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Comment by 29athrowaway | Hacker News Reader

We do plenty of number crunching all the time, just not consciously.

Like the inverse kinematics required for your arm and fingers to move.

I’d argue we aren’t solving those inverse kinematics / kinetics via “number crunching” - but rather that our neuromuscular systems are analog. Which I don’t usually call that “number crunching” in the sense current computers … compute.

As a psychologist, I completely agree. It absolutely is NOT number crunching. Analog computation is primary and dominant in animals. It has to be, for so many reasons. I continue to be amazed at how much IT people do NOT grasp human and animal IT. And that, I would argue, is why so many IT folks keep talking about our supposedly approaching human intelligence in technology. If they really understood human intelligence the absurdity of that statement would keep them quiet. An elegant, artful puppet is still a puppet, and without the personal history context and consciousness we possess, not to mention a vast complex of analogue computation functionality we rely upon, that puppet will only ever be a clever number-cruncher. We are so much more.

Are our brains "analog"? Or are they in fact "digital"? I would think actually more digital than analog. A synapse triggers or it does not trigger. It either triggers or not, not something in between. In this sense it is 0 or 1.

Similarly transistor-based logic is based on such thresholds, when current or voltage reaches a certain level then a state-transition happens.

Well, no, synapses aren't binary in response.

Would you say it's more memorization than actual calculations? It certainly feels like it, when say riding a bike.

Neurons aren't crunching numbers for inverse kinematics.

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