The Computational Theory of Mind (2015)

For those interested in topic, our book Journey of the Mind would be a great introduction from a systems-thinking perspective. As you'll see on goodreads https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/60500189-journey-of-t... the reaction tends to be a bit bimodal, so at least some of you will find it absolutely fascinating.

We go from the simplest possible model of a mind (a single sensor and doer coupled together,separate from the world around them)to consciousness and beyond.

I am quoting a couple because I find it fascinating how readers have such widely differing reactions. (JoM actually does have an explanation for this: we are each a unique bundle of experiences cohering into an identity and a perspective)

"This book is both dense with biology and science as well as equally dense with a holistic philosophy that will genuinely shift your perspective on your place as a human, person and animal."

"Written in a cutesy, "fellow kids" tone that feels less like a serious exploration of the mind and more like someone trying to pander to what they imagine zoomers want. The style makes it almost unreadable and wastes your time. "

"We are all neurons in a (currently diseased) supermind. We are not just ourselves but collectively a Self, made of past and present (and artificial) intelligence. Collectively, a God that dictates the fate of other neurons, life forms, and ultimately, the universe at its whim. Without a doubt, this is one of the best books I have ever read."

Zooming out of my specific work, the “best” success stories were connections across math/CS, neuro, and psych and the golden child is the dopamine model of reinforcement learning where firing patterns encode the TD prediction error

1. instantaneous and faithful, at the cost of depending upon substrate-specific persistence parameters;

2. faithful and substrate-neutral, at the cost of requiring historical information;

3. instantaneous and substrate-neutral, at the cost of losing faithfulness.

No implementation map can satisfy all three simultaneously.

https://philarchive.org/rec/GIOTIT

The brain and body instead construct time, a cohesive internal one,from the ground up, with nesting oscillators driving the sequence of all functions and behaviors, over long and short time closes.

What we call “thinking” is a filtered layer of it, a slice that the attention spotlight is focussed on, and in humans this process can be turned to cognition over multilayered abstractions, and using language or other symbolic communications to communicate some of the dynamics of this process, and even evoke them in others.

Turing machines, and modern digital computers with their Von Neumann bottleneck, and LLMs are outside of time. They do not experience time. They can check the clock. They can count steps. But they are not active and agentic in time. Till we change that we won’t make machines that “think”. We can certainly make machines that simulate thinking, and that’s often good enough. But make the problem a real time one, with several conflicting verbal streams to parse and respond to serially and LLMs on their own fail catastrophically.

I think so long as the memory-processing divide remains, the simulation has to break apart processes for thinking in a way that’s alright for some cases, but not for others. And this is why we have the jaggedness of LLM intelligence I believe. They do not have internal timekeeping like almost all biological agents do.

I think this article is right that definitions really matter here cause one could argue “CTM is trivial, because we can describe almost any physical system as executing computations.” So we have a dual problem here—not just the difficult discussion of ‘what’s going on in minds’, but also ‘what is computation’.

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fplato.stanford.edu%2...

Then execute it as a program.

https://creatingintelligence.org

Even the loosest, "multiply realizable" version of computationalism this entry lays out still needs something physical to run on like neurons, silicon, spacetime, whatever. Problem is, natural selection was never selecting for accurate perception of that substrate, just for fitness payoffs [2].

So computationalism has the order backwards: you can't generate a mind by computing over a brain when the brain, like any object in spacetime, is just a species-specific icon evolution gave you to see, not the hardware underneath it.

[1] https://vod.video.cornell.edu/media/1_sfv907qp

[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4060643