Tags / 41 quotes from 7 sources
#computation
A Bit Of History — The Adventures Of A Pythonista In Schemeland V0.1 Documentation
Fortran and Lisp
The history of programming begins with two languages with two completely different philosophies and goals: Fortran and Lisp. Both languages come from Academia, but from two opposite fields: on one side we find physicists and engineers interested in numeric computations to be…
Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart)
The closer to brains, the less belief in superintelligence
Contrast this view with that of Duke University neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis,5 who is actually building brain-machine interfaces, or BMIs. “The arguments favoring the emergence of a relativistic brain strongly suggest,” writes Nicolelis, “that the primate central nervous…
Consciousness is a useful hallucination
Neither brains nor computers carry out computations. Consciousness is a hallucination, albeit a very useful one. And information is an epistemic tool that is a cultural invention rather than a natural entity. Some philosophers, like David Chalmers, argue that the brain doesn’t…
The ontology of the digital
There is a strange relationship between digital ideology and the metaphysical belief that our brains also run as computations. It is as if one belief justifies the other. It would indeed be very convenient for Google if it turns out that creating artificial intelligence is just…
Is the brain computable?
One fundamental problem is that we do not understand human consciousness. Many in science and artificial intelligence assume that human consciousness is based on information or computations. Several writers have tried to tackle this assumption, most notably the British…
The computational stance
create artificial minds. However, despite assuming that the brain is a computational system—what philosopher Riccardo Manzotti calls “the computational stance”—neuroscience is still discovering that…
Computations are not like gravity
“Historically, significant scientific progress has commonly been achieved in the absence of formal definitions. For instance, the phenomenological laws of electrical current flow were formulated by Ohm, Ampere, and Volta well before the discovery of the electron in 1892 by…
Voltage values are a human invention
As I mentioned, when voltage is measured and digitized using signal processing technology, the probability that the real voltage on a computer chip has a particular value is negligible. This is a subtle but very important point. It is the fundamental fact about moving from the…
Sampling and quantization: from analog to digital
Analog signals are known as “continuous” and digital signals are called “discrete.” This distinction simply means that analog signals vary continuously in time, while discrete signals are chopped up into separate units at each time point—which is otherwise known as the sample…
Computers don't really compute
On a deeper level, which we might call the ontological level, the distinction between analog and digital disappears, as both concepts like “analog” and “digital” are ultimately epistemic tools humans have invented to describe natural and man-made signals. On a computer chip the…
AI as building robots with economic theory
Whether or not the field of artificial intelligence deals with this foundational issue could be decisive for its project of building superintelligent machines. It turns on whether computations are ontologically objective versus epistemically objective. If computations are only…
There is no computation inside a computer
In an email discussion I had with Riccardo Manzotti, he writes: We use logic and computation to build artifacts—from chairs to spaceships. We need logic and computation as an extension of our innate mental tools. They help us to achieve the precision and generality that we need…
Vision builds a world in a fraction of a second
Hoffman says: “When we open our eyes, our visual system constructs in a fraction of a second all the shapes, depths, colors, motions, textures, and objects that we see. The computational power required for such construction is massive, but the construction is done so quickly…
Biological versus functionalist views of consciousness
Without going into the mathematical details here, Maguire shows that if we do in fact have completely integrated experiences, this form of information integration cannot be modeled computationally. Both the global workspace theory and the integrated information theory can in…
Computationalism as a form of dualism
Hardly any cognitive scientists are dualists in the Cartesian sense. While the Cartesians believed that the mind represented the world, they also believed it was separate from the brain and made of nonmaterial substance. However, the idea that human thought is computational is…
Are computations real or epistemic tools?
In philosophy, cognitive science, and, more broadly speaking, in computer science, there is a divide between those who believe that computations underlie physical reality—and that human consciousness is made of information, reducible to information, or caused by it—and those…
What if there is no such thing as computation?
This metaphysical assumption—that human thought is based on objective computational rules—determines much of the methodology used in research on human psychology and artificial thought. But what if this assumption is wrong? What if there is no such thing as a computation?
Brain imaging's undefined computations
Within the more empirical fields of brain imaging and experimental cognitive neuroscience, the computational assumption is interwoven into most hypotheses about the brain. In fact, in almost every brain imaging study the concepts of information and computation are deployed…
Information is like lift
The concept of information is useful; so is the concept of lift for flight. This does not mean that lift is real. Importantly, we do not include lift in fundamental physics because the phenomenon of lift is reducible to still more basic laws of physics like mass and gravity…
The computational move
The real bone of contention between computationalists and others is whether to include computations in the list of observer-independent phenomena. Are computation and information like mass or the elementary particles? Or more dramatically, are computations even more fundamental…
Computations have no ontological status
Manzotti suggests that there is actually no such thing as information. Therefore, neither machines nor biologically based nervous systems can process it more efficiently—because information may not refer to anything. He argues that the computational level may be removed from…
Computations describe the observer, not the mechanism
than about the mechanism itself.”
Computers are like comic-book characters
one of the more counterintuitive parts to this argument is that computers themselves are not really performing computations. Manzotti argues that computers are simply “transferring electricity from one place to another and dissipating a huge amount of it. Computations and…
Logic might be the greatest hallucination
believe this logical bias might be the source of the “computational stance.” We are biased toward explaining the world with logic and computations because this is the only way that the brain can make sense of reality. Logic itself might be the greatest hallucination. Perlovsky…
Cells As Living Calculators - Mit News Office
Cells as analog computers
In the new Nature paper, Sarpeshkar, Lu and colleagues have done the reverse — mapping analog electronic circuits onto cells. Sarpeshkar has long advocated analog computing as a more efficient alternative to digital computation at the moderate precision of computation seen in…
Epigrams On Programming
Recursion
Recursion is the root of computation since it trades description for time.
Introducing Artificial Intelligence (Henry Brighton and Howard Selina)
Penrose: conventional computers cannot be conscious
Like Searle, Penrose argues that conventional computing machinery cannot support consciousness. A conscious mind requires very specific physical characteristics.
Penrose's Gödelian argument against computable thought
To support his argument, Penrose appeals to a fundamental theorem in mathematical logic – Gödel’s Theorem – which states that certain mathematical truths cannot be proved by using a computational procedure. Because human mathematicians evidently can arrive at these truths…
Cognition as the manipulation of symbols
The classical approach to AI encompasses a set of principles and practices used to explore the validity of cognitivism, and specifically, to investigate the hypothesis proposed by Newell and Simon. Cognition is best understood as the formal manipulation of symbolic structures.
Tic-tac-toe versus chess
The space of all possible tic-tac-toe games is negligible in comparison to the number of possible games of chess. One of the world’s greatest chess masters, Garry Kasparov, perfectly expressed the difficulty.
The chess game tree won't fit in the universe
With chess, looking ahead even a moderate number of moves becomes intractable – the number of combinations becomes too large to contemplate. The game tree for chess cannot fit into the universe, let alone a computer’s memory.
The brain computes in parallel
The brain is massively parallel, whereas most computers compute serially. This is why the brain is so fast, despite its relatively slow machinery. The property of parallelism present in neural networks makes connectionist models appealing. The manner in which they carry out the…
Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle)
From materialism to the computational theory of mind
In the next few pages I am going to sketch briefly the history of materialism in the twentieth century, up to the point where it finally reached its most sophisticated formulation in the computational theory of the mind, the theory that the brain is a computer and the mind is a…
What an algorithm is
An algorithm is a method for solving a problem by going through a precise series of steps. The steps must be finite in number, and if carried out correctly, they guarantee a solution to the problem. For this reason algorithms are also called “effective procedures.” Good…
The Turing machine as an abstract concept
A Turing machine is a device that carries out calculations using only two types of symbols. These are usually thought of as zeros and ones, but any symbols will do. The idea of the Turing machine was invented by Alan Turing, the great British logician and mathematician. The…
The Church-Turing thesis
Due originally to Alonzo Church (arrived at independently by Turing, so sometimes called the Church-Turing Thesis), this thesis states that any problem that has an algorithmic solution can be solved on a Turing machine. Or another way to say the same thing is that any algorithm…
Big problems decompose into simple ones
Yet another important idea, already implicit in what I have said, is that big complex problems can be broken down into little simple problems, which can be broken down into even simpler problems, until we reach the level of ultimate simplicity. Doing multiplication with several…
Recursive decomposition and human intelligence
Again, the idea of recursive decomposition seemed to give us an important clue to understanding human intelligence. Complex intelligent human tasks are recursively decomposable into simple tasks, and that is how we are so intelligent.
The computational theory of mind
The collection of ideas that I have just explained contains the tools necessary to articulate the single most influential and powerful theory of the mind in the last decades of the twentieth century. The brain is a digital computer, in all probability a Universal Turing…
Computation is in the eye of the beholder
When I add two plus two to get four, that computation is not observer relative. I am doing that regardless of what anybody thinks. But when I punch: ”2+2 =” on my pocket calculator and it prints out “4” it knows nothing of computation, arithmetic, or symbols, because it knows…
Understanding Digital Humanities (david M. Berry)
The ‘computational turn’ inevitably has its doubters
The ‘computational turn’ inevitably has its doubters. Cheeseman (2011) confessed being sceptical about the computability of most of the problems he dealt with as a literary translator, editor, critic, and cultural historian, while conceding that digitisation and computation…