IMO, the two most important properties of human cognition are that it evolved through natural selection, and that it is embodied, meaning that it is part of a feedback loop between perception and action. I don't see why either of these things requires having a biological brain or body. It's true that current methods aren't close to achieving these things, but there's nothing in principle stopping us from creating evolved, embodied intelligences either in simulations or in robots.
We only seem “irrational” when we are talking about a narrow view of “rationality”, i.e., as defined by the cold hard logic of machines. We do not question why we have this definition of rationality. Our “irrationality” simply seems so because we have not bothered to understand the larger complexity of our evolutionary programming. It’s the same as not bothering to understand how a car works, and then claiming that the car works on magic. If one understands how it works, then it is no longer magic. In the case of humans, we may never fully understand how we work, but we can work towards a compassionate understanding of the same.
/rant
You can, as a human, map the 'wrong' response to external stimuli resulting in, say, your death (or the deaths of your progeny, for that matter)
If something seems irrational, that's because there are rational things layered on top of one another in a way that creates a misapprehension in a partially-informed observer.
Why? You assume nature must be comprehensible to us because you define it that way? Nature's not under any obligation to us.
> If something seems irrational, that's because there are rational things layered on top of one another in a way that creates a misapprehension in a partially-informed observer.
Possible irrational things: Collapse of the wave function, consciousness, why anything exists. There's also non-computable functions, paradoxes like the liar paradox, and the inability to refute various skeptical possibilities like living in a simulation.
Combine that with the fact that all models are wrong, some are just more useful. We can't model the entire universe with perfect accuracy without the model being the universe, which means there are always things left out. Our rational explanations are approximations.
We can't look at quantum mechanics and call it irrational. The way the universe works is by definition the right / correct / only way. If logic points one way and reality points another, the logic isn't taking everything into account.
>Rationality is something that makes sense for us
But I say:
Rationality is something that makes sense.
So nature cannot be irrational. For instance: we had the very logical Newtonian mechanics. But Mercury's orbit did not make sense. Later on Einstein saw another layer of logic that put both Newton and Mercury in more context, and now both make sense again.
When we see things now that make no sense, it indicates faults in our mental models, not in the things.
In the context of a person behaving or thinking "irrationally": their brain is just atoms and chemicals. It has to work right. If their behaviour and thoughts do not line up to reality, that's a feature of said brain.
Perhaps the irrationality is due to the brain giving too much weight to certain factors, or perhaps they are in fact behaving perfectly logically given what they know and you don't. Perhaps its workings can be improved in software, or in the next hardware generation.
But there's no spooky mechanism that can't in principle be modelled and implemented in a different architecture, ie, transistors.
But even if there are random things, are they thus irrational? Or just unpredictable? Is today's lottery number wrong in some way?
You need something like 3 petabytes just to model the neurons. There are 100 trillion atoms in a neuron. And he said subatomic, so you need some significant factor of that, plus you have to save some state.
So 300 trillion petabytes+ might be a memory the size of the moon. I think relativity does matter at that scale. Also, you will probably have to mine silicon asteroids and invent an AI factory to make the memory, and power it with what, fusion?
So yeah, just model the brain at the subatomic level, bro, it's easy bro, and you're just a naysayer for saying it can't be done, bro.
But, please. If you have a solution to this, don't post it on HN, file a patent. Not just for the model, but for the revolutionary new dense memory, the location of silicon asteroids, the planetary memory factory, the power source for it, and so on.
Gradient descent is literally highschool calculus-level math.