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Ask HN: Is human brain Turing complete?

5 pointsby sanroot99over 2 years ago
Can human brain if hypothetically in future able to run computer programs ,with human brain interface technologies ?

3 comments

p-e-wover 2 years ago
No, the human brain is not Turing complete. In fact, computers aren&#x27;t Turing complete either. Turing completeness is the ability to simulate any Turing machine, and Turing machines have <i>infinite</i> memory. The brain has only finite memory, therefore, it cannot simulate a general Turing machine.<p>If you mean &quot;Turing complete&quot; in the sense of &quot;able to run the operations of some Turing complete abstract computation system&quot;, the answer is yes. If you can comprehend the instructions of a standard programming language, then by definition you are able to &quot;execute&quot; them in your mind, so you can &quot;run&quot; programs as long as they don&#x27;t exceed your memory limits – just like any physical computer. The &quot;human brain interface technologies&quot; required already exist: Books that teach you how programming languages work.
phantom_of_catoover 2 years ago
No, it&#x27;s a finite-state machine. However, it becomes Turing complete if you provide the human with a virtually unlimited supply of pen and paper. Richard Feynman once said about his notebooks that &quot;They aren’t a record of my thinking process. They are my thinking process. I actually did the work on the paper.&quot;
Nomentatusover 2 years ago
In the sense that computer peeps use the term, yes we are already - because we can construct and run Turing machines in the real world with paper and pencils. No the brain interface you were going for, but that&#x27;s my answer.
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