"In his book In Our Own Image (2015), the artificial intelligence expert George Zarkadakis describes six different metaphors people have employed over the past 2,000 years to try to explain human intelligence.
In the earliest one, eventually preserved in the Bible, humans were formed from clay or dirt, which an intelligent god then infused with its spirit. That spirit ‘explained’ our intelligence – grammatically, at least.
The invention of hydraulic engineering in the 3rd century BCE led to the popularity of a hydraulic model of human intelligence, the idea that the flow of different fluids in the body – the ‘humours’ – accounted for both our physical and mental functioning. The hydraulic metaphor persisted for more than 1,600 years, handicapping medical practice all the while.
By the 1500s, automata powered by springs and gears had been devised, eventually inspiring leading thinkers such as René Descartes to assert that humans are complex machines. In the 1600s, the British philosopher Thomas Hobbes suggested that thinking arose from small mechanical motions in the brain. By the 1700s, discoveries about electricity and chemistry led to new theories of human intelligence – again, largely metaphorical in nature. In the mid-1800s, inspired by recent advances in communications, the German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz compared the brain to a telegraph."
Instead I mean that humans are logically computers. Physical entities operating on inputs and producing outputs. They share this property with any other physical system. Now there may be some supernatural layer that exists beyond the physics and chemistry operating within the skull that would lead to that position being undermined, but in the absense of that my point is purely that the human brain is just computer in the sense that it's a physcical system producing output.
I don't think those using the gear metaphor, or the telegraph metaphor, and so on, believed the brain actually contains gears or has a real telegraph in the day to day sense either.
The problem was the metaphor, not that they took it literaly.
Don't get me wrong, I do believe there's a place for the philosophy of science. But to give a list of instances where metaphors have been wong in the past as some form of argument against a given metaphor does not seem robust to me.
You're saying it as some counter-argument, but I actually agree with it:
Yes. We should learn our lesson, and try to understand complex things for what they are, and map their complexity - not think that we "get them" when we only have a simplistic reductionistic version of them...
>Perhaps you could give a reason why you think the human brain is not physical system?
First, where does the question come from? Who said that I think "the human brain is not physical system"?
It not being "a computer" doesn't mean that it's not a physical system anymore than it not being "a gear mechanism" means it's not a physical system.
Second, a rock is a physical system too, but a computer can't be a rock. A rock simulation isn't a rock either: it lacks several very important attributes of rockiness.
So, the question is less about whether a brain is a physical system, than about whether modelling some physical interactions its all it takes (as opposed to the actual interactions and their "qualia").
Or even worse, whether loading a big enough statistical model is all it takes...
-- as if we have already discovered the interplays and mechanisms involved in the brain, neurons, chemical pathways, and such, and modelled them, and we're just short of enough scale with GPT.
1. The human brain has outputs (e.g. creative works, or even just movements of limbs etc)
2. The human brain has inputs (e.g. the light landing on retinas, the DNA and processes that gave rise to its structure).
3. The outputs of the human brain are a function of its inputs (probably my most contentious contention :-P ). This is what I mean by it's physical system.
4. The human brain shares these features with a computer. And thus my metaphor is formed.
I'm happy to concede that metaphors like this have been shown to be wrong in the past, and indeed we can learn humility by remembering that. But I'm much more interested in thinking about which of 1 through 4 may be wrong and why.
Well, this needs to be proven. Note that "the outputs of the human brain are influenced by its inputs" is not the same as "the outputs of the human brain are a function of its inputs".
>4. The human brain shares these features with a computer. And thus my metaphor is formed.
Doesn't it also share it with, e.g. a meat processing machine? It too has an input (say, meat and spices) and an output (e.g. sausages), and it's output is a function of its input (e.g. different meat and spices create different kinds of sausages).
That is just a widespread analogy we use. The human brain is not a computer, although obviously some aspects of its function resemble the logical / mathematical model of a computer, which (I gently remind you) is a construction of the brain itself.
> it seems plausible that there's a future where such a distinction is either not meaningful, or perhaps even skewed against humanity.
I would not dispute that at all. The future of humanity is hopefully long and full of wondrous discoveries but arguing that we are "close" to "real AI" flies in the face of what is actually achieved on the ground with current approaches: clever utilization (where the one who is clever is the human) of rather limited algorithms to re-use productively the vast body of human generated information corpus.
Not a useless exercise by any measure, but the mantle under which it is sold does not augur well for the sustainability of those efforts.
The algorithm is doing pretty much the same thing that a brain is doing, except it's a smaller and slower brain, so it's not that smart, and we hardwired some parts to fill the gaps.
It’s clear that computation is one of the brain’s primary functions. Does that make it a computer (albeit one that works very differently from a macbook)? I’d say yes, but it’s essentially a question of semantics.
this is just an idle extrapolation that is not based on any fact.
if the brain was a computer in your sense of the word it would have been decoded by now.
we don't need to get metaphysical (if that is your worry) to accept that we don't know yet exactly what is going on in the brain.
Of course not. Existence of an equivalent computer program doesn't imply that it's easy to infer it.
> we don't know yet exactly what is going on in the brain
That's why it's an unreliable way to judge the distance to human level intelligence.