3 ms·

Its a thought experiment, so whatever is required. Need a dyson sphere using a stars total energetic output for calculations? Need to network that? Fine, thats

Its a thought experiment, so whatever is required. Need a dyson sphere using a stars total energetic output for calculations? Need to network that? Fine, thats an engineering problem.

notahacker 4y ago
But in this case "whatever is required" to build an atomic level simulation is the ability to observe and understand the simultaneous state changes of an octillion atoms well enough to write an emulation of them in some other medium (which is arguably a "body" of sorts anyway). That seems like less of an engineering problem and more of a "do you believe in gods?" problem.
- yreg 4y ago
  Yes, being able to observe a brain to the same depth as the simulation is assumed.
  - notahacker 4y ago
    Not just non-destructive real time observation, but also understanding patterns in observed state changes sufficiently well to be able to create lossless abstract representations of them in another medium. All seven octillion of them, operating in continuous time. There are information theoretic reasons to suspect the human mind can't parse itself in sufficient detail to write that program, but even without these I feel the rhetorical framing "why should it be possible?" makes more sense than "why shouldn't it". At least with "why shouldn't my dog be capable of understanding this HN exchange?" we've got evidence that mammals can learn that in our favour, and the step change between understanding "walkies" and thought experiments about hypothetical brain emulations is probably smaller than that between spotting which brain excites the EEG scanner more and atomic-level brain emulation.
    - yreg 4y ago
      This is not the point though. I'm not discussing whether we, humans can create such a simulation. It is a thought experiment of what we think such a simulated mind would be like and whether it would have intelligence/self-awareness/consciousness/experience qualia/etc. The topic is whether there is anything fundamentally important about the human wetware which couldn't be substituted by a computer.
    - burnished 4y ago
      The sticking point for me here is that you are pointing out that it could be very difficult but have not come out right and said you suspect it to be impossible - that would be a fine response to the top level question of what is stopping you from simulating a human in software; "the fundamental error in simulating those atoms is great enough that we would no longer see expected macro behaviors like predictable chemistry". I wouldn't expect you to say it with the same level of conviction, but assailing a question like that with practical concerns instead of the principle of the matter feels like it misses the point a little. Asking "why should it be possible" is very reasonable - but you gotta ask it. My take on it is simple; the interactions between things can be reliably predicted - if not exactly then with a model whose outputs are indistinguishable from reality.
      - notahacker 4y ago
        But the rough implementation details are pretty fundamental to what is being asked! I don't think there are any logical reasons why a different set of atoms cannot be an equivalent mind with identical conscious experience (my mind constituted different atoms yesterday, yet perceives continuity!) though I'm unconvinced of the existence of an entity capable of engineering it (and agnostic on what permutations of atoms are and aren't capable of representing brain state). But that's a very different question to "is it possible for humans to create equivalent consciousness by writing high level code which symbolically represents the molecular behaviour we think is pertinent to thought as electrical signals as a binary code state machine" which is often implied by such a question, the answer to which I think is a fairly confident no. It's commonly suggested that scepticism about the ability of the human mind to be replicated in silicon suggests "something special" about it; when rephrased as a question about actually building it it becomes more of a question about whether there's "something special" about our theories of computation and i/o pattern matching that transcends fundamentally different chemistry, as well as the mother of all engineering problems.
- burnished 4y ago
  That doesnt follow from anything that has been said. Do you have some reason to think that a simulation at that resolution and scale is fundamentally impossible? For purposes of the thought experiment you could go bigger or smaller - the practical considerations aren't important for that.

Its a thought experiment, so whatever is required. Need a dyson sphere using a stars total energetic output for calculations? Need to network that? Fine, thats an engineering problem.

notahacker 4y ago

But in this case "whatever is required" to build an atomic level simulation is the ability to observe and understand the simultaneous state changes of an octillion atoms well enough to write an emulation of them in some other medium (which is arguably a "body" of sorts anyway). That seems like less of an engineering problem and more of a "do you believe in gods?" problem.

yreg 4y ago
Yes, being able to observe a brain to the same depth as the simulation is assumed.
- notahacker 4y ago
  Not just non-destructive real time observation, but also understanding patterns in observed state changes sufficiently well to be able to create lossless abstract representations of them in another medium. All seven octillion of them, operating in continuous time. There are information theoretic reasons to suspect the human mind can't parse itself in sufficient detail to write that program, but even without these I feel the rhetorical framing "why should it be possible?" makes more sense than "why shouldn't it". At least with "why shouldn't my dog be capable of understanding this HN exchange?" we've got evidence that mammals can learn that in our favour, and the step change between understanding "walkies" and thought experiments about hypothetical brain emulations is probably smaller than that between spotting which brain excites the EEG scanner more and atomic-level brain emulation.
  - yreg 4y ago
    This is not the point though. I'm not discussing whether we, humans can create such a simulation. It is a thought experiment of what we think such a simulated mind would be like and whether it would have intelligence/self-awareness/consciousness/experience qualia/etc. The topic is whether there is anything fundamentally important about the human wetware which couldn't be substituted by a computer.
  - burnished 4y ago
    The sticking point for me here is that you are pointing out that it could be very difficult but have not come out right and said you suspect it to be impossible - that would be a fine response to the top level question of what is stopping you from simulating a human in software; "the fundamental error in simulating those atoms is great enough that we would no longer see expected macro behaviors like predictable chemistry". I wouldn't expect you to say it with the same level of conviction, but assailing a question like that with practical concerns instead of the principle of the matter feels like it misses the point a little. Asking "why should it be possible" is very reasonable - but you gotta ask it. My take on it is simple; the interactions between things can be reliably predicted - if not exactly then with a model whose outputs are indistinguishable from reality.
    - notahacker 4y ago
      But the rough implementation details are pretty fundamental to what is being asked! I don't think there are any logical reasons why a different set of atoms cannot be an equivalent mind with identical conscious experience (my mind constituted different atoms yesterday, yet perceives continuity!) though I'm unconvinced of the existence of an entity capable of engineering it (and agnostic on what permutations of atoms are and aren't capable of representing brain state). But that's a very different question to "is it possible for humans to create equivalent consciousness by writing high level code which symbolically represents the molecular behaviour we think is pertinent to thought as electrical signals as a binary code state machine" which is often implied by such a question, the answer to which I think is a fairly confident no. It's commonly suggested that scepticism about the ability of the human mind to be replicated in silicon suggests "something special" about it; when rephrased as a question about actually building it it becomes more of a question about whether there's "something special" about our theories of computation and i/o pattern matching that transcends fundamentally different chemistry, as well as the mother of all engineering problems.
burnished 4y ago
That doesnt follow from anything that has been said. Do you have some reason to think that a simulation at that resolution and scale is fundamentally impossible? For purposes of the thought experiment you could go bigger or smaller - the practical considerations aren't important for that.