this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2024
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TechTakes
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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It seems to me like when you say "human minds are computational things" you can mean this in several ways that can be roughly categorized by what your ideas of "minds" and of "computational things" are.
You can use "computational things" to be an extremely expansive category, capable of containing vast complexity but potentially completely impractical for fully recreating on a drawing board. In this use, the word user would often agree with the statement but it wouldn't belittle the phenomenon that is the human mind.
Or you can use "human minds" in a way that sees them as something relatively simple - kinda like a souped up 80486 computer, maybe. Nothing all too irreplaceable or special, in any case. Maybe an Athlon can be sentient and sapient! Most who say it like that would probably disagree with the sentiment because it small-mindedly minimizes people.
Then there's the tech take version, which somehow does both: "Computation is everything and everything is computation, but also I have no appreciation for complexity nor a conceptualization of what all I don't see about the human mind". Within the huge canvas of what can be conceived of if you think in computation terms, they opt for tiny crayon scribbles.
Shorter: "Minds are computers" can imply views of (1) minds as simpler than they are, (2) computers as potentially very complex and general, or (3) both.
1 and 3 are not only wrong but also bad.
I guess (4), neither, is also thinkable, but internally quite contradictory.
Those "you"s were meant as general yous. ESL here, sorry.