I must say, I wince at 1 book here, and I’ll explain why.
On the Emperor’s new mind book, I see a wealth of wrongness in the book. The misuse of Godel’s Incompleteness Theorems is astounding, and the problem is ‘human understanding’ is really a way to say that there are hidden inconsistencies in your proof and not complete (it’d require having uncountably infinite proofs to be solved by humans in a finite time, which is very exceptional as a claim.)
The Chinese Room issue is that a look up table understanding Chinese is only physically impossible due to storage limits, information limits and thermodynamic issues with heat dissipation, not logically impossible. If you’re willing to accept that thermodynamics is utterly broken, then you can arbitrarily add more energy to get more cases in the look up table until you learn Chinese, or arbitrarily force the efficiency beyond 100% until you get every rule down with a minimum of computing. The Chinese Room is a philosophical toy, nothing more.
Microtubules are known what they do, and they’re not quantum. Actually, the quantum brain has severe problems, and is basically an attempt to claim there’s a soul in a physical sense.
Re determinism and quantum mechanics, there is a variant called super determinism which says there is no free will, and all actions are pre-staged. It is just as computational, if not more than the free will quantum version.
This book is the perfect example of expertise in one area doesn’t equal expertise in all areas.
I must say, I wince at 1 book here, and I’ll explain why.
On the Emperor’s new mind book, I see a wealth of wrongness in the book. The misuse of Godel’s Incompleteness Theorems is astounding, and the problem is ‘human understanding’ is really a way to say that there are hidden inconsistencies in your proof and not complete (it’d require having uncountably infinite proofs to be solved by humans in a finite time, which is very exceptional as a claim.)
The Chinese Room issue is that a look up table understanding Chinese is only physically impossible due to storage limits, information limits and thermodynamic issues with heat dissipation, not logically impossible. If you’re willing to accept that thermodynamics is utterly broken, then you can arbitrarily add more energy to get more cases in the look up table until you learn Chinese, or arbitrarily force the efficiency beyond 100% until you get every rule down with a minimum of computing. The Chinese Room is a philosophical toy, nothing more.
Microtubules are known what they do, and they’re not quantum. Actually, the quantum brain has severe problems, and is basically an attempt to claim there’s a soul in a physical sense.
Re determinism and quantum mechanics, there is a variant called super determinism which says there is no free will, and all actions are pre-staged. It is just as computational, if not more than the free will quantum version.
This book is the perfect example of expertise in one area doesn’t equal expertise in all areas.