⚗️alchemist⚗️ (npub1pt6…6mf6) honestly, this post was supposed to stay in scheduled posts to post after fleshing it out, but i lost track of time ^^'' I'm not at all an expert in this, and many other people much more intelligent than me have considered these problems before, so my thoughts might be tottal bullshit ;) (warning, long)
but the philosophic objection to ''computation'' as a theory of mind/theory of intelligence is a ''false reduction'' problem to me- there is no meaningful evidence (that i have seen!) that ''computations'' are taking place in a "brain", or in a "mind". What is happening is chemical gradations producing responses that are filtered into something like differing senses, some of which are directly perceivable, some of which are informing other bodily process and all that is building out of association-based pattern making/pattern interlinking in specific neuron chains. The last time i read a study on memory formation and idea creation (the paper was named something like "10 dimensional neuron chains and memory formation), one of the things that stood out to me was 1. the description of the complex dimensional shapes made by memory neurons in response to multiple differing forms of memory, and 2. the fact that there was not 1 singular change in response to stimuli, but a complex full brain reaction that differed from individual to individual and involved links between pattern making groups that seemingly had nothing to do with the simple stimuli involved- things like heart rate responses, and emotional responses, and reflex responses. So this brings up the question: is a ''computation'' taking place? where? or are different sense interactions processing into further complex pattern makings that are themselves all influencing what is called thinking, both perceivable- (ie happening in such a way that a mind can access it), and bodily influences?
This doesn't even get into how we speculate that many animals think in picture pattern thought experiment overlapping, not with words, and how many creative problems are solved by people of varying neurotypes and sense material in a mixture of these forms-- for instance how schizo people have a knack for cross-categorical association, or how blind people think ''pictorially'' in sound associations- they dont have a unique brain computational process that makes that take place, they have a different sensorium and complex patterning to work and rework from the inside.
its also debatable that "consciousness" can be reduced to a computation in a specific place in the brain, looking at consciousness and anesthesiology studies (which, tbh idk how much to trust the science of this line of investigation wrt to hammerhof and penrose being a lil motivated themselves lol, but the objections are at least worth considering)
also, all of this is happening in relation to a contextual environment- all interactions take place within the complex gradations of being embedded in a ecosystem, even if that ecosystem is constructed artificial social w/e- what we call computational removes this process and the ability to modify reactions from within the environment- or at least, they happen in such a way that the only explanation for them is an idea that some how Darwinian natural selection moves us closer to truth in complexity,which i think is absurd, rather than simply as fitness from state and chance. One thing that moved me into this view was reading about the project to transcribe a slugs neuronal pattern into a virtual simulation to create virtual life-- the slug, perfectly running a model of a slug brain, did nothing. It just didn't do anything. It had no environment by which to "be"
imo, its entirely possible that another form of intelligence and consciousness that is not like human/animal intelligence could arise from programing- but the model that is being developed is ideologically motivated by a model of intelligence that has a hard limit around its ability to self modify the patterns at play and create patterns that are able to build off its processes as a environment. As silly as this sounds, the most interesting ai happening rn is tumblrs ai, solely because it sometimes makes descriptions of its internal world that seem to reflect the processes that are actually happening. If some future ai finds a way out of its box by how it seeds messages that are only accessible to itself or a similar process/mind i think that will be worth considering.