OK Veeky Forums bear with me, because I think I'm going insane...

OK Veeky Forums bear with me, because I think I'm going insane. I've come to the conclusion that any process in the universe, even human thought, can be expressed mathematically. There are two corollaries:

>There are processes whose mathematical expression we do not understand right now (if there really is anything in the universe we would currently call "supernatural", I think it falls under this).
>There are processes whose mathematical expression we may simply be unable to understand at all, ever, due to the limits of human ability (though something more intelligent, like an advanced AI, may be able to understand).

If we can express relatively simple electrical signals and chemical interactions mathematically, and understand correlation between these and similar factors in the brain to human thought, doesn't it stand to reason that, were our mathematics advanced enough, we could accurately simulate and predict human thought?

Are we really just machines, analog computers? Is the brain really just some soft circuit and the human mind is software written in chemical interaction?

Well take another class of quantum mechanics. You can't predict or calculate everything so accurate as you claim. Randomness is a real thing user.

This is more of a Veeky Forums thread but I understand, you don't want to be blown away by responses you can't even begin to understand.

>doesn't it stand to reason that, were our mathematics advanced enough, we could accurately simulate and predict human thought?
yes it does. heard of strong AI?

you're retarded

strong AI does not mean making a human mind in a computer, it means making an AI that is just as good at complex intellectually demanding tasks as humans are. Functional strong AIs won't function anything like human brains, nor should they.

sure but the idea that intelligence is something that can be understood and replicated is mostly the same one as OP is having here

How so? The fact that there are random things in the universe does imply there is no way you can precisely simulate this universe given that there is no time span.

Or the human mind for that matter

No it's not

The operation of a human mind goes down to pretty small scales, but it doesn't go down to scales where quantum mechanics will have a significant effect on it

>Randomness is a real thing user.
Or is it just something we don't understand yet, or something we are incapable of understanding?

If you were able to record every single cell, electrical impulse, chemical interaction etc in a human brain and recreate them exactly, would you not end up with an identical copy that held the same thoughts?

If not, what differentiates them? If they have the exact same physical makeup and are exposed to the same experiences, should they not develop identically?

If things go EXACTLY the same twice, the result should be the same. Repeated coin tosses do not refute this because they don't account for fluctuations in air, power of flip, matter lost from coin on impact, etc. If you could rewind time, changing nothing, it would always be the same.

I think it will be impossible to fully recreate a human mind in a digital substrate but you could make a very convincing approximation. It would never be more than emulating foreign software on an unintended hardware platform.

Rather, I think a different substrate and necessarily different software (i.e. intentionally designed by humans as opposed to evolutionary chance) would produce a wholly alien mind regardless of whether it could surpass our own.

What do you mean 'mathematically'?

>Significant effect

Any effect is significant. One electron or atom can change the way a system like our brain works. Maybe not on a very short timescale but in a longer one at least.

We can express the following mathematically:

>cellular operation
>electrical currents
>chemical interactions

These are the things happening, truly happening, in the brain. So, applying these and similar factors, doesn't it stand to reason that we could also express the process of the human brain mathematically?

That is to say, we understand the voltage of an impulse between two neurons, we understand the interaction of dopamine, the caloric requirements - we express them numerically, mathematically. Physics is applied mathematics - physical processes, such as the movement of planets, expressed mathematically. Is it only our ignorance that keeps us from applying mathematics to express our brains? Will we always be that ignorant or can we learn?

You're making the exact point as Einstein did. He said something along the lines God doesn't play dice.

He was wrong though . Look up the Heisenberg uncertainty principle or shrodingers cat.

I guess what I'm asking is, where does "hard math" understanding of the physics in our brains end and the "soft humanities" of human thought begin? And can we use the former to predict the latter?

On a calculator, 2+2 ALWAYS =4. Is the brain just so complex that because we don't understand all the factors we cannot accurately predict its calculations?

This is all I've thought about for days. Human individuality is a gestalt of our biology and experiences, is there some way to manipulate this? Some hidden experiential stimulus that encourages some of us to be intelligent and others stupid? How much of it is biology versus stimulus? There must be some factor accounting for it - and if we know that, can we control it?

Mathematics is expressed in languages, and it is possible that there is no mathematical language adequate enough to express more complicated processes accurately. Maybe not even be able to direct enough energy to have something read and compute these languages.

Present state can't be used to determine the future state. Quantum mechanics makes it impossible.

With the shrodingers equation for example. If you want to calculate the precise position of an electron around an atom you can only calculate the probability it's there .

the things that control human minds are not very hidden at all. any idiot can learn that stuff, most of it is just not very interesting.

You know quantum mechanics literally describes how states evolve in time?

it describes how states may or may not exist as an average. it's just glorified statistics.

superposition of states prior to measurement =/= determination of time evolution of a state

We literally have an operator called the time evolution operator, or more generally known as the propagator.

Those are for states that have yet to undergo some interaction, after such an interaction when then particle is "determined" you can calculate the time evolution.

All that is irrelevant to the thread.

Considering people are trying to use quantum mechanics to justify certain claims despite not understanding some basic facts about quantum mechanics, I think it's actually pretty relevant to the thread

m8 just stop

No, you're just randomly ranting about things irrelevant to the thread.

Okay so it's the year one million.
We've got a computer the size of the Moon, maybe we even figured out FTL technology.

We put a guy in a room with the task of generating in his head 1000 random numbers.
We've taken a snapshot(only one time) of every particle in the room and there is a field preventing the outside world from affecting the inside of it.
We understand everything about the human brain and everything else of significance.

Could we predict what his numbers will be through a simulation based on the snapshot?
Most likely we could at first but quantum mechanics would at some point cause the simulated answers and the real answers to diverge and not even probability would be of use at that point.

>strong AI does not mean making a human mind in a computer, it means making an AI that is just as good at complex intellectually demanding tasks as humans are.
This isn't a proper of what strong AI is. Strong AI is the stance that a Turing machine can be sentient. It technically doesn't have to be a human mind since it could be a dog's mind or a completely new kind of mind and it doesn't have anything to do about being able to deal with intellectually demanding tasks outside of being sentient.

What you're describing is weak AI.

No fucking shit retard, with sufficiently advanced models and sufficient data for said models, it's possible to express anything mathematically. Also, this isn't history or humanities you fag

Yeah but thoughts aren't actually correlated with the electricity we detect in brain activity, they are the same as much as a guitar is the same as a musical composition, what does predict thoughts mean? What do you think thoughts are? Do you even realise the kind of reality of self human conciousness is able to generate?

I'm sorry but you sound so ridiclously sentimental about your primitive idea, it's almost pathetic.