[HN Gopher] Cognition Without Computation
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Cognition Without Computation
Author : RageoftheRobots
Score : 45 points
Date : 2021-10-28 18:00 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (spectrum.ieee.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org)
| xor99 wrote:
| If things on ieee are going to get philosophical then its wise to
| start with philosophy! David Chalmers is great at showing the
| complexity of these kinds of qs:
| https://philpapers.org/rec/CHAOIA
| https://philpapers.org/rec/CHATVO-8
| silent_cal wrote:
| One day we are all going to come full circle and realize that the
| ancients were right: the mind is immaterial.
| burnished wrote:
| Then why do injuries to the brain directly impact the parts of
| selfhood we hold most sacred, like feelings memories and
| attitudes?
| diplodocusaur wrote:
| Perhaps a stretch, but maybe like a color filter (injury)
| affects the perception of a rainbow (immaterial).
| silent_cal wrote:
| You can still say that many of those things (memories,
| feelings) are material impressions or tendencies in the
| brain. But cognition itself must have an immaterial
| component, because it deals with immaterial realities
| (justice, truth, abstracted quantities and shapes, etc.)
| That's the Aristotelian and Thomistic theory.
| tikwidd wrote:
| Or we will realise the conclusions of the 17th century
| philosophers, that there is no coherent notion of
| physical/material. Anything we can reason about is a
| construction of the mind on the occasion of sense.
| silent_cal wrote:
| Yes it starts with the senses, but at a certain point the
| mind abstracts immaterial notions from physical reality, such
| as justice, truth, point, line, and so on. So the mind must
| be immaterial.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| This article is crap. It's impossible to even say what the author
| means by computation. I kept reading expecting to find some kind
| of there there (after all its in IEEE), but nope. Just abruptly
| ends with him calling himself a kook. Wow, did Rodney Brooks
| really write this?
| jbotz wrote:
| The mind may not work anything like the electronic computers
| we're familiar with (in particular, the hardware vs software
| distinction may not be useful for understanding the mind, which
| is implemented in "wetware" that's both and neither), but that
| doesn't mean that what it does isn't some form of computation.
| Indeed, information processing === computation, and there can be
| little doubt that what the mind does is process information.
| goatlover wrote:
| What if the mind instead generates information from the noisy
| chaos of sensations? This goes back to Kant's idea that the
| mind creates the phenomenal world from the manifold of
| sensations via categories of thought like space, time and
| causality.
|
| But it all depends on how seriously we take the idea that the
| world is actually information (or systems computing
| information) which is transmitted to the brain via the senses.
| jhickok wrote:
| I assume he means cognition without classical computation, but
| that's non-controversial already-- we mostly agree (minus some
| holdouts) that processing units are also memory units. Whatever
| else he could mean is not clear to me.
|
| Also, there is very good indirect evidence that cognition is
| computational: https://direct.mit.edu/jocn/article-
| abstract/3/2/190/3022/De...
|
| You can multiply these sort of examples dozens of times.
| throwaway24124 wrote:
| The the brain is the most complex object we know of. Therefore,
| throughout history, it's always been compared to the most complex
| technology of each historical era. " Descartes thought that the
| brain was a kind of hydraulic pump, propelling the spirits of the
| nervous system through the body. Freud compared the brain to a
| steam engine." And today we have computational neuroscience. That
| doesn't mean that these models aren't useful. Many discoveries
| came about from thinking about the brain as an engine, and now as
| a computer. But these models are just models. They are refined
| and become closer to the reality that we observe in the brain,
| but we still have massive gaps in our understanding of the brain.
| Like the misconception with amyloid plaques in Alzheimer's that
| was only realized in the past few years. And now with glial
| cells, which likely make up 80% of the brain (but we're not even
| sure). https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/brainwaves/know-your-
| ne...
|
| Glial cells were largely ignored, and thought to only protect
| neurons with myelin, but we're now realizing how important they
| actually are for cognition and memory. And computational models
| and neural networks don't even take glial cells into account when
| forming models.
| 13415 wrote:
| In my opinion computationalism is the only non-mysterious
| explanation of how the mind/brain works in principle. By
| "computationalism" I mean either any process that can be
| expressed by reducing formulas in the untyped lambda calculus,
| or, alternatively, all processes that can be expressed in some
| parallel approach to computation like the pi calculus. (I've
| never seen a conclusive argument why the "software" running on
| the mind/brain _must_ be parallel, though. But there could be
| such an argument.)
|
| What alternatives are there? Other versions of functionalism seem
| to boil down to computationalism in the end - although the final
| verdict on this matter is open. Penrose's quantum approach is
| falsifiable, which is great, but there is not much evidence for
| it. Dualism is not compatible with modern physics, suffers from a
| variety of homunculus problems, and even if it was true,
| computationalism of the mind would still be the best explanation.
| (Computationalism does not imply physicalism, although most
| computationalists are physicalists.) Hypercomputation presumes
| ordinary computation, most hypercomputers are physically
| impossible, and there is no evidence that the mind/brain is a
| hypercomputer anyway.
|
| In any case the article does not define computationalism, so it's
| pointless.
| silent_cal wrote:
| One alternative theory is that the mind is immaterial.
| burnished wrote:
| >>(I've never seen a conclusive argument why the "software"
| running on the mind/brain must be parallel, though. But there
| could be such an argument.)
|
| I don't think there is, but the way the brain is connected
| implies a great deal of structural parallelism.
| bondarchuk wrote:
| I was skimming past the examples of other theories which turned
| out to be wrong, in order to get to the meat of the argument, but
| before I could detect any such meat the article had already
| ended.
|
| _Maybe instead these conscious experiences come from some kind
| of self-organization. The computation we associate with these
| sensations could be simply an invention of our own to explain the
| mechanism of sentience, not the primary cause of it._
|
| What is meant with "some kind of self-organization", and,
| crucially, why couldn't it be considered a form of computation?
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| Yeah, a proper refutation of the idea that cognition is
| computation is going to have a VERY difficult time addressing
| the fact that computation and information theory are VERY
| fundamental physics, right down there with entropy,
| thermodynamics, and causality.
|
| I just don't see how you can possibly get around that without
| figuratively introducing fairies. More susinctly: if it's not
| that, I think it's going to involve a proposal that involves
| something outside of observed physics which puts it on very
| dubious ground.
|
| If you don't accept that, you have some really fundamental
| truths you're going to have to explain around.
|
| 1. By all measures, cognition is intimately associated with the
| physical brain (and the fundamental forces, chemistry, and
| emergent phenomenon of a functioning brain). This is basically
| irrefutable by every measurement and understanding of physics
| that we have. We can even use drugs, strong electric or
| magnetic fields, or physical stimulation to interrupt and alter
| that cognition.
|
| 2. Computation itself is such a fundamental notion involving
| information and operations on that information that most
| emergent phenomenon you could propose will almost necessarily
| meet the definition of computation.
|
| Now... exactly what TYPE of computation is an interesting
| question: is it equivalent to a turing machine? To this, I
| don't know, but I suspect so. There are many other viable
| computational models though that likely fit the bill if this
| fails.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Something I feel more and more is that a lot of our brain
| capability is related to whatever form of memory exists in
| it. Things are hard if you can't remember them fully, you're
| smart if you can absorb a lot.
|
| Space/Density/Regularity (self similarity helping here) are
| somehow universal I believe.
| User23 wrote:
| > Yeah, a proper refutation of the idea that cognition is
| computation is going to have a VERY difficult time addressing
| the fact that computation and information theory are VERY
| fundamental physics, right down there with entropy,
| thermodynamics, and causality.
|
| That's not at all a given. Our models tell us nothing about
| the true nature of what they describe, they merely let us
| make predictions whose accuracy is limited by the congruence
| of the model with observation up to available computing
| capacity. Quantum Electrodynamics, which is arguably
| science's greatest triumph for agreement between model and
| observation, doesn't mean that photons are actually members
| of the computable subset of C.
|
| It's not surprising to see man with a hammer syndrome about
| computation among programmers. It's an easy trap to fall into
| and I try hard not to.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Given that Steven Wolfram wants to model the _entire
| universe_ as a computation, the idea that one would need to
| refute the idea that one could form a computational model of
| cognition seems a little silly. You can build a computational
| model of more or less anything at this point, and "this is
| not computational" is a red herring.
|
| The question, as other commenters have pointed out, is not
| whether cognition _IS_ computation, but whether or not a
| computational model of cognition is the best way to
| understand it.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| At the 20th century, science evolved in a way that now every
| scientific theory must be described computationally. (It's
| actually the most flexible way we ever had, so there's no loss
| there.)
|
| So, yes, the entire exercise looks meaningless to me too. If we
| get a theory it will be computational. And that tells
| absolutely nothing.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| "the article had already ended"
|
| I had this very same experience.
| moyix wrote:
| The author is Rodney Brooks [1] so I assume he's aware that it
| _can_ be considered a form of computation, and probably would
| agree that it can be simulated using a computer (just as
| Newtonian mechanics can). But my guess is that he 's asking
| whether that level of abstraction will turn out to be the most
| scientifically useful way of understanding how cognition
| actually works. After all, cognition could also be described as
| interactions of atoms - but trying to understand it in those
| terms is unlikely to yield much insight.
|
| But it is certainly true that the article is pretty
| uninformative and superficial!
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodney_Brooks
| pessimizer wrote:
| You can consider the gradient-following of water when acted
| upon by gravity a "gradient calculation" but I think it would
| be deeply misleading.
| jerf wrote:
| I actually laughed out loud at the end of the article.
|
| "This long held theory that is certainly vague and fuzzy but is
| as concrete as we currently know how to make it could be wrong!
| What if, instead, bargle fluzzle emergent momble self-
| organization bazamble magrile?"
|
| What if, indeed.
| iflp wrote:
| I was about to post the same thing. Self-organisation maps seem
| a classical computational model to me. If the author's point
| was that computational models should be biologically plausible,
| there are many other examples as well. I've never really
| understood what neuroscientists are talking about...
| wildermuthn wrote:
| The article would be better served by exploring the "explanatory
| gap" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explanatory_gap?wprov=sfti1)
| -- how is it that neurons firing in a parallel asynchronous
| manner leads to sequential synchronous experience and thought?
| How is it that matter leads to what many people throughout
| history have understood as "spirit".
|
| The question can be restated more clearly: why aren't we all
| philosophical zombies? Or more generally: why is there something
| rather than nothing?
|
| It may never be possible to answer this question, but does an
| answer matter? We know that it is possible to arrange a physical
| system (the brain) in such a way that a mind emerges. At some
| point we will be able to develop such systems in silicon. We
| don't need to know why there is something rather than nothing to
| do so. We simply have to follow the patterns that we know work
| catskul2 wrote:
| I like Rodney Brooks, but this just seems like a nothing
| idea/article.
| yshklarov wrote:
| Indeed. "Many widely-accepted theories ultimately get rejected.
| Perhaps this one will be, too." What use is an article like
| this to anyone?
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| This is a much deeper, better take on a similar rejection of
| simplistic "computational" models of cognition. It might have
| been on HN a few weeks ago:
|
| https://aeon.co/essays/the-study-of-the-mind-needs-a-coperni...
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