Hi, I’m Eric and I work at a big chip company making chips and such! I do math for a job, but it’s cold hard stochastic optimization that makes people who know names like Tychonoff and Sylow weep.

My pfp is Hank Azaria in Heat, but you already knew that.

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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: January 22nd, 2024

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  • but I do believe brains are computers, but only in the broadest sense of what computation could be

    Agree. A human brain is capable of executing the steps of a TM with pen/paper, and in that sense the brain is absolutely capable of acting as a computer. But as far as all the other process a brain does (breathing/maintaining heart rate/etc.) describing that as ‘a computer’ seems such an abuse of notation as to render the original definition meaningless. We might as well call the moon a computer since it is ‘calculating’ the effect of a gravitational field on a moon sized object. What I think many people are really claiming when they say a brain is a computer is that if only we could identify the correct finite state deterministic program, there would be no difference between the brain and its implementation in silicon. Personally, I find claims of substrate independence to be less plausible, but of course many of our dear friends are willing to bite that bullet.