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baggy_troughtoday at 1:18 AM3 repliesview on HN

Neurons are just summing up their inputs according to the laws of chemistry. What's the difference?


Replies

acdhatoday at 2:04 AM

This is definitely complicated—I’m not a neuroscientist but worked for some and married one, so I’ve heard quite a few entries from the genre of how our brains fool ourselves or make our conscious experience seem more coherent and linear than it actually is—but the big ones I see are the inability to learn from experience or have a generalized sense of conceptual reasoning. For the latter, I’m not just thinking about the simple “count the r’s in strawberry” things companies have put so much effort into masking but the way minor changes in a question can get conflicting answers from even the best models, indicating that while there’s something truly fascinating about how they cluster topics it is not the same as having a conceptual model of the world or a theory of mind. This is the huge problem in the field: all of these companies would love to have a model which is safe to use in adversarial contexts because then the mass layoffs could begin in earnest, but the technology just isn’t there.

This isn’t a religious argument that there’s something about our brains which can’t be replicated, but simply that it’s sufficiently more complex than anything we have currently.

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2snakestoday at 6:03 AM

Physical fields like dendritic integration, EM, diffusion, it isn’t binary logic. Brains are a different substrate. Metabolism power efficiency affects cognition too.

digitaltreestoday at 1:30 AM

I came here to say this. But your neurons are faster than mine.