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Aaron Hertzmann

@aaronhertzmann.com
3.8K followers 285 following 409 posts

www.dgp.toronto.edu/~hertzman

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Aaron Hertzmann @aaronhertzmann.com · 29/09/2026
This paper, its commentaries, and the author response are together the best thing I’ve read in a really long time. Not easy reading, but an amazing resource for debates on consciousness, the nature of the brain, and rejoinders to the “consciousness must be computational” views I hear so often.
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Aaron Hertzmann @aaronhertzmann.com · 29/09/2026
Artists are way ahead of AI christopherweedsculpture.com/red-papercli...
christopherweedsculpture.com
Red Paperclips -
Red Paperclips Red Paperclips, durable epoxy primer, and Polyurethane coated mild steel tubing. Private commission residing in Grand Rapids, MI.Read More
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Aaron Hertzmann @aaronhertzmann.com · 22/09/2026
On why brains and computers are different (much of this is cribbed from a great paper by Rosa Cao): aaronhertzmann.com/2026/07/13/b...
aaronhertzmann.com
The Brain Is Not Just A Computer, and Cannot Be Simulated by One
Digital computers perform fixed logical operations on clock cycles; brains are biological systems of staggering complexity.
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Transactions on Machine Learning Research @tmlrorg.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
TMLR has faced a deluge of submissions, necessitating stricter desk rejection policies due to limited reviewer capacity Co-EiC Nihar Shah reached out to authors of 10 papers slated for desk reject. Could they answer questions about their *own* submission? medium.com/@TmlrOrg/ask...
medium.com
Asking Authors About Their Own Papers
By Nihar B. Shah
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Hadas Weiss @hadas.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
sorry about the bad post my account went rogue
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Aaron Hertzmann @aaronhertzmann.com · 14/09/2026
So the issue can be stated in different terms, e.g., "author is unqualified to write this" and some of the solutions you proposed could be about determining qualification (e.g., an endorsement from an expert)
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Aaron Hertzmann @aaronhertzmann.com · 11/09/2026
Do you have a call to action, a request or demand for what is to be done? "These issues must be addressed..." is pretty vague. IMO a position statement without a concrete, justifiable call to action does not achieve much.
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Alison Gopnik @alisongopnik.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Thanks, but actually my favorite line didn't make it to the piece. Does Odysseus feel guilty about the Trojan war? Lots of discourse on this question even though he doesn't exist! Is he conscious? AI agents are fictive characters abstracted from text - like Odysseus.
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Aaron Hertzmann @aaronhertzmann.com · 11/08/2026
I was surprised and amused when I learned what "e-collar" is short for.
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Aaron Hertzmann @aaronhertzmann.com · 06/08/2026
Case in point bsky.app/profile/eryk...
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Aaron Hertzmann @aaronhertzmann.com · 06/08/2026
One thing I've noticed when writing on this topic is that my reference points skew pretty old; most examples in my essay are more than two decades old. (Plus the obvious gender imbalances.) Are there recent AI depictions with similar cultural or discourse presence to Skynet, HAL, C-3PO, Samantha...?
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Aaron Hertzmann @aaronhertzmann.com · 06/08/2026
This suggests a fun exercise: watch fictional sympathetic robots, but imagine them as mere chatbots: Data providing simulated relationships to humans; C-3PO + R2-D2’s bickering as generative performances of personality; WALL-E mindlessly following its programmed behaviors long after humans left. 5/
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Aaron Hertzmann @aaronhertzmann.com · 06/08/2026
One case where movies/TV have "gotten it right:" where humans have personal relationships with AI, but you don't need to interpret the AI as conscious. I enjoyed "Her" without believing that Samantha was conscious, and now it seems prescient. Black Mirror's "Be Right Back" as well. 4/
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Aaron Hertzmann @aaronhertzmann.com · 06/08/2026
Short answer is that storytellers care about story. Story, story, story. This is especially true in movies and TV. Story drives everything, not accuracy. And we care about stories about people. So AI characters are modified people; just like other movies have talking animals, talking cars, etc. 3/
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Aaron Hertzmann @aaronhertzmann.com · 06/08/2026
I was inspired to try to answer the question posed in this post's title (even if that title was meant to be rhetorical). 2/ bsky.app/profile/tech...
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Aaron Hertzmann @aaronhertzmann.com · 06/08/2026
I wrote a little piece about how science fiction in movies and TV doesn't care much about accuracy or predicting the future, which is why it's not a good guide for understanding real technology. 1/ aaronhertzmann.com/2026/08/05/s...
aaronhertzmann.com
Science Fiction AI Has Nothing to Do with Real-World “AI”
Science fiction is fiction, not science
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Adverb @adverb.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
machines became superhuman at chess just long enough ago for people to somehow not make any connection between that and every event in 2026
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Aaron Hertzmann @aaronhertzmann.com · 04/08/2026
Seems analogous to the Wundt curve as well
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Aaron Hertzmann @aaronhertzmann.com · 04/08/2026
Very interesting! It seems like there's a common trend here; a similar thing happens in visual art when medium-quality models make the most unintentionally-interesting pictures: dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1... osf.io/preprints/ps... (artbreeder images are deliberately manipulated for effect)
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Clément Canonne @ccanonne.github.io · 03/08/2026
FWIW, here are Terence Tao’s slides at the ICM on maths and AI:  teorth.github.io/tao-web/slid... @teorth.bsky.social (I am not endorsing nor criticizing the content, but this is a useful and thoughtful set of points and views in the discussion, from someone who has deeply engaged with the matter)
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Matthew Cobb @matthewcobb.bsky.social · 02/08/2026
Nothing changes.
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Nicholdav @nicholdav.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
hello everyone, I made this helpful meme to explain how to read scientific papers
Vince McMahon reaction meme but its in reverse order from most to least excited and the text to the left of the Vince McMahon faces says title abstract introduction methods results discussion
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Aaron Hertzmann @aaronhertzmann.com · 30/07/2026
It's inappropriate no matter who the authors are. aaronhertzmann.com/2025/06/23/n...
aaronhertzmann.com
Violent Communication in Scientific Paper Reviews
Paper reviews should not discuss the authors.
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Aaron Hertzmann @aaronhertzmann.com · 24/07/2026
Both can be true: the technology works, and there's a stock market bubble centered on it. It happened in 2001.
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Freya Holmér @freya.bsky.social · 22/07/2026
movement in non-euclidean quaternionic space
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Aaron Hertzmann @aaronhertzmann.com · 19/07/2026
This afternoon at #SIGGRAPH2026! I'll be speaking about the human vision in how people draw pictures; excited to see the other speakers!
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Aaron Hertzmann @aaronhertzmann.com · 16/07/2026
In theory we could simulate a brain—if we figured out all the mechanisms, which we haven't, and how to determine initial conditions, which we cannot. Regardless, as for computational theories, the only relevant ones describe Turing machines, not to analog computation.
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Aaron Hertzmann @aaronhertzmann.com · 16/07/2026
Fully simulating continuous dynamics (including fluid mechanics) is much much much harder than simulating discrete systems; if they're chaotic in any way it's basically impossible. If you haven't tried to build or run mechanical simulators, it's hard to appreciate how hard it is.
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Aaron Hertzmann @aaronhertzmann.com · 16/07/2026
Every simulation is an approximation, even simulation of a single neuron. No one can say which approximations are reasonable and which ones omit important stuff, but the paper I linked to gives reasons to believe it's all important ("generative entrenchment").
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Aaron Hertzmann @aaronhertzmann.com · 16/07/2026
It's not just a matter of simulating all the neurons, but also all the other stuff: proteins, ions, nitric oxide, neurotransmitters, blood flow, glia, temperature modulation, electromagnetic field. Existing simulations (e.g., mouse brain) omit some or all of these. See: www.jstor.org/stable/27325...
jstor.org
Multiple realizability and the spirit of functionalism | JSTOR
Rosa Cao, Multiple realizability and the spirit of functionalism, Synthese, Vol. 200, No. 6, 2022
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Aaron Hertzmann @aaronhertzmann.com · 16/07/2026
A main point of the blog post is why the existing theory of computation is inadequate to describe the functioning of brains ("the brain is not just a computer"); that you can't accurately simulate a brain with a computer is a second, related, point.
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Aaron Hertzmann @aaronhertzmann.com · 16/07/2026
I don't think it does either, but I think the "AI" hype (from some CEOs) is that AI will be able to do any knowledge-based job as well as a human can do, and one flavor of this is equivalence between AI and human brains.
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Alison Gopnik @alisongopnik.bsky.social · 15/07/2026
This is very good...
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Aaron Hertzmann @aaronhertzmann.com · 15/07/2026
Storytelling is, first and foremost, about people, and AI in fiction are typically modified people, not genuine explorations of a scientific concept. Viewers can identify with Data as a smart-but-naive nerd, with Terminator (in T2) as an emotionally-closed-off father figure, etc.
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Aaron Hertzmann @aaronhertzmann.com · 15/07/2026
In one context "the brain is just a computer" means "computation is an important paradigm for understanding the brain" and in the other it implies "we can replace people with data centers"
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Aaron Hertzmann @aaronhertzmann.com · 15/07/2026
I think the stakes are different in computing than it has been in neuroscience/philosophy, and the meaning of "is just a computer" differs. In neuro, it's a healthy debate between competing scientific paradigms. In computing, it's increasingly about dehumanization. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/24/b...
nytimes.com
To A.I. Executives, We’re All Just ‘Meat Computers’
A term first used in philosophy and cognitive science circles has lately taken on a more ominous cast. Moo.
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Aaron Hertzmann @aaronhertzmann.com · 15/07/2026
Looks very interesting, I'll check it out, thanks!
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Aaron Hertzmann @aaronhertzmann.com · 15/07/2026
The assumption is strongly held, often asserted as fact. One computer scientist accused me of being a creationist simply because I said there’s _some_ important difference between human brains and computers.
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Aaron Hertzmann @aaronhertzmann.com · 15/07/2026
In your paper you wrote that brains are literally computers because humans can work out any calculation by hand. This is correct, but this is not what computer scientists mean when they say "the brain is a computer." They mean "it's takes information in and produces information"=computer.
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Aaron Hertzmann @aaronhertzmann.com · 14/07/2026
For example, one recent article quotes billionaire owners describing people as “meat computers.” To my ear, this devalues people, since neither meat nor computers have any moral rights or value. What human rights do you have if you're little more than a steak? 16/ www.nytimes.com/2026/05/24/b...
nytimes.com
To A.I. Executives, We’re All Just ‘Meat Computers’
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Aaron Hertzmann @aaronhertzmann.com · 14/07/2026
The growth of “AI” companies create a new moral urgency to this distinction, since treating brains as “just computers” risks dehumanizing people, giving false moral weight to computers, or both. 16/ faculty.washington.edu/ebender/pape...
faculty.washington.edu
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Aaron Hertzmann @aaronhertzmann.com · 14/07/2026
Much of this information is adapted from a paper called "Multiple realizability and the spirit of functionalism" by Rosa Cao and I highly recommend that paper for more discussion, e.g., why we probably can't just abstract out some elements. 15/ www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/3r3lh...
dropbox.com
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Aaron Hertzmann @aaronhertzmann.com · 14/07/2026
Even if we had a perfect simulator, the problem of determining initial conditions seems insurmountable. We can’t just boot up a brain from a raw install the way we can with a computer. Brains develop from fetuses through gestation in a complex biological process. 14/
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Aaron Hertzmann @aaronhertzmann.com · 14/07/2026
The brain is a dynamical system of uncountably many variables (i.e., continuous fields, not just discrete variables), involving electrical, fluid, and chemical mechanics, with complex feedback affecting neural function, likely with many chaotic elements. Complete simulation is not feasible. 13/
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Aaron Hertzmann @aaronhertzmann.com · 14/07/2026
Chaotic systems like double pendulums are especially hard to get right and make accurate predictions. So simulation of even moderate size systems can be nearly insurmountable. We can predict accurate behavior of the weather with some probability, but it's far from a complete simluation. 12/
Probabilistic weather simulation
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Aaron Hertzmann @aaronhertzmann.com · 14/07/2026
Accurate simulation of even simple systems can be extraordinarily difficult, since floating point errors compound. Anyone who has built a physical simulator and tried to create complex, accurate predictions knows how hard it is. You can have speed, or mostly satisfy physics, but not both. 11/
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Aaron Hertzmann @aaronhertzmann.com · 14/07/2026
The human brain has 86,000,000,000 neurons, each of which averages 7,000 synaptic connections to other neurons, along with tens of thousands of ion channels on each neuron. These neurons have countless other interactions and mechanisms, many surely yet to be discovered. 10/
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Aaron Hertzmann @aaronhertzmann.com · 14/07/2026
But could we simulate brains accurately enough to reproduce intelligence and consciousness? In theory, perhaps, but not in reality. In theory, you could multiple one billion times one billion by counting out tickmarks one-by-one, but in practice you cannot, since it would take 32 billion years. 9/
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Aaron Hertzmann @aaronhertzmann.com · 14/07/2026
Oooh, looks very interesting
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Aaron Hertzmann @aaronhertzmann.com · 14/07/2026
I don't have a strong opinion on non-digital functionalism at the moment. My goal here is to respond to a common view that equates current/upcoming AI technologies to humans, and this is about digital computers and what's possible with the technology paradigms we have.
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