Our brains actually do something, may be the difference. They're a thing happening, not a description of a thing happening.

Whatever that something that it actually does in the real, physical world is produces the cogito in cogito, ergo sum and I doubt you can get it just by describing what all the subatomic particles are doing, any more than a computer or pen-and-paper simulated hurricane can knock your house down, no matter how perfectly simulated.

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thrance 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

You're arguing for the existence of a soul, for dualism. Nothing wrong with that, except we have never been able to measure it, and have never had to use it to explain any phenomenon of the brain's working. The brain follows the rules of physics, like any other objects of the material world.

A pen and paper simulation of a brain would also be "a thing happening" as you put it. You have to explain what is the magical ingredient that makes the brain's computations impossible to replicate.

You could connect your brain simulation to an actual body, and you'd be unable to tell the difference with a regular human, unless you crack it open.

	▲	phantasmish 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		> You're arguing for the existence of a soul, for dualism. I'm not. You might want me to be, but I'm very, very much not.

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ehsanu1 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Doing something merely requires I/O. Brains wouldn't be doing much without that. A sufficiently accurate simulation of a fundamentally computational process is really just the same process.

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terminalshort 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Why are the electric currents moving in a GPU any less of a "thing happening" than the firing of the neurons in your brain? What you are describing here is a claim that the brain is fundamentally supernatural.

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phantasmish 3 days ago | parent [-]

Thinking that making scribbles that we interpret(!!!) as perfectly describing a functioning consciousness and its operation, on a huge stack of paper, would manifest consciousness in any way whatsoever (hell, let's say we make it an automated flip-book, too, so it "does something"), but if you made the scribbles slightly different it wouldn't work(!?!? why, exactly, not ?!?!), is what's fundamentally supernatural. It's straight-up Bronze Age religion kinds of stuff (which fits—the tech elite is full of that kind of shit, like mummification—er, I mean—"cryogenic preservation", millenarian cults er, I mean The Singularity, et c)

Of course a GPU involves things happening. No amount of using it to describe a brain operating gets you an operating brain, though. It's not doing what a brain does. It's describing it.

(I think this is actually all somewhat tangential to whether LLMs "can think" or whatever, though—but the "well of course they might think because if we could perfectly describe an operating brain, that would also be thinking" line of argument often comes up, and I think it's about as wrong-headed as a thing can possibly be, a kind of deep "confusing the map for the territory" error; see also comments floating around this thread offhandedly claiming that the brain "is just physics"—like, what? That's the cart leading the horse! No! Dead wrong!)

	▲	hackinthebochs 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Computation doesn't care about its substrate. A simulation of a computation is just a computation.