Comment on 'vegetative electron microscopy'

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barsoap@lemm.ee ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

It stuck in popular culture, but time and time again neuroscientists and psychologists have found that it is a poor metaphor.

Notably, neither of those two disciplines are computer science. Silicon computers are Turing complete. They can (given enough time and scratch space) compute everything that’s computable. The brain cannot be more powerful than that you’d break causality itself: God can’t add 1 and 1 and get 3, and neither can god sort a list in less than O(n log n) time. Both being Turing complete also means that they can emulate each other.

Architecturally, sure, there’s massive difference in hardware. Not carbon vs. silicon but because our brains are nowhere close to being von Neumann machines. That doesn’t change anything about brains being computers, though.

There’s, big picture, two obstacles to AGI: First, figuring out how the brain does what it does and we know that current AI approaches aren’t sufficient,secondly, once understanding that, to create hardware that is even just a fraction as fast and efficient at executing erm itself as the brain is.

Neither of those two involve the question “is it even possible”. Of course it is. It’s quantum computing you should rather be sceptical about, it’s still up in the air whether asymptotic speedups to classical hardware are even physically possible (quantum states might get more fuzzy the more data you throw into a qbit, the universe might have a computational upper limit per unit volume or such).

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