Comment by voidhorse

Comment by voidhorse 14 hours ago

4 replies

But that acknowledgement would itself lend Searle's argument credence because much of the brain = computer thesis depends on a fundamental premise that both brains and digital computers realize computation under the same physical constraints; the "physical substrate" doesn't matter (and that there is necessarily nothing special about biophysical systems beyond computational or resource complexity) (the same thinking by the way, leads to arguments that an abacus and a computer are essentially "the same"—really at root these are all fallacies of unwarranted/extremist abstraction/reductionism)

The history of the brain computer equation idea is fascinating and incredibly shaky. Basically a couple of cyberneticists posed a brain = computer analogy back in the 50s with wildly little justification and everyone just ran with it anyway and very few people (Searle is one of those few) have actually challenged it.

vidarh 7 hours ago

Unless you can show an example of how we can compute something that is not Turing computable, there is no justification for the inverse, as the inverse would require something in the brain to be capable of interactions that can not be simulated. And we've no evidence to suggest either that the brain can do something not Turing computable or of the presence of something in the brain that can't be simulated.

ozy 9 hours ago

Maybe consciousness is exactly like simulated fire. It does a lot inside the simulation, but is nothing on the outside.

lo_zamoyski 13 hours ago

> The history of the brain computer equation idea is fascinating and incredibly shaky. Basically a couple of cyberneticists posed a brain = computer analogy back in the 50s with wildly little justification and everyone just ran with it anyway and very few people (Searle is one of those few) have actually challenged it.

And something that often happens whenever some phenomenon falls under scientific investigation, like mechanical force or hydraulics or electricity or quantum mechanics or whatever.