@beneuroscience@neuromatch.social
2023-09-14 18:52 UTC
Replies (5)
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@debivort@drosophila.social 2023-09-14 18:55
@beneuroscience@neuromatch.social @yoginho@spore.social @tyrell_turing@fediscience.org @NicoleCRust@neuromatch.social True! Much of what I meant by "fun" was "spicy."
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@yoginho@spore.social 2023-09-14 19:00
@beneuroscience@neuromatch.social I've spent a whole life engaging reductionists & computationalists with curiosity. So now I can call them out in good faith for the utter bullshit they are heaping on humanity. Computationalism is an existential threat. I'm really tired playing Mr. Nice Guy with people who literally live in their model of the world, while screwing up the real world in the process. It may be unpleasant, but certainly not bad faith. Deal with it.
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@axoaxonic@synapse.cafe 2023-09-14 21:22
@beneuroscience@neuromatch.social @debivort@drosophila.social @yoginho@spore.social @tyrell_turing@fediscience.org @NicoleCRust@neuromatch.social I've mentioned it before, but Piccinini's book "Physical Computation" has a nice breakdown of why pancomputationalism can obscure the specific meaning of computation by applying it to everything, while at the same time being pro- computationalism for brains. I've also taken a course by pancomputationalist Hector Zenil, who has some interesting work on the possibility of an algorithmic nature to the universe and biology, and is a colleague of Stephen Wolfram. The idea goes back farther than the 80's, to Konrad Zuse's 1969 book "Calculating Space"
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@NicoleCRust@neuromatch.social 2023-09-14 21:36
@beneuroscience@neuromatch.social @debivort@drosophila.social @yoginho@spore.social @tyrell_turing@fediscience.org Thanks for this Ben, on all counts!
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@kendmiller@qoto.org 2023-09-18 00:02
@beneuroscience@neuromatch.social @debivort@drosophila.social @yoginho@spore.social @tyrell_turing@fediscience.org @NicoleCRust@neuromatch.social This conversation is genuinely confusing to me. @yoginho seems to be saying that "computation" means anything that can be mechanized, reduced to an algorithm or program, and the brain is not limited to that. @tyrell_turing@fediscience.org seems to be saying that a computation is anything that a physical system can instantiate, and so a brain, being physical, does computations. I"m confused as to whether there is genuine disagreement here, or just different definitions of computation. @yoginho@spore.social can you explain what are, or give examples of, things a physical system (a brain) can do that are not computations by your definition? @tyrell_turing@fediscience.org, are you stating that the brain, or indeed any physical system, cannot do anything that is not computable, reducible to a rote computation, an algorithm or program? Again, what I'm trying to understand is: are you using the same definition of computation, or different definitions of computation? Are you disagreeing about what physical systems, including the brain, can do, or only about what to call it?