Post #2022523

2026-05-03 23:11 UTC

The situation is the following. 1. Brains are analog computers, which are digitally irreducible. 2. There are stringent limitations on Turing machines (digital computers), 3. We can’t extract semantics from syntax, and so… We’ll probably need analog computation, currently in its infancy, to get artificial (inorganic) consciousness. I study metaethics and philosophy of mathematics. These problems are real, and I am being honest with you.

Replies (1)

@psycotica0@lemmy.ca 2026-05-05 04:20

That is *not* the situation. 😛 Analog signals are *not* digitally irreducible without presuming there's no level of noise floor under which greater detail is irrelevant, Turing's machines are *not* digital by their construction and predate the concept by a long time, and the first computers we built *were* analog and we invented digital computers later because they were cheaper and more efficient and easier and more reliable. Also the halting problem doesn't say "there are things which a computer can't know *but a human can*", it says "there are some things that *cannot* be known". Similarly Gödel proved that there will always be true things about a system that cannot be proven from within the system, that is using its axioms. That was a real bummer for folks trying to prove all of math with a small set of axioms. But that does *not* mean there are things math can't know that humans magically can, it just means there's other math, outside the axioms, that are true without following from them, in math. He proved it with math, after all. It doesn't claim to give any special abilities to human brains. And also, again, nothing Gödel or Turing ever said has anything to do with the concept of "digital" anything. I think you're using the term "digital" to mean "rulesy"? Which is not even close to what it means?

Open ##2022524