Comment on MIRI's Approach

Fri, 31 Jul 2015 04:00:58 GMT

Eli this doesn't make sense - the fact that digital logic switches are higher precision and more powerful and thus require more minimal energy makes the brain/mind more impressive, not less.

Nuh-uh :-p. The issue is that the brain's calculations are probabilistic. When doing probabilistic calculations, you can either use very, very precise representations of computable real numbers to represent the probabilities, or you can use various lower-precision but natively stochastic representations, whose distribution over computation outcomes is the distribution being inferred.

Hence why the brain is, on the one hand, very impressive for extracting inferential power from energy and mass, but on the other hand, "not that amazing" in the sense that it, too, begins to add up to normality once you learn a little about how it works.

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