This claim is false. (as in, the probability that it is true is vanishingly close to zero, unless the human brain uses supernatural elements). All of the motor drivers except for the most primitive reflexes (certain spinal reflexes) are in the brain. You can say that for all practical purposes, 100% of the computational power the brain has is in the brain.
I agree with your intuition here, but this doesn’t really affect the validity of my counterargument. I should have stated more clearly that I was computing a rough upper bound. So saying something like, assuming embodied cognition is true, the non-brain parts of the body might add an extra 2, 10, or 100 times computing power. Even under the very generous assumption that they add 100 times computing power (which seems vanishingly unlikely), this still doesn’t mean that embodied cognition refutes the idea that simply scaling up a NN with sufficient compute won’t produce human-level cognition.
Yes and first of all, why are you even attempting to add “2x”. A reasonable argument would be “~1x”, as in, the total storage of all state outside the body is so small it can be neglected.
I mean...sure...but again, this does not affect the validity of my counterargument. Like I said, I’m using as strong as possible of a counterargument by saying that even if the non-brain parts of the body were to add 2-100x computing power, this would not restrict our ability to scale up NNs to get human-level cognition. Obviously this still holds if we replace “2-100x” with “1x”.
The advantage of “2-100x” is that it is extraordinarily charitable to the “embodied cognition” theory—if (and I consider this to be extremely low probability) embodied cognition does turn out to be highly true in some strong sense, then “2-100x” takes care of this in a way that “~1x” does not. And I may as well be extraordinarily charitable to the embodied cognition theory, since “Bitter lesson” type reasoning is independent of its veracity.
I agree with your intuition here, but this doesn’t really affect the validity of my counterargument. I should have stated more clearly that I was computing a rough upper bound. So saying something like, assuming embodied cognition is true, the non-brain parts of the body might add an extra 2, 10, or 100 times computing power. Even under the very generous assumption that they add 100 times computing power (which seems vanishingly unlikely), this still doesn’t mean that embodied cognition refutes the idea that simply scaling up a NN with sufficient compute won’t produce human-level cognition.
Yes and first of all, why are you even attempting to add “2x”. A reasonable argument would be “~1x”, as in, the total storage of all state outside the body is so small it can be neglected.
I mean...sure...but again, this does not affect the validity of my counterargument. Like I said, I’m using as strong as possible of a counterargument by saying that even if the non-brain parts of the body were to add 2-100x computing power, this would not restrict our ability to scale up NNs to get human-level cognition. Obviously this still holds if we replace “2-100x” with “1x”.
The advantage of “2-100x” is that it is extraordinarily charitable to the “embodied cognition” theory—if (and I consider this to be extremely low probability) embodied cognition does turn out to be highly true in some strong sense, then “2-100x” takes care of this in a way that “~1x” does not. And I may as well be extraordinarily charitable to the embodied cognition theory, since “Bitter lesson” type reasoning is independent of its veracity.