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Comment by SEMW | Hacker News Reader

The human brain, like everything else, ultimately runs on the laws of physics. If the laws of physics can be simulated on a computer, then the brain is theoretically simulatable on a computer. So any argument that a computer cannot even in theory do some thing that a human mind can do must be flawed, unless the assumption that of the simulatability of physics is wrong.

(This particular instance is thinly veiled question-begging; it takes as its assumption that a human mind is special ("A defining aspect of the human mind is its ability to create mutual information"), and proceeds to conclude exactly what it just assumed. See also: sloppy dualism — http://goodmath.scientopia.org/2013/01/17/sloppy-dualism-den... )

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Or, the mind is not the brain. No one has ever proven it is.

Sure, of course. That's a philosophical position known as Dualism[0].

The trouble is that what the author has done is base their argument on an assumption of dualism, but not made that assumption explicit. If made more explicit, the question-begging becomes more obvious: "If we assume there is something special and meta-physical about the human mind which is not replicable anywhere else, then artificial intelligence is impossible". Well, yeah. But putting it that way doesn't make for a very dramatic article...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind%E2%80%93body_dualism

Author here. I would not say I am making the assumption that dualism is true, merely that it is a possible explanation. Given the human mind generates a whole lot of mutual information, seems dualism might be a good explanation in this case. There are also other possibilities. At any rate, the possibility the mind is a Turing machine is excluded by the premise that it creates mutual information.

I don't know, it looks like the conservation of mutual information is like the fact that entropy always remains constant or increases. This is true for the overall universe, but not true for individuals.

A human isn't some magical entropy reducer -- we reduce entropy in ourselves by increasing it elsewhere. I suspect mutual information works the same way.

That is a good insight. The law does seem similar to the 2nd law of thermodynamics. The form of the free energy formula looks a lot like mutual information.

So, this could go two ways. Either humans are not net entropy reducers, and also not information creators. Or, they are information creators, and thus are net entropy reducers. Not sure there is evidence the latter is false.

A broader point is that regardless of whether the human mind is an entropy reducer, something in existence is an information creator/entropy reducer, otherwise we wouldn't have information/low entropy to begin with.

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