Activity
#5733·Vincent Brunsch, 12 days agoI understand “we can write the programs and simulate animals” to mean that we can write an underlying program capable of generating an animal’s full behavioral and cognitive repertoire across novel circumstances. If you only mean that we can reproduce particular behaviors, then I don’t see the asymmetry, since we can reproduce particular human behaviors computationally too.
But I think we should be careful with the stronger claim. As far as I know, we cannot currently write such a complete generative program for animals such as crows or apes either. Indeed, even for vastly simpler animals such as the fruit fly or C. elegans, despite having mapped its complete connectome, our executable models still reproduce only parts of its behavior rather than the organism’s full repertoire.
… since we can reproduce particular human behaviors computationally too
Only for very narrow tasks, and even then there’s no guarantee humans won’t deviate from it, whereas for animals there basically is. Humans aren’t predictable like that but animals are.