>b) we've already beaten the brain in straight compute density by many orders of magnitude.
citation needed.
computers are better at arithmetic, sure, but computers can only do things that you can map to arithmetic. I'm given to understand that we don't understand how the brain works well enough to simulate even a very small one. Not because we lack the compute power, but because we don't know what to simulate.
I think there's a lot of evidence that brains are doing something powerful (that we don't yet fully understand) that computers are unable to do. It's quite possible that brains are doing something that can't be done in a practical way with transistors.
In short, I don't know of any solid evidence that the brain is only a turing machine. I mean, brains can be used as a turing machine, but a brain is terrible at that, and can't compete with even really primitive purpose built turing machines.
I mean, I'm not saying that it is theoretically impossible to map what a brain does on to sufficiently powerful silicon, or that we wont figure out, at some point in the future, whatever non-arithmatic primitives the brain uses... just as far as I can tell, we haven't yet, and that means it's likely that a brain is still more powerful in some ways than even our largest computers. (obviously, even a small computer is more powerful when the problem maps cleanly to mathematical primitives. )
>Back then, we've learned something new about nature of human societies. I don't believe the concept of MAD was known before nuclear weapons. The individual human nature didn't change, nor did the social one; it's just that we already know a lot about the former, but we're still discovering the latter.
citation needed.
computers are better at arithmetic, sure, but computers can only do things that you can map to arithmetic. I'm given to understand that we don't understand how the brain works well enough to simulate even a very small one. Not because we lack the compute power, but because we don't know what to simulate.
I think there's a lot of evidence that brains are doing something powerful (that we don't yet fully understand) that computers are unable to do. It's quite possible that brains are doing something that can't be done in a practical way with transistors.
In short, I don't know of any solid evidence that the brain is only a turing machine. I mean, brains can be used as a turing machine, but a brain is terrible at that, and can't compete with even really primitive purpose built turing machines.
I mean, I'm not saying that it is theoretically impossible to map what a brain does on to sufficiently powerful silicon, or that we wont figure out, at some point in the future, whatever non-arithmatic primitives the brain uses... just as far as I can tell, we haven't yet, and that means it's likely that a brain is still more powerful in some ways than even our largest computers. (obviously, even a small computer is more powerful when the problem maps cleanly to mathematical primitives. )
>Back then, we've learned something new about nature of human societies. I don't believe the concept of MAD was known before nuclear weapons. The individual human nature didn't change, nor did the social one; it's just that we already know a lot about the former, but we're still discovering the latter.
What if we just got lucky?