Two strikes against the hypothesis:

- LLMs suggest that human-like "cognition" can be somewhat mimicked by purely mechanical means.

- Exposing the brain to an MRI would affect cognition if there was a quantum element to it.

jebarker 21 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> LLMs suggest that human-like "cognition" can be somewhat mimicked by purely mechanical means.

This is not a strike against that hypothesis. Quantum systems can be simulated using non-quantum computers but that doesn't make non-quantum computers into quantum computers. Similarly, mimicking some aspects of human cognition doesn't mean you can replicate all of human cognition with the same method.

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beardyw an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Everything is subject to "quantum effects". Not necessarily trying to squeeze superposition and entanglement into a pint pot.

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ck2 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

oh and to address your second idea about MRI

when mice were exposed to cosmic ray bursts (to test for effects on past and future astronauts traveling to moon and mars)

the mice learned much much more slowly and forgot things much much faster

how's that for "cognitive corruption" ?

(btw this is also why I laugh when Musk thinks he's going to Mars ever, it's not just a one-way trip, he wouldn't even survive the journey itself with current technology and unlike earth there's no magnetic field or enough atmosphere on Mars to deflect them)

	▲	ben_w 13 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> unlike earth there's no magnetic field or enough atmosphere on Mars to deflect them These are solvable with known methods. They make the whole thing rather less romantic. If you're going to the trouble of e.g. burying your base under regolith or wrapping a planet in a big coil and lots of PV to make an artificial magnetic field, it very quickly becomes apparent that for essentially all possible disasters short of "oops we made a black hole and it caused a magnitude 15 earthquake and all the crust everywhere liquified and mixed with all the water so even ocean bases weren't safe", it's much, much easier to survive disasters on Earth without actually leaving Earth, than to go to Mars and have a normal day. If someone made a robot factory that went mad and converted all the nitrogen in our atmosphere into ammonia (killing all the plants that no longer had access to the atmospheric nitrogen), while also producing enough smog to halve how much sunlight we got, and dumped a lot of endocrine disruptors into our water cycle, the top of Mount Everest and the Sahara desert would each still be much more hospitable than Mars is today.

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ck2 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

if you mean LLM seems like cognition

LLM emulate cognition, there is a huge difference, it's a mimick process not genuine

if you read about psychopaths/sociopaths, they do not comprehend emotions but they can learn to emulate them by watching others and mimicking them

that's exactly what LLM is doing, it is taught to assemble words in a way that mimics all the humans in its huge datapool, so it comes off as "cognition" because that's what the humans it's emulating were doing

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j-pb 23 minutes ago | parent [-]

Sociopaths can feel emotions, they just lack empathy. So they can consciously manipulate others.

LLMs don't have conscious processes that perform that kind of reasoning.

If anything the fact that they are blackboxes to their own behavior and are able to non-verbally empathise, is the opposite of what you describe.

Your requirment for something supernatural/quantum to decide between emulation and real thing is self referential.

	▲	ben_w 7 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> LLMs don't have conscious processes that perform that kind of reasoning. If only we could tell either way, we'd have made a huge breakthrough in the philosophy of consciousness.