Comment by theptip
5 days ago
> But; they don't learn
If we took your brain and perfectly digitized it on read-only hardware, would you expect to still “think”?
Do amnesiacs who are incapable of laying down long-term memories not think?
I personally believe that memory formation and learning are one of the biggest cruces for general intelligence, but I can easily imagine thinking occurring without memory. (Yes, this is potentially ethically very worrying.)
>If we took your brain and perfectly digitized it on read-only hardware, would you expect to still “think”?
it wouldn't work probably, brains constantly alter themselves by forming new connections. Learning is inseparable from our intelligence.
Our intelligence, yes. But that doesn't establish it as essential for thought.
I mean, _we_ probably can't think with our wetware on a read-only substrate. It doesn't establish it as essential, just that the only sure example in nature of thought doesn't work that way.
4 replies →
> If we took your brain and perfectly digitized it on read-only hardware, would you expect to still “think”?
Perhaps this is already known, but I would think there is a high chance that our brains require "write access" to function. That is, the very process of neural activity inherently makes modifications to the underlying structure.
> a high chance that our brains require "write access" to function
There are multiple learning mechanisms that happen on different time-frames, eg neural plasticity, hippocampus are both longer-term processes for memory consolidation. Whereas the content of “RAM” might be better modeled as a set of fast dynamic weights representing ions and neurotransmitter concentrations.
My hunch is that you could model the latter fast weights in volatile memory, but I wouldn’t count these as “modifying the structure”.
Do you have any particular systems in mind where you have reason to believe that permanent modification is required for brains to function?
I wonder why we need to sleep so much though
Self-play for memory/skill consolidation, plus flushing out metabolites which can’t be cleaned while consciousness is online?
Rebalancing weights?