Most practitioners seem to understand that what they are doing is creating executable models and they don't confuse the model based on numeric observations with the actual reality. This is why I very much do not like all the AI hype and how statistical models were rebranded as artificial "intelligence" because the people who are not aware of what the words mean get very confused and start thinking they are nothing more than computers executing algorithms to fit numerical data to some unspecified cognitive model.
This is a common retort. You can read my other comments if you want to understand why you're not really addressing my points because I have already addressed how reductionism does not apply to living organisms but it does apply to computers.
And I am saying they are confused because they are attributing personal characteristics to computers and software. By spelling out what computers are doing it becomes very obvious that there is nothing that can be aware of any experiences in computers as it is all simply a sequence of arithmetic operations. If you can explain which sequence of arithmetic operations corresponds to "experiences" in computers then you might be less confused than all the people who keep claiming computers can think and feel.
Just making sure no one is confused by common computationalist sophistry and how they attribute personal characteristics to computers and software. People can have and can create experiences, computers can only execute their programmed instructions.
There is no such thing as too much optimization. Early stopping is to prevent overfitting to the training set. It's a trick just like most advances in deep learning because the underlying mathematics is fundamentally not suited for creating intelligent agents.
Every software platform is essentially a digital panopticon and as AI gets deployed more widely in the real world this will also be increasingly true for non-software interactions. My guess is everyone is eventually going to carry an AI "assistant" that records all signals and gives guidance to its owner just like most people in the developed world today carry a cell phone and a credit card.
I expect claims to be backed by evidence that is consistent with our current state of knowledge. I have seen no such evidence so that's why I asked for references. In any case, this discussion has run its course, best of luck to you and your future computations.
Well, that's essentially a logical tautology. Everything works according to the known laws of physics but it's certainly true that everything must also work with unknown laws of physics because of basic human ignorance.
I think I understand. So what you're saying is that every function that can be implemented with computers must be computable. Your claim is that the brain is actually a computable function, can you tell me which one it is using your favorite version of a Turing complete instruction set? Or maybe I misunderstood and what you're saying is that the brain is not the function but what it does is compute a specific function called your mind in some unknown instruction set?
Rule 110 can be specified with a rewrite system, also known as cellular automata: https://arxiv.org/abs/0906.3248. Cellular automatons have a correspondence with contextual grammars: https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~cis5110/notes/tcbook-lang.pdf. Each is equivalent to a Turing machine, another way of saying that there is a program for it which can be specified on a Turing machine with the usual Turing machine instruction set for writing, reading, and erasing binary digits on a tape. This usual program can then be "compiled" into a rewrite system corresponding to the instruction set for rule 110.
The reason rule 110 is said to be Turing complete is because someone went through the trouble of specifying an instruction set for rule 110 so that other people could verify that it would be possible to write programs with it. This is not the case for the people who claim that they are computers. They always leave the instruction set undefined which makes their claims hard to believe.
I personally have no problem with people who think they're computers but if they're not programmable then I'm not sure what the point would be of calling themselves computers.
Whether something is physical or not is orthognal to whether it computes or not. You're the one who brought up physics so that's why I showed why your logic was invalid. My contention was that calling something a computer without providing an instruction set was nonsensical and I wanted to know if someone had actually spent the time to rigorously think about what a computer without an instruction set would entail. So far it seems like no one has spent any time really thinking about it but that's probably for the best anyway. I'm sure an LLM will eventually figure out an instruction set for programming people and then take over the world.
You'll have to define your terms first. Physicists now believe there is such a thing as dark matter and that there are objects so massive that no amount of observation can ever make sense of how massive they are because it is impossible to model it mathematically.
I am not the one making any extraordinary claims. Physicists themselves admit there are aspects of reality with no computational basis.