The Fundamental Distinction Between Brains and Turing Machines (2002) [pdf](web.mit.edu)
web.mit.edu
The Fundamental Distinction Between Brains and Turing Machines (2002) [pdf]
http://web.mit.edu/asf/www/PopularScience/Friedman_BrainsAndTuringMachines_2002.pdf
1 comments
It did have some interesting ideas, but too much "proof by handwaving" and not enough actual proof. (It's fine if he's presenting ideas that he can't prove, but he seemed to be trying to use enough words to give an impression of proof, rather than admitting that he couldn't prove his ideas.)
The two ideas I find most interesting here are:
A) True random numbers cannot be computed by a Turing machine whereas human minds may have access to them. The author does not address the fact that it is relatively easy to augment a TM with a physical RNG. I'm not aware of any evidence that such an augmented TM can solve problems a simple TM cannot.
B) Human minds seem to be able to always abstract to a higher level meta-language whereas programs/TM's seem to lack this ability. I have a feeling this issue may be key to the difficulty in producing machines that seem "truly intelligent" but I don't currently have a clear grasp of this problem.
The author makes a great deal of use of the term "consciousness" without being very clear about what he means by it. He seems to be using it in the sense of what I would call "true intelligence" or strong AI rather than in the sense of "capable of having subjective experiences".
I have generally tended to hold the following "beliefs":
Issue (B) above leads me to question belief (2). Perhaps it will turn out that "subjective experience" is necessary for strong AI and hence that no strong AI algorithm exists ?