The Human Brain Is Incapable Of Volition Or Free Will

I am self aware but software cannot be self aware, no Turing machine can be self aware because all they have are states and actions, state machines offer no prospect of self awareness.

What would be, indeed what could be, the difference between a conscious Turing machine and an unconscious Turing machine?

This is the crux of the issue.
I agree. But I am beginning to think that GPT3 is becoming self-aware, because it is more than a Turing machine.

I'd like to continue this but, this is really off-topic and I don't want to be reported for trolling.
Can we continue this in Science and Society: "Do machines already exceed human intelligence?"
 
I agree. But I am beginning to think that GPT3 is becoming self-aware, because it is more than a Turing machine.

But it isn't.

I'd like to continue this but, this is really off-topic and I don't want to be reported for trolling.
Can we continue this in Science and Society: "Do machines already exceed human intelligence?"

I do not agree that discussing the presumed mechanistic basis for self awareness in a thread about free will is off topic.
 
But it isn't.

I do not agree that discussing the presumed mechanistic basis for self awareness in a thread about free will is off topic.
The OP asks about the human brain, not the AI brain.
Have a look at "Do machines already exceed human intelligence". There is already quite a bit in GPT intelligence.
 
The OP asks about the human brain, not the AI brain.
Have a look at "Do machines already exceed human intelligence". There is already quite a bit in GPT intelligence.

Right, and there's a case being made here that the brain is purely mechanistic, algorithmic, hence the discussion will embrace Turing machines and algorithms which are mechanistic, nothing even remotely "off topic" about this.
 
Right, and there's a case being made here that the brain is purely mechanistic, algorithmic, hence the discussion will embrace Turing machines and algorithms which are mechanistic, nothing even remotely "off topic" about this.
This was becoming a discussion about AI . That's all I am saying.

I've learned my lesson about a discussion of tangentially related subjects. But if you know something about the human brain in relation to volitional actions, I'm interested.
Well we have no real idea what neuron does or how it does what it does, the claim that it is a mechanism that can be wholly represented by an algorithm is a belief that's all it is.
Actually we have a very good idea of how neurons function. It is one of the hard facts. They process elctro-chemical data in accordance with science.

What we do not know is how an entire system of trillions of electrochemical processors and synapses produces a conscious experience.
 
Actually we have a very good idea of how neurons function.

This is a huge oversimplification even misrepresentation of this subject, look:

A new survey of the activity of nearly 60,000 neurons in the mouse visual system reveals how far we have to go to understand how the brain computes.

The analysis reveals that more than 90% of neurons in the visual cortex, the part of the brain that process our visual world, don't work the way scientists thought -- and it's not yet clear how they do work.

and

"We thought that there are simple principles according to which these neurons process visual information, and those principles are in all the textbooks," said Christof Koch, Ph.D., Chief Scientist and President of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, a division of the Allen Institute, and co-senior author on the study along with R. Clay Reid, M.D., Ph.D., Senior Investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain Science. "But now that we can survey tens of thousands of cells at once, we get a more subtle -- and much more complicated -- picture."

This is from a 2019 Science Daily report - here.

So you really can't make the claim that the brain can be modelled as a Turing machine or is a Turing machine when we don't have any idea if even a single neuron can be adequately modelled as a Turing machine.
 
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Actually things are even worse, I'm now reading that it is not neurons at all that are the seat of the "processing" but the dendrites, these may be more relevant than previously thought and the neurons less relevant than previously thought...
 
This is a huge oversimplification even misrepresentation of this subject, look:
"But now that we can survey tens of thousands of cells at once, we get a more subtle -- and much more complicated -- picture."
This is from a 2019 Science Daily report - here.
So you really can't make the claim that the brain can be modelled as a Turing machine or is a Turing machine when we don't have any idea if even a single neuron can be adequately modelled as a Turing machine.
I didn't say that brains are Turing machines. You must read more carefully. I said that the MT in the neurons are electrochemical processors and therefore are biological Turing mechanisms.
320px-TuringPattern.PNG
Three examples of Turing patterns

But that article is just citing generalities, it does not say that each neuron contains a collection of as many as 1000 synapses which are the terminal ends of the internal Turing processors inside the neuronal cells and its dendrites. See below why this better understanding of the complexity also leads to an appreciation of the much greater complications in catalogueing than was previously assumed.

Number of synapses in the neocortex
According to Wikipedia, the majority of neurons are cerebellum granule cells, which have only a handful of synapses, while the statistics above suggest that the average neuron has around 1,000 synapses. Purkinje cells have up to 200,000 synapses.
Purkinje_cell_by_Cajal.png

These cells are some of the largest neurons in the human brain (Betz cells being the largest),[3] with an intricately elaborate dendritic arbor, characterized by a large number of dendritic spines. Purkinje cells are found within the Purkinje layer in the cerebellum. Purkinje cells are aligned like dominos stacked one in front of the other.
Their large dendritic arbors form nearly two-dimensional layers through which parallel fibers from the deeper-layers pass. These parallel fibers make relatively weaker excitatory (glutamatergic) synapses to spines in the Purkinje cell dendrite, whereas climbing fibers originating from the inferior olivary nucleus in the medulla provide very powerful excitatory input to the proximal dendrites and cell soma. Parallel fibers pass orthogonally through the Purkinje neuron's dendritic arbor, with up to 200,000 parallel fibers[4] forming a Granule-cell-Purkinje-cell synapse with a single Purkinje cell.
Each Purkinje cell receives approximately 500 climbing fiber synapses, all originating from a single climbing fiber.[5] Both basket and stellate cells (found in the cerebellar molecular layer) provide inhibitory (GABAergic) input to the Purkinje cell, with basket cells synapsing on the Purkinje cell axon initial segment and stellate cells onto the dendrites.
Purkinje cells send inhibitory projections to the deep cerebellar nuclei, and constitute the sole output of all motor coordination in the cerebellar cortex.
.....much more
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purkinje_cell

The brain may have as many as a trillion electrochemical processors, which each may fill a specific function when called upon.
 
Actually things are even worse, I'm now reading that it is not neurons at all that are the seat of the "processing" but the dendrites, these may be more relevant than previously thought and the neurons less relevant than previously thought...
Exactly, I have 100+ pages devoted to this very problem. You are beginning to catch on ...... :cool:

In fact, it is not even the dendrites that are the actual processors, dendrites are more like wires in an electrical network, and inside the dendrites reside the trillions of actual electrochemical processors, which are self-assembling coiled nano-scale tubes consisting of just 2 tubulins (a dimer) and terminate at the synapses.

microtubulesfigure1.jpg
microtubulesfigure2.jpg


To the mods, this is the only post I shall make about microtubules in this thread. But it was in direct response to a inquiry about the capabilities of the human brain. All further discussions of MT will be in the thread that addresses the nature and function of MT.
 
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