What is the difference between a “thinking” human mind and a simulated one? ChatGPT selects words based on a language model that determines mathematically the most likely response to a question based on the volume of data it was trained on. But it doesn’t know what it’s discussing.
Straight Dope 3/3/23: Followup - What are the chances artificial intelligence will destroy humanity?
He does allow himself some romanticism. Theater is an important part of new product introduction.
They had enough confidence in the basic concept to throw billions of dollars at it. It wasn’t a shot in the dark.
It will certainly be interesting to watch how GPT functions as it is released in to commercial applications. How will it be merged into the corporate management model and what applications will benefit most? What’s the downside? Mundane tasks are currently the training ground for future leaders. Sweep those away and what happens to your future?
In the context of the OP, the potential danger of AI is that we will imbue it with human properties. We will interact with it as though it has human authority. A thinking computer is the ultimate form of theater. And theater is an influential component of society. The image of computers as brains is a snake that should be killed while it’s still small.
I read and understand the article, and like to see where people are coming from. But its technical definitions, though they may be accurate, are not how I think of computers or algorithms. I still disagree the brain is a computer, but now understand we mean different things by that. I wonder how many neuroscientists accept their discipline is just a branch of computer science?
No definition really makes me think of a bit of fine-grained sand as “a computer”, even if kings play chess on them, or whatever we learned in biology class. (You might find this argument specious.). However, back to the main feature. 
I don’t really know what to make of this. In other branches of knowledge, do you adopt a similar approach where you adopt idiosyncratic personal definitions that differ from experts in the field?
Nobody has claimed that. This is no more true than suggesting that medicine is just a branch of evolutionary biology. Nevertheless, a neuroscientist who believes that the brain is not a computer would be wrong, just a doctor who believed that humans are not a product of evolution would be wrong.
Different definitions are useful for different purposes. The definition that is applicable to shopping at Best Buy is one thing. The definition that is applicable understanding what a machine intelligence can theoretically simulate is another.
In this discussion, which of those things are we concerned with?
I enjoy your personal contributions to the board, Riemann, and respect your opinion and hypotheses. You have taught me some things.
The most recent article I posted, which you seem to agree with, does make the claim neuroscience is a sub discipline of computer science. It may be true that there are many ways to define many things, and even experts disagree about how to define things. It is certainly true definitions matter, and much influence debate, discussion and worldview.
.I am very, very far from expert in computing or any of its components. But expert opinion, as one learns when studying a discipline like medicine where much of what you learned turns out to be various degrees of wrong or incomplete, teaches one expert opinion is one of the lower forms of evidence. Experts are sometimes wrong, their predictions not always much better than layfolk.
That’s an open question. And if a deep learning neural net is ‘just determining mathematically’, how do you know the brain isn’t doing the same thing?
You started the pragraph by asking what the difference was, but by the end you were asserting that you already know, without evidence. Whynis one of them ‘thinking’, and the other isn’t? Is that just a gut feeling, or is there evidence?
No, it doesn’t. The first paragraph:
Neuroscience is a funny discipline which can demand a level of interdisciplinary knowledge that is hard to achieve. At its heart, neuroscience is concerned with understanding the organ that is responsible for generating our behaviour, and thus, it is a branch of physiology and psychology. At the same time, most neuroscientists will have heard, or even used, the words “calculate”, “algorithm”, and “computation” many times in their professional lives. I think there’s a good reason for this: the brain is a computer , and neuroscience is also branch of computer science, in my opinion.
It is clear that the author correctly thinks that neuroscience is interdisciplinary, and that he is saying that neuroscience is a branch of computer science only from one perspective, in the same way that we might say that chemistry is a branch of physics. A chemist has a body of expertise that differs from that of a physicist, but if a chemist believes that atoms and molecules do not fundamentally (say) obey the laws of quantum mechanics, they are mistaken and when that is relevant it may lead them astray.
That is like saying the brain sometimes acts like a computer but also acts in many ways that are different from computation. I do not agree these things are irrelevant, perhaps they contribute much to the physiological and psychological interdisciplines. One can define things broadly, but (independent of your affiliation for the taste of Coke Zero), we can at least agree that the brain is not fine-grained sand.
A computer is an adder, microcode and a data management system. The microcode defines an instruction set that determines how the data management system will present data to the adder and what it will do with the result. The behavior of the computer depends on the sequence of instructions presented to it.
How much of that is known to exist in the brain?
How about “The brain is another type of computer, with its own set of properties, weaknesses and strengths”?
And neuroscience is both the study of the physical brain, and also the ‘software’ of the brain encoded in its neural net. The first part is basically medicine, while the other is increasingly involving computer science, information theory, complexity theory, etc. Just like artificial intelligence.
But we were not talking about expert opinion, we were talking about basic concepts and definitions in a branch of science. Perhaps the fact that most doctors are not scientists and that much of medicine has historically not been evidence-based is leading you astray here.
I too am far from an expert in computer science and AI, I am a lay person who is interested in the field but barely literate in the basic concepts. It seems odd to me that you are apparently approaching a branch of science not by trying to understand it, but by challenging the work of Turing based on your hot take.
Not “different”, no. As the basis for biological intelligence, there is no evidence that the brain does anything other than computation, nor even a hypothesis for what that could mean.
With the chemistry/physics analogy: chemistry is more than just physics, because there are different levels of understanding. But that does not imply that atoms and molecules act in ways that are “different” from the laws from quantum mechanics.
No it isn’t. It can have those parts, but they are not necessary for the definition of a computer. In fact, it sounds like a definition made up specifically to exclude the brain as a computer.
A computer is simply something that acts on information through some form of algorithm or sequence.
You may be confusing the lay definition of ‘computer’ as a specific type of device as opposed to the computer science definition of computer, computing, or computation.
Would it be less confusing if we just said that both the brain and an AI model are engaged in computation? The definition of computation being:
Computation is any type of arithmetic or non-arithmetic calculation that follows a well-defined model (e.g., an [algorithm))
We have found emergent algorithms both in the brain and in digital neural nets.
OK, define a digital computer that does not have that organization. I have defined anything that runs windows or controls your microwave.
Well, I certainly use my brain to control my microwave.
Yes, exactly. Your brain has the volition to start the program stored in microwave to go through the particular routine you select.
And I just finished explaining that you are confusing a lay definition of a computer with the computing science definition of a computer, which is what we are talking about. You just did it again. Or do you think a Turing machine isn’t a computer? If it is, how can it be if it doesn’t have an adder, microcode or a data management system?
And yet, a Turing machine is definitely a computer.
Are we now going on another tangent that “volition” somehow differentiates biological intelligence from machine intelligence?
Are you suggesting that when I turn on my microwave, it is not for a reason? What exactly is “volition”, are you claiming there is some process in my brain that does not obey the laws of physics?
You are correct. Shannons’ definition of a universal Turing machine with two states is a one bit adder with two inputs and an output. A data management system feeds data to the adder and stores the result based on microcode. That’s how computers are made. That fits my definition.
If there is a better definition I am willing to accept it.