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Comment by bondarchuk | Hacker News Reader

I was skimming past the examples of other theories which turned out to be wrong, in order to get to the meat of the argument, but before I could detect any such meat the article had already ended.

Maybe instead these conscious experiences come from some kind of self-organization. The computation we associate with these sensations could be simply an invention of our own to explain the mechanism of sentience, not the primary cause of it.

What is meant with "some kind of self-organization", and, crucially, why couldn't it be considered a form of computation?

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The author is Rodney Brooks [1] so I assume he's aware that it can be considered a form of computation, and probably would agree that it can be simulated using a computer (just as Newtonian mechanics can). But my guess is that he's asking whether that level of abstraction will turn out to be the most scientifically useful way of understanding how cognition actually works. After all, cognition could also be described as interactions of atoms - but trying to understand it in those terms is unlikely to yield much insight.

But it is certainly true that the article is pretty uninformative and superficial!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodney_Brooks

Yeah, a proper refutation of the idea that cognition is computation is going to have a VERY difficult time addressing the fact that computation and information theory are VERY fundamental physics, right down there with entropy, thermodynamics, and causality.

I just don't see how you can possibly get around that without figuratively introducing fairies. More susinctly: if it's not that, I think it's going to involve a proposal that involves something outside of observed physics which puts it on very dubious ground.

If you don't accept that, you have some really fundamental truths you're going to have to explain around.

1. By all measures, cognition is intimately associated with the physical brain (and the fundamental forces, chemistry, and emergent phenomenon of a functioning brain). This is basically irrefutable by every measurement and understanding of physics that we have. We can even use drugs, strong electric or magnetic fields, or physical stimulation to interrupt and alter that cognition.

2. Computation itself is such a fundamental notion involving information and operations on that information that most emergent phenomenon you could propose will almost necessarily meet the definition of computation.

Now... exactly what TYPE of computation is an interesting question: is it equivalent to a turing machine? To this, I don't know, but I suspect so. There are many other viable computational models though that likely fit the bill if this fails.

Something I feel more and more is that a lot of our brain capability is related to whatever form of memory exists in it. Things are hard if you can't remember them fully, you're smart if you can absorb a lot.

Space/Density/Regularity (self similarity helping here) are somehow universal I believe.

Equating brain capacity to memory cannot be further from the truth. The joy of being intelligent is that one can pull out things from thin air without remembering anything.

Equating is stronger than what I said. I simply claimed that space/memory is a huge part of what brain function is.

And those who can come up with totally new, orthogonal ideas may just have a better compressor :p

> Yeah, a proper refutation of the idea that cognition is computation is going to have a VERY difficult time addressing the fact that computation and information theory are VERY fundamental physics, right down there with entropy, thermodynamics, and causality.

That’s not at all a given. Our models tell us nothing about the true nature of what they describe, they merely let us make predictions whose accuracy is limited by the congruence of the model with observation up to available computing capacity. Quantum Electrodynamics, which is arguably science’s greatest triumph for agreement between model and observation, doesn’t mean that photons are actually members of the computable subset of C.

It’s not surprising to see man with a hammer syndrome about computation among programmers. It’s an easy trap to fall into and I try hard not to.

Given that Steven Wolfram wants to model the entire universe as a computation, the idea that one would need to refute the idea that one could form a computational model of cognition seems a little silly. You can build a computational model of more or less anything at this point, and "this is not computational" is a red herring.

The question, as other commenters have pointed out, is not whether cognition IS computation, but whether or not a computational model of cognition is the best way to understand it.

I actually laughed out loud at the end of the article.

"This long held theory that is certainly vague and fuzzy but is as concrete as we currently know how to make it could be wrong! What if, instead, bargle fluzzle emergent momble self-organization bazamble magrile?"

What if, indeed.

At the 20th century, science evolved in a way that now every scientific theory must be described computationally. (It's actually the most flexible way we ever had, so there's no loss there.)

So, yes, the entire exercise looks meaningless to me too. If we get a theory it will be computational. And that tells absolutely nothing.

You can consider the gradient-following of water when acted upon by gravity a "gradient calculation" but I think it would be deeply misleading.

"the article had already ended"

I had this very same experience.

I was about to post the same thing. Self-organisation maps seem a classical computational model to me. If the author’s point was that computational models should be biologically plausible, there are many other examples as well. I’ve never really understood what neuroscientists are talking about…

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