1. "The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim." - Edsger Dijkstra
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2021-July/086...
In contrast, humans are arguably the only creatures in the universe that can think. Certainly we have never discovered a creature that can think better than a human. Thus it would be highly exciting if we discovered or created one.
I'm not an expert in brains. After taking a few casual courses I saw recommended here, and reading some of the books, I'm suspicious that our story about our own intelligence is somewhat oversold, and we may find that our intelligence is 99% mundane, custom-built automation and 1% story telling. But that story telling is pretty magical.
Buddhism and Modern Psychology
Happiness Hypothesis (which is more about brains than happiness)
Citation very strongly required to back up this statement. I'm not aware of any evidence that this is the case, in fact its quite the opposite.
Frankly, one of reasons I visit HN is to find these. ;)
Flattering aside, what fascinates me is the difference in thinking - a new approaches, not seen or thought by me.
How does a young creature observe an elder doing something, and then copy it, without some form of thought occurring? It seems the elders are teaching the youth, and the youth are learning, but I'm not sure how that can happen without thinking.
Something about that quote always bothers me. I'm not sure what, but if I were to try to express the same fundamental idea, I would probably phrase it as "whether a bicycle can walk".
A submarine "swims" in the same way an airplane "flies."
But for some reason, in English anyway, we seem to define "swim" such that, by definition, only an animal can do it. Or at least, it must behave similarly to a swimming animal...such as by flapping fins and the like.
Meanwhile we don't think an airplane doesn't fly simply because it doesn't flap its wings.
The point is that semantics tells you very little about reality. And debating semantics is not particularly interesting, or at least a good way of missing the point.
Walking bicycles? Well, ok. That's much more of a stretch, partly because of the fact that there is a human much more directly involved in the propulsion of a bicycle compared to things with actual engines (airplanes and submarines)
And you might say "well, define 'think' ". In other words, that's not that interesting a question, since it is more about semantics than about reality.
Or you say it as Djykstra did, which I think is pretty clever.
And yes, your example about how words differ in different languages does a good job of explaining how this is just semantics. If a question becomes moot in a different language, it is a good indicator that the question is less about reality than it is about semantics.
Not sure what he meant by that, it doesn't really make sense to me: thinking yields information and deductions that can be very useful, while swimming by itself accomplishes nothing useful.
Actually, I just can't make any sense of the sentence, because while I have a general idea of what a thinking machine could be, I have no clue what it means for a submarine to "swim", versus whatever the alternative is ("self-propelling"?).
What's the difference? The only difference is semantic, we seem to have defined "swimming" to be arbitrarily restrictive (as in, only applying to animals), while we haven't done so for flying.
Meanwhile, we can say a magnet is attracted to metal, and no one says "wait, it can't ACTUALLY be attracted to it, since that takes a brain and sentience and preferences."
And then, most of us don't bat an eye if someone says "my computer thinks the network is down" or "my phone doesn't recognize my face" or even "the heater blowing on the thermostat is making it think it is hotter than it is." It's not helpful to interject with, "well, thermostats don't really think."
The point is, these are arbitrary choices of how we define words (which may vary in different languages), and they aren't saying meaningful things about reality.