Comment by dahart
8 years ago
> I am seriously interested in understanding why a lot of people have no issue accepting the idea of humans evolving from simple immaterial matter into biological beings and all the way up to our current reality but have a hard time believing that can be done via computers.
And similarly, I’d love to understand why you’d believe in something for which there’s zero evidence and ask with incredulity why others don’t also believe it. Isn’t it reasonable to be skeptical until it actually happens? Isn’t it possible that we don’t understand what intelligence is, and that there could be an undiscovered proof that computers can never attain it? It seems too early to call.
Computers haven’t to date ever done anything on their own, what reason is there to think they ever will? We made them. Neural networks are nothing more than high dimensional least squares. Maybe humans are also least squares, but my money is on there being more to it than that.
> ...they don’t actually need to reproduce the lungs and the intestine...
Obviously, but the one thing that all intelligent life does is reproduce and contain a survival instinct. No computers have a survival instinct, and thus no reason to get smarter that we don’t imbue them with artificially.
There is a noticeable bias among computer scientists to believe in simplistic models of intelligence and minds. I agree with you, though, and I also sympathize to the ideas of Searle and Penrose.
> Computers haven’t to date ever done anything on their own, what reason is there to think they ever will?
Interestingly, people that spend a lot of time studying their own brain by meditating are usually very confident that what most people call "free will" does not exist - is merely an illusion.
Not to mention that physics tells us that we should be simul-able, after all physics knows only about deterministic and random processes.
>and that there could be an undiscovered proof that computers can never attain it?
It's already implemented in at least one physical system.
Oh haha, duh, I misread your comment as talking about the proof, rather than life. I guess my response is then, if it’s just physics, why aren’t computers mating and reproducing and getting smarter on their own already?
Aren’t there some kinds of math that are proven to be unable to solve some problems while other kinds of math can? Trisecting an angle can’t be done with a ruler and compass, and a 5th order polynomial can’t be solved analytically. Both of these things can be done numerically.
Is it possible then that some physical systems can’t act in the same ways as other physical systems? A granite rock can never burn at the same temperature as a tree, but they’re both physical objects. Is it possible that binary logic on silicon doesn’t have the physical properties for intelligence that animal brains do?
Would love to read more. Do you have a link to this project?
I meant that human brains exist.
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