Microsoft Word - ConversationWithPeterTseArtificialIntelligence.doc - ConversationWithPeterTseArtificialIntelligence.pdf
I mean, so the brain is just manifestly not a computer.
So the dominant metaphor of my field-- neuroscience,
cognitive neuroscience, psychology-- is that the brain is a kind of computer.
And this just fails.
Right?
Because there is no software/hardware distinction in the brain.
No computer is rewiring itself on a millisecond timescale.
And computers are not conscious.
So we know that our governing metaphor is false.
And I would argue that computers as they are currently realized
are very algorithmic.
And algorithms-- one simple way to think of it is as a thread of decisions.
There's this input.
And then there's yes or no decision, and then a single output,
whereas the neurons are just radically different from that.
They're not just taking a single thread of input.
They're taking 10,000 inputs, integrating them, and then setting
hundreds or thousands of inputs out.
So I'm skeptical.
