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Is The Mind a Machine? [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-06-02

I sometimes get pushback about my approach to imitative AI from readers and commentators. I am too harsh, I am not fair enough, I am not appreciative of the potential for true general artificial intelligence. To the first two points: I never leave out evidence that I am aware of, I never misrepresent the facts I discuss, and I try to be as above board about my opinions as possible. Harsh? Well, yeah, that’s a fair cop. But I genuinely believe these people are harmful to the rest of us and it makes me a wee bit cranky. As for potential — I don’t think that there is the potential for general artificial intelligence, at least not at this stage. We simply are too caught in our own technology to understand intelligence.

To be clear, I am not saying that AI — which we will define here as mathematical and computational processes that can mimic or approach intellectual work — is not going to improve, is generally useless, or cannot have a disruptive impact on society. Machine learning, rapid pattern recognition, reinforcement learning systems — they all have had a noticeable impact on various fields, and I suspect that they have the potential for even greater impacts. Even imitative AI has been a boon for the disinformation merchants. But real intelligence, the kind of intelligence that think their way through the normal curveballs of a life? I don’t believe that is possible, largely because we are too wrapped up in our own metaphors. And metaphors, as we all know, are lies.

The central conceit of today’s imitative AI general artificial intelligence hypers is that intelligence is a function of compute. Throw enough iron, enough computational power, at the problem and you will inevitably reproduce intelligence. This stems from both the success of throwing compute power at the pattern recognition problem that is imitative AI and, more insidiously, the metaphor of the brain as a computer.

What is so insidious about that, you ask? Isn’t the brain like a computer? Doesn’t the brain operate like a computer does — storing information and processes inputs into outputs? Aren’t neurons like bits in a computer? No, no they are not. In a very real sense, we do not know how the brain functions, but we do know that it does not develop computer-like mechanisms in its functioning. And we know that it does not use simple on/off states for its work. If it is compute, it is a type of compute that we do not understand or know how to replicate.

If this is true, though, why does the analogy hold so much weight? Because human beings think in metaphors and in analogies. The brain is the most complex system we know of and so we default to thinking of it in terms of the most complex systems we ourselves understand. It has always been thus, at least since the late industrial revolution (though I suspect Grog and Grok sat around the cave and pondered how the brain was like a wheel and a fire.). During the telegraph age, the brain was modeled as a telegraph. In the telephone age, a switchboard. In the 1970s, a transistor. Today, a supercomputer. Tomorrow, likely, a quantum computer. We keep changing the model as we develop more complicated technology, and none of the models really come close to describing how the brain functions.

So what? Why does this matter? Surely the clever buggers that build these systems — and most of them are clever buggers indeed — recognize the limitations? Yes and no. As I mentioned, a lot of these clever buggers really do seem to believe that compute is the key to creating general artificial intelligence. To some degree, they have been captured by the model. There really isn’t a ton of evidence that they are correct, and yet they or their leadership, at least, insists that we must reorder society in order to indulge this inability to recognize that the map is not the terrain.

Because they claim that artificial general intelligence is within our grasp, we are supposed to destroy the copyright laws that creatives depend upon for their livelihoods and accelerate the destruction of the planet that we all depend upon for our lives. All premised on a model of intelligence that does not actually resemble organic intelligence and likely will be tossed aside when the next technological advancement appears.

Maybe I am wrong. I am not an especially clever bugger, certainly not compared to some of the people working on these problems. But I have distance from the work, and I can recognize when we don’t know what we think we know. I know the dangers of believing the map is the territory. The rise of imitative AI has brought with it assumptions, ideas, and rhetoric that sounds very much like hikers right before they fall into the ravine their map did not prepare them for.

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