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Comment by Sweetness | Hacker News Reader

> How can one turn the sinking, horrified feeling when one loses a love into a function?"

The same way the brain does. Those complex feelings can eventually be resolved into dumb neurophysics. Love, fear, anxiety etc. al are just electrical impulses tickling chemicals. Is there anything in our brains that we could never approximate with technology?

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We've had technology like poetry, art, and music for thousands of years, and yet no symbolic description of the feeling can contain the feeling of what it's uniquely like for me. Even though we could try and model the brain, say, functionalist models fail to capture qualia as it doesn't reduce to behaviour. To replicate the brain fully in a computer would need a full description of its chemistry and physics, along with that of the greater universe, which we don't have, and to describe it coherently to simulate it is a problem of the order of magnitude more difficult than ones we're going to be able to code for the foreseeable future.

I agree that it'll be while before we fully understand the brain but I don't have any doubts that we'll get there eventually. I am curious though, why would we need to understand the greater universe perfectly as well?

Where does the brain get its inputs from? These computational models are based on an ontology where the brain is an isolated box separate from the universe, which is only one of the many philosophical outlooks argued over. For example, most schools of Buddhist philosophy would regard this separation as entirely the wrong picture of the world.

This is my view as well. It's a little unnerving and it definitely starts to overlap with the whole "free will" debate, but yeah, I don't see any reason why we can't fundamentally replicate the behaviors exhibited by the brain. It doesn't violate any laws of physics.

Philosophers have debated this since at least ancient greece. It's hardly a solved question, and about a third do believe that there is something in our brain that we could never approximate with technology.

Have any of that third put up any testable theories about that something? Or are there leading theories as to what the something might be?

If a philosopher had a testable theory I don't think they'd be a philosopher anymore.

This assumes that there is no free will however :)

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