Post by @tyrell_turing@fediscience.org

2023-09-13 21:22 UTC

@yoginho@spore.social Respectfully, I disagree. I don't think you're accurately summarising computability theory, nor the implications for neuroscience. As Yoshua Bengio once said to someone at a workshop I was at (paraphrasing): "Computation just means physics. Saying the brain is a computer is just a way of saying that it is a physical device. I don't even know what a non-computational theory of the brain means, unless you're talking about magic."

Replies (2)

@tyrell_turing@fediscience.org 2023-09-13 21:25

@yoginho@spore.social Remember, as the very article from the Philosophy Encyclopedia describes, the original goal of both Turing and Church was simply to formalise the idea of an "effective method", i.e. a mechanical way of solving a problem. If the Church-Turing thesis holds, then any problem that a mechanical (i.e. purely physical) system can solve represents a computable function, and the object implementing it is engaged in a computation.

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@themanual4am@neurodifferent.me 2023-09-15 07:22

@tyrell_turing@fediscience.org @yoginho@spore.social I'll jump down off the fence [^1] and go further Consider biology and computation in terms of cache. By cache, I'm pointing at coupled, or conditionally coupled, persisted state; 'distinct from the general mechanistic implementation' Cells cache; neurones cache; multi-cellular structures cache; The brain caches – biology even 'invented' a new kind of cache: map. Every cache prior, was territory Biological systems (machines/ mechanisms) use local resources (cache: territory), occasionally with informational encodings to feedback state (cache: map) Whatever the correct account of cognition might be, it must sufficiently align 'the space of all implementation' and 'the space of all application' with the use of cache, such that 'general mechanistic implementation' + cache largely accounts for ~all downstream application and consequence So I guess the question is: does "elaboration of organismic agency" "join the dots" between biological implementation and application (which necessarily includes 'general mechanistic implementation' + cache)? If so, great, it sounds like another way of describing the same thing! 🎉 You mention map territory in this thread Yogi: territory aligns, our maps ought to; valid perspectives of the same phenomenon ought to be continuable, to other valid perspectives. Framing discontinuity as a fundamental feature is a sign of a fundamentally incoherent map. Broad contextual alignment, by intersecting implementation with application, is the only way to validate the space of all map with the space of all territory. I look forward to seeing which aspect of the same territory (that we're all looking at) "elaboration of organismic agency" describes --- [1:] or fall down, whatever

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