this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2024
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Consciousness is not a computer program. Neurons don’t use binary. I’d love it if we had computers that could do squirrel things perfectly but we don’t even have that.
I can appreciate that contemporary neural networks are very different from organic intelligence, but consciousness is most definitely equivalent to a computer program. There are two things preventing us from reproducing it:
Also, for what it’s worth, most organic neurons actually do use binary (“one bit”) activation, while artificial “neurons” use a real-valued activation function for a variety of reasons, the biggest two being that (a) training algorithms require differentiable models, and (b) binary activation functions do not yield a lot of information per neuron while requiring effectively the same amount of memory.
@ShittyBeatlesFCPres @Sorgan71 well, actually those things are not so far apart. Neural networks have their names not just by accidents, name giving neurons work similar to braincells. Also on a non-ai level you could compare the RAM easily yo put short term memory etc.
The name is an analogy, neural networks do not work in the same way as biological neurons. They were designed by computer scientists, not biologists.
RAM is so far removed from biological short term memory both in how it works and how it's used that the comparison doesn't even make sense. The only similarity is that they're short term information/data stores, so it's equally valid to compare them to a drawing in the sand of a beach.
A piece of friendly advice is to not say “Well, actually…” on the Internet because that’s a meme about know-it-alls. I (and probably everyone on Lemmy) has a tendency to “Well, actually” people and it’s one of those things where people will discount your argument before it begins.
That aside, I do think we’re trying to model the brain using the best tools we have. I suspect the next 100 years will see a revolution in biology that can be compared to previous centuries seeing huge leaps in the understanding of physics, electromagnetism, and the immune system. No one in 1900 could not have ever foreseen us mapping the human genome.
So: I wouldn’t be shocked if neural networks caught up with humans in our lifetimes. But we’re basically trying to reverse engineer it using a lot of electricity and I doubt we’ll get to squirrel level intelligence in my lifetime, much less human level. But who knows? “There are decades where nothing happens; and, there are weeks where decades happen.” (A quote from V.I. Lenin. I don’t want to be political here but hopefully we can all agree he made some history happen.)
Binary neurons are still neurons