I'm probably way off the mark here, but my instinct tells me there's nothing intrinsic about the human condition that makes it the exclusive vessel of thought.

It is theoretically possible, after all, to simulate a human brain at a subatomic level. Sure, the complexity is absurd and interface required to measure it seems far fetched, but technically there's no restriction.

Because of this I believe what we know as "thought" or consciousness exists in the space between the physical world. It's just a way to represent the world around us, with the ability to reference the past and systems to predict the future.

LLMs to me are like a simplified version thats stretched across the domain of active memory. The "thought" process is the same, an active state (current token) guided by the past state (previous tokens).

I think the next step is to reduce what a token is. Right now they are vectors that are linked to words. If instead of words we fed it direct video and audio, and a way to translate the raw data into something resembling the information passed from our eyes and ears in real time, and train it like a child learns from its parents, it's hard to draw the line on where thought begins.

It's an interesting experiment, but I still consider it anti-human.

In the future, when we have "robot" rights for robots that identify as humans, you'll find me on the side of "they aren't a real human". We'll be called bigots, and I'm okay with that.

>I'm probably way off the mark here, but my instinct tells me there's nothing intrinsic about the human condition that makes it the exclusive vessel of thought.

I'm in your boat. Molecular biology looks quite analogous to something like Conway's Game of Life, but a particle automaton with freedom in 3D space rather than cells in a fixed 2D aetheric grid.

Conway's Game of Life is Turing complete, the fundamental laws/algorithms are simple. Per Wolfram (NKS), you don't need complex algorithms in order to exhibit complex behavior. GoL is just four rules and a[n infinite] grid. Wolfram's automata are simpler.

I will go even further out 'there' and state that we are the equivalent to Greek "city-gods" which arise out of the polity/demos composing them, except our polities are little biological von Neumann machines acting in concert to emerge us in their aggregate. What most people think of as 'god' being some top-down omniscient/omnipotent creator entity, I think is wrong and reverses the true heirarchy of nature. The fabric of spacetime, the quantum field, or whatever emerges it from a lower level with its fixed simple rules, is the primary force driving the universe's [and our] existence. If there are gods, we are categorically much closer to them in form than the pious fanatics say!

(Disclosure: I am petulantly Atheist.)

Made some updates to my post but glad you brought up simulation: today when we simulate the brain, at whatever resolution, we do so in digital systems that have the Von Neumann bottleneck. Processing and memory are separated. In humans and all of biology, these things overlap instead. And that’s where simulations ultimately fail. They are out of step with real time in a way biology is not, because biology is attuned to the environment, and down to the molecular level, is actually enacting a physical process distributed across many cells that track the periodicities in various external signals, then anticipate them.

You might like this. Maybe math is existence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothes...