A discipline or field of study is a social term. If computer scientists do not organize with biologists it's obviously not a sub discipline of biology.
Likewise while computer scientists may use things they call "languages" they are not a sub discipline of the linguistic department.
Absolutely with respect to the social organization of academia, but it's worth noting that there's a lot of cross-pollination between those fields! For example Chomsky's work on grammars is foundational to programming language theory.
The brain is not an organic computer. This is a kind of fallacy sometimes called mechanomorphism. Humans can compute things and process information within their minds, but that doesn’t make their brains computers or information processors.
> Humans can compute things and process information within their minds, but that doesn’t make their brains computers or information processors.
Does it not? I mean if you define things that compute as computers or things that process information as information processors then it's trivially true that brains are. Something doesn't need the von Neumann architecture to be a computer; it just needs to be equivalent to a Turing machine in terms of the set of functions it can solve.
In fact it'd probably be reasonable to say that computers are defined in terms of human brains, because if we couldn't conceive of the solution to a problem then we couldn't create a machine to solve it, and if we could think of a set of steps for solving a problem then we could also make machines that do it.
Not agreeing with the OP or anything. Anyone who thinks learning Java 101 and writing a linked list gives some sort of deep insight into human nature is is pretty dumb. Just dropping two cents since I was lurking and this was related to part of my research!
I think /u/metachor is saying something like, it's fallacious to draw too many conclusions from analogizing a human brain with a Macbook Pro, or Turing machines in general. Biological processes are not simply Turing machines implemented with carbon-based molecules instead of silicon. I suppose you could say a seed has done some computations about whether it's the right time to germinate or not, but whatever that seed is doing bears so little resemblance to a Turing machine that saying it's engaging in "computation" and "information processing" conveys nothing useful whatsoever.
Laptops aren't much like Turing machines either, though, since Turing machines are idealized thought experiments used to prove general properties of computation.
I'd say the brain is like a computer in the sense that it computes, and Turing's theories can be applied to it. It's not like a computer in the sense that hot takes about it from some random dude on twitter with a programming background have any value.
Laptops _are_ Turing machines, but simply limited to a certain tape length.Because they are a limited version of a Turing machine, analyzing them as Turing machines make sense. Most programming languages are Turing-complete, for instance. Therefore, any properties of computation that apply to Turing machines apply to programs on laptops as well. You can't make nearly as many useful comparisons between a Turing machine and a brain. If brains _were_ Turing machines, the dude on Twitter would actually be able to make valuable comparisons.
I think you're looking at things from a very pragmatic engineering perspective, which definitely makes sense in a discussion about whether some statement is contributing to a conversation.
But the CS perspective used in computability theory doesn't care about the mechanism by which a system operates. It just cares about the set of functions the system is able to solve. That's why Turing was able to show the equivalence between computability and Church's notion of effective calculability in the appendix of his paper, by which he also showed equivalence between the two systems. It would be pretty wild to treat lambda calculus as some sort of buildable machine, but they can solve the same functions which is all that matters.
There are many wildly different models of computation, some more powerful than others, and equivalence between any of them is defined functionally rather than mechanically. A shortcut for determining equivalence is seeing if two systems can simulate each other. We know human brains can simulate finite Turing machines, so they are at least Turing complete. Whether Turing machines could simulate human brains is mathematically unanswerable (there's no formal definition of a "human brain" lol). Maybe someday far in the future we'll have enough knowledge to create a detailed enough brain model which could be simulated to provide "empirical proof".
Another way of looking at the question is as whether artificial intelligence based on Turing machines is possible in principle, which has been a question at least as far back as Turing himself and a big part of the mindset of the field. (Oh god not in the rationalist skynet terminator horror story way though I swear there are actually interesting papers in philosophy and in CS about it)
Sorry for rambling I know I'm splitting hairs I just find this stuff interesting! I agree 99% of people comparing brains to computers don't know hardly anything about either.
>The brain is not an organic computer.
That's kind of an odd thing to say.
At the very least the brain certainly possesses the capability for some pretty serious information processing and storage, so I genuinely don't see why one couldn't say that some of the brains qualities make it a computer by definition. I'd say that it's absolutely not *just* an "organic computer", nor is it similar or even comparable to, say, personal computers, if that's what you meant, but I wouldn't disregard computer-like qualities.
Also, what makes something an "information processor", if not information processing? Beep boop.
At best 10%
Computation in biology is obviously a thing (that’s a statement about what biologists use to study biological specimens)
Computational *theory* is also a thing in biology (the study of e.g. DNA and how those sorts of chemicals operate according to unconscious processes which can be described in terms of computation)
That’s the absolute end of it, that’s all, there is literally nothing else to it
The idea that any of this is subsumed under computer science is the shallowest acid-deluded Silicon Valley - and not just shallow, but *old* - bullshit is so fucking pathetic it’s off the scale
Eigenrobot is a shitposter, whose modus operandi is “think about a
topic, take it as far as possible in some absurd direction, and then
post the absurdity without context”.
Rationalist discourse and sneers trending ever closer to each other.
Then this in the thread:
No, you dumb fuck.
Internet Rationality is simply the subdiscipline of physics that concerns itself with completely insufferable people.
Eigenrobot is a shitposter, whose modus operandi is “think about a topic, take it as far as possible in some absurd direction, and then post the absurdity without context”.
This is not a serious tweet
Why does this clown think biology is dead?
Is this just a dogwhistley way of saying the future is binary?
As a biologist I can say they’re delusional…