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
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
Firstly, I want to say it's cool you're positively engaging and stimulating a lot of conversation around this.
As far turing machines go - It's only a concept that's meant to show a fundamental "level" of computing ("turing completeness"), what a computing device can or cannot achieve. As you agree a turing machine could 'simulate' a brain (and we know brains can simulate a turing machine - we invented them!), then conceptually, yes, the brain is computationally equivalent, it is 'turing complete', albeit with some randomness thrown in.
I remain extremely mad at the Quantum jerks for demonstrating that the universe is almost certainly not deterministic. I refuse to be cool about it.
We can simulate a water molecule, does it make a turing machine then? Is single protein? A whole cell? 1000 cells in some invertebrate?
Simulation doesn’t work backwards, it’s not an implied equivalency of turing completeness for both directions. If brain is a turing machine we can map one to one it’s whole function to any existing turing machine, not simulate it with some degree of accuracy.
With automata, something that is turing complete can also do what all lower levels of automata can do. E.g. something that is a turing machine can function as a finite state machine, but it is not just a finite state machine. Likewise, a soul is capable of doing all computations a turing machine can do (this is indisbutably true, otherwise we'd have never been able to make computers in the first place), but it isn't just a turing machine.
Have you read Göedel, Escher, Bach? It's a cool book, I recommend it!