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Is Neuroscience a Bigger Threat than Artificial Intelligence?

3ammagazine.com

61–66 of 66 posts

Re: Is Neuroscience a Bigger Threat than Artificial Intelligence?

#61

I posted about fusing Neanderthal brains to spiking neural networks here once. A HN poster threatened to get the Pope to stop me. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18425194 You have no idea how much more powerful neurology is over machine learning.

As we start to understand neurology sufficiently to simulate it, the two fields are converging. Eventually (soon?) they'll be seen as sub-fields of the study of intelligence.

(As for your fusing neural organoids to computers, there was a sci-fi story I read years ago that used this theme. There were human-level AIs that needed some integrated organic grey matter to perform some of their higher level functions. Wish I could remember what it was - although that description probably covers half a dozen stories by now.)

Re: Is Neuroscience a Bigger Threat than Artificial Intelligence?

#63

The article's logic is a soup sandwich of two huge misunderstandings: First, "Theory of Mind" is something experienced at a high level directly. We do reason about our own and other's actions, (both successfully and unsuccessfully of course). We still have much to learn about how this works and is implemented, but I don't think it is controversial that each of us do develop theories about our own minds and others and…

Rats brains are used to study mechanisms presumed to be conserved by humans eg aspects of molecular biology. That doesn’t mean that rat social behavior couldn’t be used to model some aspect of human social behavior.

No doubt rat behavior is worth using to model a lot of human behavior and brain organization, but the article talks specifically about Theory of Mind which is something few animals show strong signs of.

Some aspects of our species are different from most other animals, this seems to be one of them. Maybe dolphins or whales have comparable Theory of Mind capabilities?

Re: Is Neuroscience a Bigger Threat than Artificial Intelligence?

#65

Just a developer, but is this author subtly arguing that in the end, behaviorism has some sort of validity?

The weird part is that he specifically mentions behaviorism:

> Except for a brief period when psychologists embraced a wrongheaded behaviorism, the theory of mind everyone shares drove the 20th century research programs of child psychology and psychiatry, cognitive science, evolutionary anthropology, and neuroscience.

But then by the end goes ahead and suggests the premises of behaviorism as a conclusion...?

> By colonizing consciousness spoken language turned it into a monologue of silent speech, tricking us that the meaning of spoken words is given by thoughts’ content when its just silent sounds passing through consciousness. Neuroscience shows that that in our brains the neural circuits neither have nor need content to do their jobs.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding something somewhere? Is this guy really the one in charge of the philosophy department at Duke?

Re: Is Neuroscience a Bigger Threat than Artificial Intelligence?

#66

The article's logic is a soup sandwich of two huge misunderstandings: First, "Theory of Mind" is something experienced at a high level directly. We do reason about our own and other's actions, (both successfully and unsuccessfully of course). We still have much to learn about how this works and is implemented, but I don't think it is controversial that each of us do develop theories about our own minds and others and…

I might be wrong, but I think I've seen the term "theory of mind" used in the scientific context. For example, Kurzweil's "Pattern Recognition Theory of Mind" and Heylighen's "Anticipation Control Theory of Mind"

Kurzweil: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Create_a_Mind#Pattern_R...

Heylighen: http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/Papers/AnticipationControl.pdf

Though I maybe should mention I generally agree with the use of "soup sandwich" as a description for the article.

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