3 ms·

It’s a bigger question than one can get into in a forum comment (I recommend typing some key words into https://plato.stanford.edu https://plato.stanford.edu fo

by bbor 2y ago

It’s a bigger question than one can get into in a forum comment (I recommend typing some key words into https://plato.stanford.edu https://plato.stanford.edu for more!), but to share what I feel are the closest to empirical truths we have on the matter: There is, as of yet, no scientific justification for thinking that humans are different from computers in some fundamental physical sense. We can talk about differences in architectonic structure like this article does (densely connected neurons v sparsely connected transistors), but ultimately each neuron is a machine, and at this point they’re machines we understand pretty darn well. Like all other machines bigger than 0.0001nm or whatever, there’s not really a clear mechanism by which they could be meaningfully “controlled” or “influenced” by quantum interactions. In this light, the answer is simple: human brains are incredibly complex machines. Some of the main counter arguments are: 1. It “feels” like “something” to be “you”, which is a whole field science lacks the terminology/framework to study. This is the position taken by this author, more or less 2. All conscious beings so far (animals included) have been biological, so simple parsimony could argue that we need a counterexample first. 3. Humans are able to communicate with each other telepathically by tapping into an unknown physical field. Obviously won’t win a lot of fans on this forum, but it’s an interesting piece of trivia that this final point was the only one Alan Turing found plausible in his famous 1950 paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence. See page 17: https://courses.cs.umbc.edu/471/papers/turing.pdf https://courses.cs.umbc.edu/471/papers/turing.pdf

foobarian 2y ago
> There is, as of yet, no scientific justification for thinking that humans are different from computers in some fundamental physical sense This is similar to the question of, can we simulate a brain? Even if we can't build one using a LLM-type construct, it seems at the very least we could model atomic interactions in detail and brute-force a simulation that way. However I think this requires that there is a lower limit to the level of detail of physical reality; otherwise the non-determinism such as what you see with the uncertainty principle becomes intractable. As a result it's not clear to me at all that humans are not different from computers in a physical sense.

by bbor 2y ago

foobarian 2y ago

> There is, as of yet, no scientific justification for thinking that humans are different from computers in some fundamental physical sense This is similar to the question of, can we simulate a brain? Even if we can't build one using a LLM-type construct, it seems at the very least we could model atomic interactions in detail and brute-force a simulation that way. However I think this requires that there is a lower limit to the level of detail of physical reality; otherwise the non-determinism such as what you see with the uncertainty principle becomes intractable. As a result it's not clear to me at all that humans are not different from computers in a physical sense.