Comment by college_physics | Hacker News Reader

Comment by college_physics | Hacker News Reader

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college_physics

> The human brain is, after all, a computer operating on input in the form of experience and biology.

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.

It is presomptuous to think the brain is anything more than a computer.

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.

> The algorithm is doing pretty much the same thing that a brain is doing,

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.

> if the brain was a computer in your sense of the word it would have been decoded by now.

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.

The brain is nothing like a computer, for the brain doing things that computers do easily are even in the most trivial cases very hard and otherwise impossible. And vice versa. Yet these things that have effectively zero overlap in capability are the same?

The same could be said in comparing quantum computers to classical computers.

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.

Perhaps in your case, you are correct, the brain is not a computer, but in the general case, the brain is probably a computer, and in some cases, it's a super-computer.

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