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guy recently linked this essay, its old, but i don't think its significantly wrong (despite gpt evangelists) also read weizenbaum, libs, for the other side of the coin
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this post was submitted on 18 May 2024
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chapotraphouse
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Yeah but we, if "we" is people who have a basic understanding of neuroscience, aren't taking it to far. The author is yelling at a straw man, or at lay people which is equally pointless. Neuroscientists don't think of the mind or the brain it runs on as being a literal digital computer. They have their own completely incomprehensible jargon for discussing the brain and the mind, and if this article is taken at face value the author either doesn't know that or is talking to someone other than people who do actual cognitive research.
I'ma be honest, i think there might be some academic infighting here. Psychology is a field with little meanginful rigor and poor explanatory power, while neuroscience is on much firmer ground and has largely upended the theories arising from Epstein's heyday. I think he might be feeling the icy hand of mortality in his chest and is upset the world has moved past him and his ideas.
Also, the gold miner isn't a good metaphor. In that metaphor information only goes one way and is sifted out of chaos. There's no place in the metaphor for a process of encoding, retrieving, or modifying information. It does not resemble the action of the mind and cannot be used as a rough and ready metaphor for discussing the mind.
I work in neuroscience and I don't agree that it is on much firmer ground that psychology. In fact, as some people in the community have noted, the neuroscience mainstream is probably still in the pre-paradigmitic stage (using Kuhn). And believe it or not, a lot of neuroscientists naively do believe that the brain is like a computer (maybe not exactly one, but very close).
Sure there is: encoding is taking sand from the river (taking noise from the world into comprehensible inputs) storage is taking the gold, modifying is throwing some bits out or taking them to the smith.
From the bottom up (and in the middle, if we take partial electro, ultrasound or magnetic stimulation) neuroscience andvances are significant but rather vague. We likely know how on molecular level memory works, but that has jack shit to do with information pipelines, but rather rigorous experiments, or in case of machine human interface more like skilled interpretation of what you see and knowing where to look for it (you can ascribe it to top down approach).
Neuroscientists likely dont, but I think you have rather nicer opinion of tech bros than I do or their ideas among people
My opinion of tech bros is that anyone deserving the label "tech bro" is a dangerous twit who should be under the full time supervision of someone with humanities training, a gun, and orders to use it if the tech bro starts showing signs of independent thought. It's a thoroughly pathological world view, a band of lethally competent illiterates who think they hold all human knowledge and wisdom. If this is all directed at tech bros I likely didn't realize it because I consider trying to teach nuance to tech bros about as useful as trying to teach it to a dog and didn't consider someone in an academic field would want to address them.