I believe machines could be made that think. But not purely digital ones. The brain most certainly isn’t a thinking machine precisely because it doesn’t have the luxury of unlimited time. The brain and body instead construct time, a cohesive internal one,from the ground up, with nesting oscillators driving the sequence of all functions and behaviors, over long and short time closes.

What we call “thinking” is a filtered layer of it, a slice that the attention spotlight is focussed on, and in humans this process can be turned to cognition over multilayered abstractions, and using language or other symbolic communications to communicate some of the dynamics of this process, and even evoke them in others.

Turing machines, and modern digital computers and LLMs are outside of time. They do not experience time. They can check the clock. They can count steps. But they are not active and agentic in time.

This was the core premise behind my research during grad school and beyond. My favorite project — which ultimately became my dissertation — was a proposal to connect reinforcement learning algorithms, neuronal data, psychological behavior, and phenomenology. Specifically, the idea was the feeling of cognitive fatigue is a mathematical signal to ‘rest’, in which the value of rest is defined by offline mechanisms that contribute to decision-making. I proposed a connection to hippocampal replay, and was able to leverage fMRI and choice data to evaluate the hypothesis.

Zooming out of my specific work, the “best” success stories were connections across math/CS, neuro, and psych and the golden child is the dopamine model of reinforcement learning where firing patterns encode the TD prediction error

Not broad enough. Better: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculating_Space

Doesn’t the concept of a subconscious, or inner voice, invalidate any tight analogies to Turing Machines? What logical process is putting the Fur Elise into my head (earworms etc)

I think this article is right that definitions really matter here cause one could argue “CTM is trivial, because we can describe almost any physical system as executing computations.” So we have a dual problem here—not just the difficult discussion of ‘what’s going on in minds’, but also ‘what is computation’.

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