No. The fruit fly connectome's simulation doesn't incorporate all the relevant mechanisms of the brain. There is more complexity in a single biological neuron than in a whole frontier LLM.

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phi0 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Nor did I said it did. But either it's impossible to simulate their behaviour (regardless of how complex) in principle, ever, even in the far off future. Or it is possible. And what then? Is it a p-zombie?

Is a neuron arbitrarily complex ≠ is a neuron non-computable.

Of course we can't simulate a structure we don't even fully understand with full accuracy. But it's not magic. We will understand one day.

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hardbass 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I think the creator of p-zombies doesn't believe in them. It was some hypothetical to illustrate a principle or theorem. I could be wrong.

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phi0 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Chalmers used them as a thought experiment to argue against physicalism and never believed them to be real.

Similarly, if consciousness is something that neurons do, simulating them through floating point numbers on a computer should also bring it about. I think dismissing LLM consciousness because they're parameterised through floating point numbers is only possible if one hasn't thought it through long enough. Other arguments are much more reasonable / harder to object to.

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hardbass 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yes I roughly think the same. Brains are physical systems, as of yet we don't know anything beyond turing computability or physics in them, neural nets further are modeled close to neural structure, further complicating the matter. Under present knowledge, I think the existence of other conscious entities is quite possible because well we ourselves exist and are a physical system, I follow a form of Pascal's wager here. I see no cost to myself in not mistreating current AI's personally.

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danaris 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

But if simulated neurons can create consciousness, there's no guarantee of what level of detail that simulation has to operate at in order to produce that effect.

For instance, it's (unlikely, but) theoretically possible that it would require simulating them down to the level of subatomic particles, with perfect accuracy.

Right now, we're simulating them at a much, much higher and more abstract level, and AFAIK we barely even have the processing power to do that for the time being. So an artificial consciousness from simulated neurons may (again, assuming it's possible—which is a decent assumption, but not a certainty) take decades or even more for us to be able to achieve.

	▲	hardbass 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The problem again is that (a) other forms of consciousness exist eg octopuses (b) I cannot get into the shoes of you or an LLM and see if I feel or think, so we only have external effects to go by. For things that look and seem so much like consciousness, I am rather cautious.

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conmod278 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Is all that complexity necessary? Haven't we learnt that doing things in Latent space is effective as compared to Pixel space.

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TeMPOraL 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Sure it isn't. It's like taking a 2026 car and decrying all that complexity is necessary to haul cargo down a beaten path.

It's not. Two wheels and a box made out of whatever you have handy that's stiff enough is all you need. Everything else in a modern car is efficiency, safety, appeal to users, and a whole lot of details that only reflect our current economical and technological constraints of building things. 99% of the technical details of a car is about something else than the "primary goal".

Biology, even more so, is complex because of the way it's constructed (lots of tiny, independent, self-replicating machines) and how it adds up to a functioning organism.

	▲	conmod278 2 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		You are missing the point. Biology is a kludge over billions of years and evolution is a blind process. It had many constraints that are not necessary for modern machines or systems. e.g. a GPU doesn't have to reproduce. Why didn't you drop yourself to planck scale or string theory scale and say we need all that detail to actually get a functioning AI.