Sorry, I didn't see that you'd replied to my comment until today.
> A car's horsepower is in the engine.
Where is it in the engine? The engine can go 180hp. But the engine does not contain 180 hp. That's what the concept of an ability or a power is. A broken engine cannot go 180 hp. But, if as you say, it is in the engine, then that distinction would be irrelevant. We would still say a broken engine can go 180 hp. But we don't.
> Similarly, if brain can compute, it is a computer. It's also an organ.
Right, you'll see I have never said the brain can't compute. But that doesn't mean it is simply a computer. If the assumption that the brain is a computer is to stand then the abilities of a computer should be compared to the abilities of a brain, or a person. There are those that match. We agree on that. But there are those that do not. And that means the assumption that the brain simply is a computer is flawed. It is an organ that can compute. But to extend from that that it is a computer is eliding the crucial difference between the two. That is your assumption.
> Evidence needed. Why would it [imagination] not be computational?
Let's ignore that the premise you are making: that imagination is computational, requires you to support it as well;
> imagination-like computations
> A fuzzy search on a graph
> A series of simulations with relaxed constraints and somewhat randomized initial states
All require you to posit things that are -like, or somewhat like imagination. But computers are programmed. They can't think new thoughts. They are closed deterministic systems. That their output seems imaginative or novel does not mean the computer has the ability to imagine, it means the computational output was unexpected to you or the people who wrote the code. The idea that imagination is computational is a category error.
> not a big leap to conclude that imagination is nothing but a more complex variant of such computations
This is actually an enormous leap. Can computers imagine? You will find zero agreement in that regard. That doesn't prove your point. You'll need to provide evidence that computers can actually violate their programming, cannot just compute and instead imagine. But that's not what computers do. Computers compute. That they can do things that seem like imagination to you does not mean they can imagine.
>> It means you can fuzzily model the brain on a computer, but that model will have glaring gaps.
> Models exist on a map, not in the territory. So do brains and computers. The territory is made of whatever sub-quark substrate the reality is made of. When you say "brain", what you're really referring to is a model, and a pretty black-boxy one. Viewing the brain as a computer is an attempt to apply a model that's little more transparent (and therefore more useful); as long as it matches observable evidence (and it does), it's the right thing to do.
Excuse my original words, I meant "fuzzily model the brain as a computer
Again, I don't think applying the computer as a model is completely invalid. But it has limitations. You can't just brush off those limitations when you talk about the brain as a computer. They fundamentally mean the comparison is less useful. Supposing it is 1 to 1, which you are doing leads you to build on assumptions that are unsupported. You have to accept that the assumption that the brain is a computer has serious criticisms brought against it. And you have to defend that assumption. You can't simply ignore them and argue that you are right.
For instance viewing the brain as computer frequently does not match the observable evidence. We can imagine. Computers cannot. That is observable. So how do you support the assumption that the brain is a computer in spite of that?
Yeah but a metric is a metric is a metric. That there are more metrics in one area than another is arbitrary.
You could just as easily say: all right LOC is the only thing that matters, we're not paying you to be right, we're paying you to write code so do it. And the warehouse could have thousands of metrics to measure the intricacies of working in a warehouse. Following that your argument easily applies to programmers as well. They deserve to be treated like crap.
That you view working in a warehouse as so simple,and that you talk about "deserving" so much reveals a lot. You're using metrics as an abstraction to hide behind so you can really say they "deserve" to be treated this way because they work in a warehouse.
But, really, whether someone deserves some treatment or not
because of the job they work should be irrelevant.
It's not a remotely bold statement. Think about what imagination is, and then think about whether computers can imagine. Computers can't imagine. Computers can't come up with new things because they are programmed. Programming prescribes the outputs to the same limitations as the inputs: it's a closed deterministic system.
You'll see in my comment above this one that I agree that the brain is a physical thing. But abilities and powers are not physical. That's not voodoo magic. That's what abilities are. Think about horsepower. The horsepower of a car does not reside in any one physical thing, not the carburetor, or the intake manifold, or the piston, or the wheels; it's an ability of the car: it is able to go at such and such horsepower. That is what horsepower is.
The same applies to computation. Computing something is an ability, but we have many more intellectual and cognitive abilities beside computing things.
As a result
> a sufficiently powerful computer with a physically accurate simulation of a brain would produce virtually identical results to a real brain.
is just you are assuming that it will work, but nothing about computers supports that in the slightest. That's just a guess.
> A team of scientists able to sufficiently model the physics of the brain (and presumably the entire central nervous system, I imagine a disembodied brain simulation would experience a horrific form of locked-in syndrome) would not need to be concerned about emergent properties of the simulation such as a sense of consciousness, or thought, or imagination. Those things will just happen once the simulation is perfected.
All of this is still an assumption.
Again, that doesn't mean you are right or wrong: it means its an assumption. You have to accept the limitations of your assumption and the limitations of modelling the brain on a computer are large and glaring.
> Indeed the cognitive neuroscience folk, etc, would be invaluable to actually understanding, training, interpreting and caring for the brain simulation, and figuring out if its behaviours and interactions constitute consciousness etc, so I do not think this has to even be framed as programmers pretending to know about brain stuff vs brain people who dismiss any notion of computationally recreating consciousness. It would be a team effort that works both ways, but is already doomed to fail if half the team thinks it's impossible from the get-go.
You are assuming here that only the programmers are heading down the right path. But you don't know that. It's entirely reasonable (and I would say much more supportable) to say that the programmers are heading down the wrong path: their path will lead to nothing at all. That's because the programmers have fallen to a category error.
You think they need to model the brain on a computer for it to make sense. But there is actually very little if anything to support that.
Brains are brains. Computers are computers. That computer science can be fuzzily applied to the study of brains around the ability to compute does not mean the study of brains is computer science or that brains are computers.
> It's because it is effectively a computer. Not in the vague sense of "it has stuffs connected to stuffs and there's electricity involved", but in the more specific sense that it takes inputs, produces complex outputs, has clearly identifiable hardware and indirectly identifiable software. It even has internal structure we're only beginning to understand, but that we know enough about to reasonably infer what computations happen where. There's little reason to assume there's some metaphysical mystery here, as exactly zero other things in the universe that we studied since the dawn of humanity turned out to be magic.
You're conflating the ability to compute with ontology. Computers compute. That's all they do. They're programmed to do only that. Humans have other abilities, such as imagination, that are not computational. Computers cannot imagine, not because of limited hardware or software; they can't imagine because they only compute. Imagination isn't computational. All throughout your response you are using the terminology of computers and software as if they are completely intuitive, but we have other terminology to define those things: medical terms define parts as the brain as parts of the brain not as hardware because that's a metaphor; the cerebelum is like this part of the computer. What they are is not the same as what they can do. That's not some magical mystery, or even obscure metaphysics. A car's horsepower is not in its carburetor, or its gas, or its manifold, because the horsepower of a car is what it can do, its an ability, a power. In the same sense the brain can compute, but that doesn't mean it is a computer.
What else could it be? A brain. Animals have them. They are not computers. But they can compute. The field of computer science and software development only slightly aligns with studying the brain.
> If I know the limit of applicability of my computer knowledge, I sure can comment on brain and consciousness.
Yes and when it is no longer applicable it is no longer right or wrong: it's just assumption. That you can fuzzily attach assumptions to arguments about the brain does not mean the brain is a computer. It means you can fuzzily model the brain on a computer, but that model will have glaring gaps. You can build from your assumptions but you have to accept the limitations of that assumption. Assuming the brain is a computer comes with glaring limitations.
You'll see in my comment and your quote that I don't say the brain can't compute. I agree, the brain can compute. But that doesn't mean it is a computer, because computing is an ability. People can do many other things aside from computing, none of which rely on computation, for instance they can imagine, which is the ability to think new thoughts. Computers can't imagine because all they do is compute: that's their programming. No amount of programming can produce imagination. Computation and imagination are categorically distinct as different intellectual powers and abilities.
You are conflating an ability with ontology. We know what a brain is. It's a collection of fatty material with neurons that do not explicitly fire exactly like a computer. Key word there is like. Church-Turing built a model of computational logic off of intuitions about the brain and formal mathematical logic. That's it's not provable doesn't prove your point; it removes any distinction between it being right or wrong: because it is a model (lets make something like the brain).
That an industry was built on computation doesn't prove anything. We know computation is an ability. For instance it's also something we can do with abacuses. We could have built an enormous industry on building elaborate abacuses. We built computers do be extremely fast at computation. We didn't build computers to be brains.
You'll notice, if you read the review, that the author of the review repeatedly cites cognitive neuroscientists, even evangelists of the singularity, philosophers, psychologists, and zoologists, who have published at length on this topic and repeatedly critcise and disrupt the simple idea that the brain is a computer or an algorithm or even a machine. An entire branch of philosophy developed off of Ludwig Wittgenstein to counter the computational model of consciousness. Numerous books in the Philosophy of Mind argue that the assumption that the brain is a computer is not just unsupported, it is logically nonsensical.
It's interesting the definition of bullshit in this study:
> ‘Bullshitters’ are individuals who claim knowledge or expertise in an area where they
actually have little experience or skill.
compared to the definition that the philosopher Harry Fankfurt came to in his book On Bullshit, and that this study references:
> bullshit is speech intended to persuade without regard for truth. The liar cares about the truth and attempts to hide it; the bullshitter doesn't care if what they say is true or false, but rather only cares whether their listener is persuaded.
The key difference being, these teenagers might still have regard for the truth, they think they know it and believe they know it. But they're still bullshitters under the definition used in this study. Intention seems to have been discarded in this study when I think it plays a very big part, especially among teens. The specific context of a situation might mean certain individuals are inclined to overclaim vs others because they have different reasons to.
That CV Dazzle project is fascinating. The link to the warship Dazzle camouflage is also hilarious in the sense that that is what people have to turn to in 2019.
It reminds me of the comic book The Private Eye by Brian K Vaughn. In that story the cloud "bursts" and online privacy evaporates overnight so everyone turns to intense camouflage to protect their identity. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Private_Eye)
The problem with that line of reasoning is you're assuming the brain is a computer, or that it merely computes.
But that's just an assumption and there are many reasons a person, let alone a brain, is not a machine or a computer or an algorithm. That it is like it? Sure, in some insignificant ways, we have the ability to compute things. But is it an algorithm? No.
The idea that consciousness is an algorithm or a computer or a machine is an assumption that is extremely popular among people in the tech industry because it confirms their assumptions, and it makes them feel like they have extremely transferable knowledge. "I know about computers. Let's assume the brain is a computer and consciousness is an algorithm. I can now comment on the brain and consciousness."
In this case, then, I don't think the article from the BPS accurately presented the research in the paper. The fact that they specified that it is clinical depression in the abstract is pretty important to the importance of this study. To elide that seems to bury the lede.
Now I think we're running into the strange alleyways in our concept of depression. Do people with depression have no agency in their depression? I think it depends.
Depression can be a disposition, ie. someone is disposed to being depressed but not always depressed.
Depression can be a mental state, ie. I'm depressed right now.
Depression can also be a clinical diagnosis, ie. you are lacking such and such chemical balance and that is your depression and you require such and such to "fix" it.
Depression can be an emotion or a feeling, ie. I feel depressed, or that poet is describing or manifesting their depression in their words.
Depression can be a cause and a reason, in the sense that one (an agent) gives a reason for their actions.
The concept of depression has different degrees of agency. In some clinical cases, none at all. That seems controversial until you realize depression is a complex and flexible concept.
This study seems to have not clarified what exactly they are talking about when they describe people as depressed.
I personally wouldn't jump at the chance to live in the US, but I still would. I absolutely would not ever live in a country that is not a democracy. That is the distinction I think you are kind of eliding. A puttering democracy is still better than a thriving authoritarian country.
In general, I agree with you. I would not use the current US as a stirling example, historically, though the US system has been largely successful. We probably disagree on the level of success though.
I can't speak from the US perspective, but in Canada many people come and they like it here. Not just because of status or money. Because people don't just need or want status or money. They like it here because here we actually work to balance security and opportunity. Not everyone is happy. But they're not unhappy and without rights, they're just unhappy. Liberal democracies have been trying to create [Rawlsian justice](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Theory_of_Justice#The_Two_Pr...) and some have been more successful than others.
I think the idea that economic success and liberal democratic values coincide has been too quickly conflated. I share your view of West - China trade. The West thought that liberalizing economic markets would naturally cause liberalized societies and democracies. Allowing China to enter the WTO without serious stipulations and controls to ensure democratic transition was a mistake. And now they flaunt their economic "success" as the sign of a successful counter to democracy. Western industries and governments that cozy up to China risk serious moral hazard and we are already seeing the effects of that.
We missed our chance to seriously allow a liberal China to take shape when it would have been best to.
But China still relies on the west for trade. And that is our leverage. Going alone against China is suicide. As a block of democracies, however, we could stand up to them quite easily. We just can't be greedy. That's a hard sell in 2019 apparently.
> The Chinese, Russians and Arabs are just copying the West.
The problem with that line of reasoning is that those countries are categorically different from democracies.
Those countries do not have the interlocking systems of laws, elections, values, that constitute democracy, things like 1) rule of law 2) private property rights 3) protections for minorities 4) independent judiciaries 5) systematic transitions of power through electoral systems with competing parties 6) independent constitutions that require 2/3rds or more majorities to amend, 7) separation of church and state (this includes cult of personalities), I could go on.
Superficially, it seems fair to compare democratic western countries to China, Russia, and Arab monarchies/dictatorships. But you easily slide into a category error. The very fact that they are not democracies means the people in those countries lack concrete tangible mechanisms and systems to ensure their freedom, independence, and safety, in a productive society that also protects minorities. The people are just fundamentally less free than they would be if they were in a democracy.
Your criticisms of western democracies are well founded. The biggest problem in modern democracies is simple greed and regulatory capture (and intensification of capital in a low % of the population but that's connected to greed and regulatory capture). But that's not an argument to adopt a Chinese, Russian, or Arab, system if there is one beyond greed and authoritarian control. That's an argument to fix our democracies (ironically, the idea of fixing a government and society in this way is unique to happening within a democracy, otherwise what are you fighting for? more oppression?).
The grass is always greener when you assume you'll be in the powerful, rich, or successful, portion of society. But you can't assume that. So we have democracy.
The problem with that argument is that they can just call themselves developers and nothing would change. Currently, "software engineer" doesn't mean anything. There is no credential that obligates software engineers to the same standards as other engineers or more than developers. Right now it's just an empty title in the tech industry.
It's not a restricted word. It's a restricted accredation that, should one carry it, obligates them to a certain set of standards and accountability.
The people making those apps don't need to call themselves engineers. They can call themselves developers. And the world will keep spinning. But a developer calling themselves an engineer is like a local contractor calling themselves a "residential engineer". An engineer can be a local contractor, but a local contractor can't simply call themselves an engineer, of any sort, unless they're accredited. That distinction matters because engineers have obligations that they are held to that a local contractor doesn't. That's the point.
> The regulation won't necessarily help anything but to outlaw a lot of smart people from being able to write certain software. It will put us further behind the USA in our ability to create tech companies that matter (or that can compete with offshoring)
Has any of that happened with engineers in Canada? We still have plenty of engineers.
A lot of this comes off as any industry wanting to hold onto the engineer title without any of the accountability that should come along with it, or really any accountability at all.
I don't want a random self taught engineer involved in building my house or a local highway overpass. So why would I also want a random self taught software engineer working on vital computer systems or on autonomous vehicles or on the software that controls the pitch controls on a Boeing 737? Software is not just some shit-tier SaaS app. It being hard to get official credation means accepting holding oneself to high (legal) standards. If that means lots of people have to go around calling themselves a developer instead of an engineer then I'm fine with that.
It might seem depressing that we hold engineers to high standards and expect legal accountability for the things they sign off on or create or approve, but I think more accountability in the tech industry is a good thing. The modern tech industry and software engineers hold themselves to ludicrously low standards because they basically operate on the idea that innovation = good and if-it-makes-money it must also be good. I know fast food workers who are held to higher standards than software engineers. That many continue to call themselves engineers is mainly just a hold over from a metaphor that describes computer systems as "architecture".
Software is a big deal and it effects every fabric of daily life in 2019. We shouldn't treat it like it's ephemeral stuff that has no consequences beyond the next VC exit or going public.
You have wedded your opinion of US news organizations to your definition of the news. Those two can and should be kept seperate.
1) Being an account is all the news is. It's a story. The division between TMZ and Fox and CNN is defined. They are all news organizations. They differ in the nature of their accountability and the degree with which they hold themselves accountable for their stories. They show this in their willingness to retract, correct, or stand by stories. And they have a history that we can judge.
You already show that in your opinion of them.
2) Anyone can be a journalist. Just as anyone can be a scientist or a programmer. But to do those things, to be considered a professional in those things, is to hold yourself to a certain set of standards, that is, to hold yourself accountable. I have read excellent and insightful journalism in a newspaper just as I have read it on a local blog. In both cases they have acted with professionalism. I have also seen the inverse, in which case I don't consider them credible journalists or their news to be credible.
3) That's a completely credible criticism of many news organizations. That however, does not target my definition of news, that targets the use of op-eds by news organizations to evade accountability. In which case, they are bad news organizations and you would be justified in considering them as such.
However to insist on 100% "truthfulness" or "objectivity" leads to a metaphysical paralysis where news or journalism is impossible. Show me an 100% true and objective news story? You can't (or you could show your fact from your parent comment, but, as you admit, that is not news). Because it has never been like that, nor need it. Instead we can be pragmatic and demand that the news be useful. what the news is is its use. That use is accountability. Because neither I nor you can be everywhere at once. To overcome that, we rely on news, on accounts of events. But, in turn, we can also, as you have, insist that we have good news and criticise those that are not useful (a Fox News, for instance, that insists on only holding one party accountable).
1) News is an account (story) of an event. The degree with which it is "true" is the degree with which it holds the events to account, and the degree with which the news organization/publisher holds itself accountable for that account/story. Good news is accountable and provides accounts of events. "Truth" is the wrong focus; "fact" is far too malleable (hence the status-quo legitimacy of "alternative facts"); accountability is the goal.
2) A journalist is someone who writes accounts/stories for a news organization/publisher and, in turn, is held accountable (either professionally or legally) for their story. Anyone can be a journalist, but few are willing to hold themselves to the standards of accountability good journalism demands.
3) The division between news and op-ed is marked by the degree and nature of accountability. News organizations are accountable for the news. News organizations call for op-eds and those op-eds have a different standard of accountability. That's why we call them op-eds. If a news organization will not hold itself accountable for a story then it is an op-ed.
We are far too focused on "truth" "fact" and "objective vs subjective". Instead we should focus on what the use of journalism and the news is. The use is accountability. And the special nature of news and journalism, what differentiates it from fiction and bullshit, is that it is also held to standards of accountability.
> A car's horsepower is in the engine.
Where is it in the engine? The engine can go 180hp. But the engine does not contain 180 hp. That's what the concept of an ability or a power is. A broken engine cannot go 180 hp. But, if as you say, it is in the engine, then that distinction would be irrelevant. We would still say a broken engine can go 180 hp. But we don't.
> Similarly, if brain can compute, it is a computer. It's also an organ.
Right, you'll see I have never said the brain can't compute. But that doesn't mean it is simply a computer. If the assumption that the brain is a computer is to stand then the abilities of a computer should be compared to the abilities of a brain, or a person. There are those that match. We agree on that. But there are those that do not. And that means the assumption that the brain simply is a computer is flawed. It is an organ that can compute. But to extend from that that it is a computer is eliding the crucial difference between the two. That is your assumption.
> Evidence needed. Why would it [imagination] not be computational?
Let's ignore that the premise you are making: that imagination is computational, requires you to support it as well;
> imagination-like computations
> A fuzzy search on a graph
> A series of simulations with relaxed constraints and somewhat randomized initial states
All require you to posit things that are -like, or somewhat like imagination. But computers are programmed. They can't think new thoughts. They are closed deterministic systems. That their output seems imaginative or novel does not mean the computer has the ability to imagine, it means the computational output was unexpected to you or the people who wrote the code. The idea that imagination is computational is a category error.
> not a big leap to conclude that imagination is nothing but a more complex variant of such computations
This is actually an enormous leap. Can computers imagine? You will find zero agreement in that regard. That doesn't prove your point. You'll need to provide evidence that computers can actually violate their programming, cannot just compute and instead imagine. But that's not what computers do. Computers compute. That they can do things that seem like imagination to you does not mean they can imagine.
>> It means you can fuzzily model the brain on a computer, but that model will have glaring gaps.
> Models exist on a map, not in the territory. So do brains and computers. The territory is made of whatever sub-quark substrate the reality is made of. When you say "brain", what you're really referring to is a model, and a pretty black-boxy one. Viewing the brain as a computer is an attempt to apply a model that's little more transparent (and therefore more useful); as long as it matches observable evidence (and it does), it's the right thing to do.
Excuse my original words, I meant "fuzzily model the brain as a computer
Again, I don't think applying the computer as a model is completely invalid. But it has limitations. You can't just brush off those limitations when you talk about the brain as a computer. They fundamentally mean the comparison is less useful. Supposing it is 1 to 1, which you are doing leads you to build on assumptions that are unsupported. You have to accept that the assumption that the brain is a computer has serious criticisms brought against it. And you have to defend that assumption. You can't simply ignore them and argue that you are right.
For instance viewing the brain as computer frequently does not match the observable evidence. We can imagine. Computers cannot. That is observable. So how do you support the assumption that the brain is a computer in spite of that?