Re:Peter Norvig critically reviews AlphaCode's code quality
by jpttsn on Saturday December 17, 2022 @01:56PM
(#34030913)
Intent: not lumping in all of Turing's work, not the universal computation argument.
The hand wave spelled out: "Is there thinking going on inside a given machine? Let's propose a simple test. Look at what problems the machine can solve, and compare to what problems a thinking thing is known to be able to solve. If there is sufficient overlap, the machine must be thinking. Because we know of no non-thinking ways to solve these problems, so there must not be any".
Personally I think that’s a misreading of what Turing meant when he proposed the test. In getting people to ask ‘can computers think?’ he wasn’t trying to get you to grapple with ‘can electronic hardware do something as special as thinking?’ - he wanted you to confront ‘is thinking actually special at all?’
I think he was trying to get people to grapple with the idea that brains can not be anything more than Turing machines - because there is nothing more than universal computation.
The only things a mind can possibly act on are its initial configuration, its accumulated experiences and the inputs it is receiving - and anything it does with that information can only ever be something computable.
And anything that can be computed by Turing machine A can be computed by equivalently powerful Turing machine B.