RE: On naturalism and consciousness
September 13, 2014 at 11:07 am
(This post was last modified: September 13, 2014 at 11:53 am by The Grand Nudger.)
LOL, I wish. Maybe then we'd clock faster and wouldn't need our PC's anymore? Direct bussing is a top down design. The simplest way to implement the function on a printed circuit board - but our brains are neither top down designs nor printed boards. I suspect that a similar architecture is present at the very bottom, yes, but with a whole shitload of inefficient and unnecessary (with regards to that specific function) obstructions along the way - which segues into an interesting bit about -why- our "experience" has such breadth and depth to it, btw. At the moment, connectionists and NN guys are finding that their model has the best analog in structure regarding neurons, brain, mind...ect.
My gate explanations are intentionally simple for the purposes of conversation and explanation. A "so you want to build mind?" sort of thing - not necessarily a human mind. As soon as we found out how many traces that neurons have any analogy to simple gates became one of principle, not specific design or construction. The architecture of a processor is directly tied to the behavior of it's components. The reason that an electronic circuit has to do things this and thus - is because that's the way that the materials involved interact. We aren't made of the same stuff, so we wouldn't expect our architecture to be a direct analogy. Under ctm, however, we -do- expect the principle to hold, and that if we were to isolate the chipset involved in the experience of mind that it would be ultimately reducible to an algorithm which -could be- translated between material architectures (both a string gate and a silicon processor implement boolean functions, CTM posits that our brains could be added to that list as well). The brain, for example, may have 10k gates (made of entirely different stuff) in the same chipset that a modern computer only uses 4 gates for. The flipside to this, is that my explanations regarding gates fall apart at some point regarding the mind because they -all- imply intent. NN guys say "okay, that's a good idea.....so, what if the brain implements these functions (leverages the principle) in a different way than electronics do? What would that look like?" Amusingly, it looks alot like the (limited) maps we have regarding neuron connectivity. The idea that with enough redundancy (also from principle...any function can be implemented with a single universal gate repeated ad naus) you don't -need- a specific gate or chipset or group to achieve the function. All chipsets could conceivably perform any function, provided that they make the "right" connections to the relevant inputs (sensory, for example). This has incredible implications for computing (imagine a system that can devote every bit (or at least a much larger ratio of bits) to a task indiscriminantly, or, to put it a different way...what if all your gigs or t's of memory were interchangeable with your processing resources......when your pc encountered a beefy problem it could leverage all of those gates to perform the task, rather than bottlenecking at a set limit of design or construction) and also for mind -if- our minds are the product of the principles of computing.
Modern computers have a leg up in design efficiency as they have a sentient designer behind them, whereas our brains do not and did not. Our brains strong point is the scale of it's construction (a brain is much smaller than a supercomputer but could contain more "gates" - by orders of magnitude.....if neurons are being leveraged as gates-ofc, each gate having much more than a single output or input from the ground floor up), which muddies the water and makes any direct comparison to a computer (as we currently build them) difficult to maintain beyond a certain point- which is probably the harshest criticism of CTM - as it applies to human minds, specifically...... and one that CTM is currently (and may always be) unable to overcome. A nueron, to argue against my position - could by virtue of it's structure act more like a chipset than a gate - and yet it's construction is - at one level- simpler and smaller. So we may be centuries away from AI, for example (because then my numbers on the processing power required to create the only "mind" we're aware of would be obscenely low)..or a convincing explanation of -human minds coming from the CTM corner (if ever.....those NN guys are pretty good..lol, they may be able to explain the functions without ever needing to map one out specifically).
My gate explanations are intentionally simple for the purposes of conversation and explanation. A "so you want to build mind?" sort of thing - not necessarily a human mind. As soon as we found out how many traces that neurons have any analogy to simple gates became one of principle, not specific design or construction. The architecture of a processor is directly tied to the behavior of it's components. The reason that an electronic circuit has to do things this and thus - is because that's the way that the materials involved interact. We aren't made of the same stuff, so we wouldn't expect our architecture to be a direct analogy. Under ctm, however, we -do- expect the principle to hold, and that if we were to isolate the chipset involved in the experience of mind that it would be ultimately reducible to an algorithm which -could be- translated between material architectures (both a string gate and a silicon processor implement boolean functions, CTM posits that our brains could be added to that list as well). The brain, for example, may have 10k gates (made of entirely different stuff) in the same chipset that a modern computer only uses 4 gates for. The flipside to this, is that my explanations regarding gates fall apart at some point regarding the mind because they -all- imply intent. NN guys say "okay, that's a good idea.....so, what if the brain implements these functions (leverages the principle) in a different way than electronics do? What would that look like?" Amusingly, it looks alot like the (limited) maps we have regarding neuron connectivity. The idea that with enough redundancy (also from principle...any function can be implemented with a single universal gate repeated ad naus) you don't -need- a specific gate or chipset or group to achieve the function. All chipsets could conceivably perform any function, provided that they make the "right" connections to the relevant inputs (sensory, for example). This has incredible implications for computing (imagine a system that can devote every bit (or at least a much larger ratio of bits) to a task indiscriminantly, or, to put it a different way...what if all your gigs or t's of memory were interchangeable with your processing resources......when your pc encountered a beefy problem it could leverage all of those gates to perform the task, rather than bottlenecking at a set limit of design or construction) and also for mind -if- our minds are the product of the principles of computing.
Modern computers have a leg up in design efficiency as they have a sentient designer behind them, whereas our brains do not and did not. Our brains strong point is the scale of it's construction (a brain is much smaller than a supercomputer but could contain more "gates" - by orders of magnitude.....if neurons are being leveraged as gates-ofc, each gate having much more than a single output or input from the ground floor up), which muddies the water and makes any direct comparison to a computer (as we currently build them) difficult to maintain beyond a certain point- which is probably the harshest criticism of CTM - as it applies to human minds, specifically...... and one that CTM is currently (and may always be) unable to overcome. A nueron, to argue against my position - could by virtue of it's structure act more like a chipset than a gate - and yet it's construction is - at one level- simpler and smaller. So we may be centuries away from AI, for example (because then my numbers on the processing power required to create the only "mind" we're aware of would be obscenely low)..or a convincing explanation of -human minds coming from the CTM corner (if ever.....those NN guys are pretty good..lol, they may be able to explain the functions without ever needing to map one out specifically).
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