HYPOTHESIS AND THEORY article
Front. Syst. Neurosci.
This article is part of the Research TopicNeurobiological foundations of cognition and progress towards Artificial General IntelligenceView all 4 articles
Minding the gap between artificial and human computers: new computing paradigms would be needed for devices to replicate us
Provisionally accepted
- University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, United States
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The theoretical foundation of neuroscience has a rift with that of artificial intelligence, which current AI models cannot bridge unless we create a new computing paradigm that describes both fields well. This gap came from mathematicians' invention of computability theory, which was deliberately narrower than cognition and yet became a cornerstone of computer science. It has resulted in circular logics for computational biology and biological computing: the mathematical model of human mathematical activities ends up limiting the sorts of technology we build, and in turn, the engineering constraints on our technologies ends up limiting our understanding of brain systems. Here we study several important mathematical and biological activities that computability neglects, and they should help bridge the gap between neurobiology and (aspirational) AGI. One activity is mathematicians' producing proofs of theorems that lie outside artificial computers' logic. Another is neurons' functions that are more complex than transistors, information by recent neurobiological findings. We also survey candidates and inspiration for a new synthesis of AGI with neurobiology.
Keywords: computability, neural networks, Proof Theory, natural independence phenomena, Biological computing, bio-electronic interactions, multi-scale neuroscience, whole brain emulation
Received: 29 Aug 2025; Accepted: 03 Dec 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Kirkpatrick. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: K. L. Kirkpatrick
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