Your brain does not process information, retrieve knowledge or store memories. In short: your brain is not a computer

the-podcast guy recently linked this essay, its old, but i don't think its significantly wrong (despite gpt evangelists) also read weizenbaum, libs, for the other side of the coin

  • bumpusoot [any]
    ·
    6 months ago

    Firstly, I want to say it's cool you're positively engaging and stimulating a lot of conversation around this.

    As far turing machines go - It's only a concept that's meant to show a fundamental "level" of computing ("turing completeness"), what a computing device can or cannot achieve. As you agree a turing machine could 'simulate' a brain (and we know brains can simulate a turing machine - we invented them!), then conceptually, yes, the brain is computationally equivalent, it is 'turing complete', albeit with some randomness thrown in.

    • Frank [he/him, he/him]
      ·
      6 months ago

      some randomness thrown in.

      I remain extremely mad at the Quantum jerks for demonstrating that the universe is almost certainly not deterministic. I refuse to be cool about it.

    • plinky [he/him]
      ·
      6 months ago

      We can simulate a water molecule, does it make a turing machine then? Is single protein? A whole cell? 1000 cells in some invertebrate?

      Simulation doesn’t work backwards, it’s not an implied equivalency of turing completeness for both directions. If brain is a turing machine we can map one to one it’s whole function to any existing turing machine, not simulate it with some degree of accuracy.