I took the original sentence to mean something like “we use things external to the brain to compute things too”, which is clearly true. Writing stuff down to work through a problem is clearly doing some computation outside of the brain, for example. The confusion comes from where you draw the line—if I’m just wiggling my fingers without holding a pen, does that still count as computing stuff outside the brain? Do you count the spinal cord as part of the brain? What about the peripheral nervous system? What about information that’s computed by the outside environment and presented to my eyes? I think it’s kind of an arbitrary line, but reading this charitably their statement can still be correct, I think.
(No response from me on the rest of your points, just wanted to back the author up a bit on this one.)
Writing stuff down to work through a problem is clearly doing some computation outside of the brain, for example.
I’m not sure that this is correct. While making the motions is needed to engage the process, the important processes are still happening inside of the brain- they just happen to be processes that are associated with and happen during handwriting, not when one is sitting idly and thinking
Yes but take this a step further. If you assume that each synapse is 4 bytes of information (a bit sparse it’s probably more than that), 86 billion neurons times 1000 synapses times 4 bytes = 344 terabytes.
How much information do you store when you have 3 fingers up when counting on your fingers? How much data can a page of handwritten notes hold?
You can probably neglect it. It doesn’t add any significant amount of compute to an AI system to give it perfect, multi-megabyte, working memory.
I took the original sentence to mean something like “we use things external to the brain to compute things too”, which is clearly true. Writing stuff down to work through a problem is clearly doing some computation outside of the brain, for example. The confusion comes from where you draw the line—if I’m just wiggling my fingers without holding a pen, does that still count as computing stuff outside the brain? Do you count the spinal cord as part of the brain? What about the peripheral nervous system? What about information that’s computed by the outside environment and presented to my eyes? I think it’s kind of an arbitrary line, but reading this charitably their statement can still be correct, I think.
(No response from me on the rest of your points, just wanted to back the author up a bit on this one.)
I’m not sure that this is correct. While making the motions is needed to engage the process, the important processes are still happening inside of the brain- they just happen to be processes that are associated with and happen during handwriting, not when one is sitting idly and thinking
Yes but take this a step further. If you assume that each synapse is 4 bytes of information (a bit sparse it’s probably more than that), 86 billion neurons times 1000 synapses times 4 bytes = 344 terabytes.
How much information do you store when you have 3 fingers up when counting on your fingers? How much data can a page of handwritten notes hold?
You can probably neglect it. It doesn’t add any significant amount of compute to an AI system to give it perfect, multi-megabyte, working memory.