[belugacat]

This is why the reductionist argument of "your brain is reducible to a computer with inputs/outputs like any other, all we have to do is reimplement it" of AGI proponents always fell flat to me.

It's now becoming clear that we can't just take the brain in isolation, treating the spinal nerve like a PCI-E lane - the gut has to come with it. And if the gut comes with it, all the other organs (skin top of the list) probably do as well.

Now to model a human brain, you need to model an entire human, along with all the complexity of the microbiota, interactions of the organs with the environment... it all just falls apart.

[Balgair]

Neuroscientist here: There is no such thing as a mind-body duality. Your body is your mind and your mind is your body. Full stop.

We are still in the very infancy of the study of the mind body and brain. We're finally uncovering some of the most basic tools that will serve us for millennia to come. Imagine trying to understand a 2022 Ford F-150 with only a 7/16ths wrench and a flat-head screwdriver: You can get pretty far, but you're not getting anywhere near the cylinders. It's going to take along time to even get the tools to understand the brain.

For example: We don't even have all the basic circuit components that the brain has. We have resistors, capacitors, and inductors. All things that the electrical systems of the brain have analogs to (very very roughly, I am simplifying a lot here). But we're missing the memristor. We know the brain has a memristor, it's the synapse, but we don't really have ones to play around with and use as tools. Yes, you can model these things in software. But then you miss out on most of the ugly reality that is hard/wetware; and that's where all the magic happens.

But that's just the electrical parts of the nervous system. Most of what is happening is in the electrically dark chemistry. Heck, we can't even agree on what percentage of the brain is glia. Is it 50%, is it 90%? Whose paper should you trust? We don't even have a good census of what is in the damn thing!

But of course you can't take the brain in isolation. The inputs and effects on it are still nearly completely unknown to us. And that's not hyperbole either. We really are mostly in the dark as to what effects the brain. Just look at temperature. We know that the rate of firing of neurons goes as T ^ 4. Yes, that's the hypercube of temperature. Even the slightest change in temperature has massive changes to firing rates. How in God's name do any of us function on a hot or cold day!? We haven't the foggiest idea.

So again, we're in the absolute infancy of our study of the brain. Fortunately, most of us HNers are going to live to see a lot of progress in this science. It's an exciting time to be alive.

[InSteady]

Adding to this, I just want to quote a post made in a different thread [1] about bacterial memory:

"Not only simpler lifeforms. Cases with humans that may indicate a memory transfer after organ transplants are also documented:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31739081/

>The acquisition of donor personality characteristics by recipients following heart transplantation is hypothesized to occur via the transfer of cellular memory

https://www.namahjournal.com/doc/Actual/Memory-transference-...

>There have been perplexing reports of organ transplant receivers claiming that they seem to have inherited the memory, experiences and emotions of their deceased donors, and which are causing quirky changes in their personality."

This post was in response to one describing decapitated worms growing new heads with their old memories intact, as well as old studies where planarians were trained to navigate a simple maze, then fed to other planarians who were then also able to navigate the maze. Fascinating stuff!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38372687

[felixyz]

Regular, reasonable person here.

> Your body is your mind and your mind is your body. Full stop.

This is completely unwarranted judging from the rest of your post ("in the very infancy", "nearly completely unknown", "mostly in the dark", "haven't the foggiest idea"; although I appreciate the frankness).

If people made bold statements like "There is no such thing as X" in any other field at a similar stage of development, their claims would be rightly dismissed as pseudoscience. ("There is no such thing as a graviton. Full stop.")

Your claim is not a finding of your field of expertise, or any other branch of science. It's metaphysical belief. You're entitled to it. It's a widely shared belief. It might be a belief with a lot going for it. Metaphysical claims are fun! They can be discussed! But I wish people wouldn't confuse them with scientific knowledge.

[Teever]

So let's say that you cut off a person's arm. and then you cut off their other one. and their legs too. and then you take out organs that they definitely don't need to live, exactly when do they stop being human? What are they then?

I don't totally disagree with your notion that the body is the mind, but I'm struggling to determine what a MVH (Minimum viable human) is.

[alienicecream]

> Neuroscientist here: There is no such thing as a mind-body duality. Your body is your mind and your mind is your body. Full stop.

Of course there is, if I lose a finger I don't lose part of my mind.

[zubairq]

Very interesting, so exercising the body IS exercising the mind!

[geraldhh]

> a 7/16ths wrench

made me chuckle

get metric guys!

[armada651]

"your brain is reducible to a computer with inputs/outputs like any other, all we have to do is reimplement it"

It still is though, you will reach human intelligence by just modeling the brain. The problem is that you probably won't reach an emotionally stable human since you'll be missing all the emotional/hormonal signaling that comes from the rest of the body, but we can emulate that without having to model the full complexity of the gut.

[plufz]

> you will reach human intelligence by just modeling the brain

I'm not so sure. I mean obviously this is very complicated and we still know very little of the brain.

Just one example (from what I understand) you can't really separate intelligence from emotions. There are researchers in emotions that explain our whole system of affect/feeling/emotion/mood/etc. as a very effective abstraction of all the inputs from our whole body (both direct inputs, cognitive processes and stored data). So without a working system of emotions I don't think you will have a working brain at all.

[chiefalchemist]

Shortened: Modeling how the brain works is not synonymous with how humans work.

We just need to maintain our awareness of that difference.

The good news is, it makes replacing humans - trait for trait - far more more complicated.

[bwestergard]

The person you are replying to is questioning whether a conceptual distinction can really be drawn between cognition and emotion. To say that "you will reach human intelligence [but not emotional stability] by just modeling the brain" assumes what is being questioned.

[wredue]

“Just” is doing a whole lot of heavy lifting here.

[alienicecream]

> It still is though, you will reach human intelligence by just modeling the brain.

What is the basis of this claim?

[mewpmewp2]

The argument stays the same though. Your body is reducible to an input/output mechanism.

In terms of complexity, since we haven't solved brain yet, it doesn't matter that much that there's also other parts of the body involved, as we don't even know the exact complexity of the brain, but the argument stays the same.

In theory we are input/output mechanism, possible to emulate if there's enough capacity.

But in addition AGI wouldn't require many traits that humans have since it doesn't need the same evolutionary survival mechanisms. It only needs part of it.

[cal85]

I don't get it. I can see the human body as a system that comprises many input/output mechanisms. (And of course it's possible to emulate such a system given enough compute.) But how can you reduce it to a single "input/output mechanism"? Can you give an example input/output pair for this mechanism?

[jb1991]

In my opinion, a living creature is more than just an input and output mechanism. If I were to think up one way to define consciousness, it would be that it provides output even in the absence of inputs.

[alienicecream]

> In theory we are input/output mechanism, possible to emulate if there's enough capacity.

People used to think that the universe was a deterministic clock-work mechanism, possible to model in theory down to atomic interactions. Now we have things like black holes to nowhere and correlations without causation. So this theory seems at best, a tentative first approximation that doesn't warrant the kind of confidence you declare it with.

[saiya-jin]

Yes you are probably right, but generally I don't get why AGI needs to be 100% mimicking every aspect of human, just better/faster. Like proverbial skynet can have extreme excellence in one/few aspect of general intelligence but can be muted to almost 0 on everything else, say emotions, yet still be falling into AGI behavior and could take over the world. It doesn't need to simulate gut interactions to get there.

And I think for such an entity we may be closer to emerging than we like, especially if it can traverse whole internet including this comment and make summaries out of it out of reach to mere mortals.

[mewpmewp2]

> And I think for such an entity we may be closer to emerging than we like

Why are people talking about it as if it was a bad thing? If I listen to people everyone seems to be dissatisfied with their life as of now, due to work, politics, society and everything else. If AGI was to arrive it would potentially remove those frustrations, right.

[kashyapc]

Also see the "somatic marker hypothesis"[1][2] by neuroscientist, Antonio Damasio. It's about how various internal body "markers" deeply influence decision-making. I first read it in his 1991 book, Descarte's Error.

Quoting from here[1]:

"Somatic markers" are feelings in the body that are associated with emotions, such as the association of rapid heartbeat with anxiety or of nausea with disgust. According to the hypothesis, somatic markers strongly influence subsequent decision-making. Within the brain, somatic markers are thought to be processed in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and the amygdala. [...]"

Although, experimental evidence is not as yet as robust as it needs to be. See the "Experimental evidence" and "Criticism" sections here[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatic_marker_hypothesis

[2] https://sci-hub.se/https://www.jstor.org/stable/3069187

[vacuumcl]

I don't see why this changes anything. There are some, sort-of intelligent networks of cells in the gut that help in digestion and other processes. Doesn't change the fact that consciousness resides in the brain.

[ericmcer]

Did you read the article? The gut "brain" can just perform it's own functionality independent of the brain. If anything the article raises the concept that organs can function without being regulated by the brain, which would mean the brains purpose is less to regulate the body and is specifically just for performing computations (and doing whatever consciousness is).

If I am doing math my skin is not being leveraged to help out.