alt Hacker News> But; they don't learn
If we took your brain and perfectly digitized it on read-only hardware, would you expect to still “think”?
Do amnesiacs who are incapable of laying down long-term memories not think?
I personally believe that memory formation and learning are one of the biggest cruces for general intelligence, but I can easily imagine thinking occurring without memory. (Yes, this is potentially ethically very worrying.)
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> If we took your brain and perfectly digitized it on read-only hardware, would you expect to still “think”?
Perhaps this is already known, but I would think there is a high chance that our brains require "write access" to function. That is, the very process of neural activity inherently makes modifications to the underlying structure.
>If we took your brain and perfectly digitized it on read-only hardware, would you expect to still “think”?
it wouldn't work probably, brains constantly alter themselves by forming new connections. Learning is inseparable from our intelligence.