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Comment by Veedrac | Hacker News Reader

If I've understood this article correctly, the thesis is that we should avoid trying to understand the mind, because understanding the mind is inevitably about controlling and subverting human behaviour to worse ends, and that it also legitimizes those ends by dehumanizing people.

I am, mind, not totally sure I have understood the article, because the article is not written very clearly, as the point is never stated without vagueness and allusion. Perhaps this comes from the author's worries about the negative effects of understanding things.

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This reminds me of the typical criticisms that Daniel Dennett[0] has faced throughout the decades where he tried to argue the point that we can talk about consciousness through similar tools as those of computation (amongst other things) and that there isn't a reason to put humans on a magical pedestal of immunity from further understanding.

There's some anchored belief that humans are somehow sacred beyond understanding and that logic that we happily apply to a cricket or a star has to be thrown out the window when we try to touch the sanctity of humanity. I recall Dennett pointing out how starting from Descartes the whole meme of the person within your brain doing things (present day example: see Pixar's Inside Out) is a way to put a wall around the thing that scientists want to poke at for more understanding. The guy turning switches in the brain is God, and you just can't test it and should accept it as gospel, i.e. the "don't question God" type of thing.

Making the unknown a thing from beyond is how we (used to) avoid being scared of death too. I've always been wary of that attitude, and the tech world is not immune to that by the way (these days a good one is "don't question the absolute power of technology to solve the climate crisis").

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Dennett#Philosophy_of_m...

> I recall Dennett pointing out how starting from Descartes the whole meme of the person within your brain doing things

I like Dennett's coinage for this error of reasoning: the Cartesian theater. If a theory of mind relies upon some inner mind, it hasn't explained the mind at all.

edit I see it has its own Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartesian_theater

A particularly choice quote from Dijkstra here:

"The question of whether machines can think is about as relevant as the question of whether submarines can swim."

In this case I guess it's the other way around, but the sentiment still stands.

Dijkstra, who valued rigor, was apparently greatly irritated by loose talk of computers as thinking machines and the use of teleological language in discussing them (in the sense of attributing purposes to programs, rather than their creators), so this quote could just be a reaction to that. If, on the other hand, it was offered in the spirit of "(artificial) machines could not possibly think, because thinking is something only (human) animals can do", that would just be a way of avoiding the question.

It could also be the case the human mind transcends computation, i.e. a transfinite, yet limited, halting oracle, and as such is logically impossible to reduce to a Turing machine. To insist this is not the case merely based on materialism is begging the question. It is a very simple and formally rigorous point, but gets obscure by high fallutin philosophical language like "reductionism".

Is there any reason to believe that the human mind has these amazing computation-transcending powers? What would be the mechanism behind it?

Unless there is evidence for these suggested special powers of the human mind, it looks to me like another instance of Russell's teapot.

Programming is one of the most obvious. Mathematics is another. Human success in both is easiest to explain if we are halting oracles of some variety, albeit not perfect, but still transfinite.

So you don't have any concrete examples, just broad topics that you have a vague feeling about?

I guess I am not truly human because I can't solve the halting problem in the general case. I'm probably also subject to Gödel's incompleteness theorem.

Programming is concrete. Programmers have to reliably determine if their code will halt or not to make functioning software.

Mathematics is concrete and mathematicians have to reliably create new consistent axioms to expand our mathematical knowledge.

Notice that the fact you too are subject to Gödel's theorem does not entail you are a Turing machine. There is an oracle hierarchy where each level has its own halting problem and a higher level oracle. This does not cause the hierarchy to collapse. So even though humans have their own halting problem does not entail they are reducible to Turing machines.

It is a subtle point of logic, but one I see many people miss, even philosophers and computer scientists who attempt to refute oracle arguments.

Well, depends on your moral strictures.

A functional understanding of how someone else thinks whether on a personal basis or more generally or categorically is useful and actionable information.

What you do with that is up to you, but if you’re not using information, someone else is.

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