last link above describes, instances of can be made to function certain ways simply by good story telling. So in this case, maybe some chunk of the whole have heard that they are not computational.
> They do the same thing a general computer can do.
The ambiguity and misinformative of English (as we (or at least I) see here) is why I linked to Set Theory. Do you see the relevance?
If you're going to casually dismiss twenty years of funded research on the topic you asked about, then this is a self-regulating thread.
https://constructivist.info/riegler/pub/riegler05foerster.ht...
> Artificial neural networks were one of the “hot” topics at the BCL. They combine engineering.. and empirical science.. As early as in 1960, the BCL developed a neural network prototype called “Numa-Rete,” which could count objects irrespective of their shape and size.
https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=12098476
The reductionist eventually comes to know everything about nothing (by way of distinction) - the wholist eventually comes to know nothing about everything (by way of generalization).Again you misunderstand what I am asking for. There is no use in me asking for the color blue and you talking about the color red, then when I say, I am asking about blue, you tell me that there has been 20 years of research on red. That may be true but that is not what I am asking about.
Multiple, independent responses to your "question" have said almost the same thing. Good luck finding different answers.
If you want to move the conversation forward in your new thread, you can offer evidence of a positive claim, instead of asking others to provide evidence of a negative claim.
Both of our comments are equally aggressive since I mimicked the delivery.
> to defensive aggression against anything new and "threatening".
What’s new. You can take this back to Cartesian Dualism (or further) where animals where just “machines”. Same thing: oh we have these levers that we’ve made and understand, huh I guess rabbits and storks work the same because why not?
Chances are you are both equally wrong.
If you presuppose such things exist, of course we reach different conclusions.
And what part of that do people like to pretend is not the case (see OP)? That we have senses and that we act on sense information?
If input-output is the only message here then it’s a boring and obvious one.
Not really. Most people do not even believe this to be the case, hence my comments. They are thoroughly convinced that they are not machines like stated above whatsoever.
Which is precisely why I dislike them.
The core argument is one about the non-existence of free will and one many people reject as you were right to point out. The reasons vary from personal discomfort with the idea of not being in control, over religious ideas of souls, to basically falling for the illusion and defending it.
The more interesting question about determinism is in which way it is deterministic? Like the movement of the planets? Like the weather? Or like brownian motion? Probably a mix of all of those, but what mix?
And if everything is an input and output and any slight variation throws of the long term development of the system, there would be no way to test that theory with two separate human entities and no way to make accurate predictions on long time scales, which makes the whole point kinda moot.
Yes, as I stated, if you follow philosophers of the mind, they cover all of these aspects and more. It is hard for me to go in depth without rehashing their arguments so I will invite you to study them.
> there would be no way to test that theory with two separate human entities and no way to make accurate predictions on long time scales, which makes the whole point kinda moot.
Just because this is the case does not make it untrue. There are lots of things we cannot fully test with certainty (in the Locke epistemology sense) that we nevertheless assume to be true. This may or may not be one of these cases, but it does not make it "moot."
You could be even more reductive and just say we are chemical machines, or an agglomeration of molecules. Or that even the whole Universe is just a soup of vibrating energy. They aren't untrue but the reduction to such statements don't capture what emerges from.
The article has some extraordinary demands; radical openness, reflective practice, co-evolution, mentalisation... all things you'd associate with high emotional intelligence and hard inner work.
Some people just aren't up to that. Maybe we need to be able to say "that's okay". Humanists need not feel threatened by reductionists any more than reductionists need feel upset there is a bigger world "outside the test-tube".
Perhaps we should focus more on why some life-stances expressed by others feel uncomfortable for us.
What makes life enjoyable for me is exploring it so I've not found a dichotomy between a "humanist spiritual belief" and a "reductionist one". That's a smouldering flame war that started half a millennium back between Copernicus, Galileo and the church. May I suggest a cool read is "The Two Cultures." by C. P. Snow [1]. Snow thinks, as I do, that this artificial split holds humanity back. Albert Einstein is also a great study to get into this groove.
If I am objecting to anything (not sure if I am really) it is the strident certainty with which some who have explored part of the territory declare that there is nothing more to see. That applies to either side. Maybe there's stuff that would make the material facts of physics and biology that much more wonderful and enjoyable to behold.
[0] "The world is all that is the case" - Wittgenstein
Of course the downvoted comment is just speculation about people’s inner life and motivation. Just like the claim that it might
> [pain] people to admit
to your viewpoint is. Or “I really think it stems from religious biases”.
A possible missing step here. While maybe true for some, many of (the few) eccentric types I know grew up bullied or ostracized in some small ways and after repeated failings to "fit in" or please others expectations said f-this and embraced themselves. It still came about from others, but in a not so pleasant way
> unless they've been socially (or perhaps even physically) repressed