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Comment by LightMachine | Hacker News Reader

Neither a human can solve the halting problem. There is no evidence the brain does anything that a computer can't do.

How do you know that? Do you have an example program and all its inputs where we cannot in principle determine if it halts?

Many things are non-algorithmic, and thus cannot be done by a computer, yet we can do them (e.g. love someone, enjoy the beauty of a sunset, experience joy or sadness, etc).

Those are just specific particles floating around the brain

What would those specific particles be, then? Sounds like a crude abstraction.

They said - there is no evidence. The reply hence is not supposed to be - how do you know that. The proposition begs for a counter example, in this case an evidence. Simply saying - love is non algorithmic - is not evidence, it is just another proposition that has not been proven, so it brings us no closer to an answer i am afraid.

My question was in response to the statement "Neither a human can solve the halting problem."

There's an interesting article/podcast here about what computers can't do: https://mindmatters.ai/2020/08/six-limitations-of-artificial....

I can throw a ton of algorithms that no human alive can hope to decide whether they halt or not. Human minds aren't inherently good at solving halting problems and I see no reason to suggest that they can even decide whether all turing machines with number of states, say, below the number of particles in the observable universe, very much less all possible computers.

Moreover, are you sure that e.g. loving people in non-algorithmic? We can already make chatbots which pretty convincingly act as if they love people. Sure, they don't actually love anyone, they just generate text, but then, what would it mean for a system or even a human to "actually" love someone?

A good example was given earlier -- will a program that searches for counterexamples to the Collatz Conjecture halt?

When mathematicians solve the Collatz Conjecture then we'll know. This will likely require creativity and thoughtful reasoning, which are non-algorithmic and can't be accomplished by computers.

> creativity and thoughtful reasoning, which are non-algorithmic and can't be accomplished by computers.

Maybe. When computers solve it then we'll know.

We may use computers as a tool to help us solve it, but nonetheless it takes a conscious mind to understand the conjecture and come up with rational ways to reach the solution.

Human minds are ultimately just algorithms running on a wetware computer. Every problem that humans have ever solved is by definition an algorithmic problem.

Oh? What algorithm was executed to discover the laws of planetary motion, or write The Lord of the Rings, or the programs for training the GPT-4 model, for that matter? I'm not convinced that human creativity, ingenuity, and understanding (among other traits) can be reduced to algorithms running on a computer.

They're already algorithms running on a computer. A very different kind of computer where computation and memory are combined at the neuron level and made of wet squishy carbon instead of silicon, but a computer nonetheless.

I don't see how it could be reasoned otherwise.

Conscious experience is evidence that the brain doesn't something we have no idea how to compute. One could argue that computation is an abstraction from collective experience, in which the conscious qualities of experiences are removed in order to mathematize the world, so we can make computable models.

are you sure? If conscious experience was a computational process, could we prove or disprove that?

If someone could show the computational process for a conscious experience.

How could one show such a thing?

If it can't be shown, then doesn't that strongly suggest that consciousness isn't computable? I'm not saying it isn't correlated with the equivalent of computational processes in the brain, but that's not the same thing as there being a computation for consciousness itself. If there was, it could in principle be shown.

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