3 ms·

Correlation is not causation. One would expect a physical implementation of an electro-chemical neural net with loops (and consciousness / self-awareness defini

Correlation is not causation. One would expect a physical implementation of an electro-chemical neural net with loops (and consciousness / self-awareness definitely requires loops) to develop voltage biases over time, which require periodic rebalancing to continue operation. This is what brain waves are. You see the structure of the brain wave change when consciousness is chemically turned on or off (anesthesia), because those self-reinforcing loops turn off or change character when the brain is unconscious. It's like noticing that an electrical circuit gives off radio waves, and then trying to locate the behavior of the circuit in those waves because you noticed that when you switched off the device those radio waves disappeared. No, the computation is happening in the circuit; the radio waves are just an unavoidable side product of electric charges moving around. I'm a physicist by training; I understand what resonance is. > no serious neuroscientist on the planet currently claims we have a viable mechanistic theory of consciousness yet This isn't true. There are dozens of mechanistic theories of consciousness: take your pick. We just don't know which one reflects the situation within our own brain, because we lack sufficient understanding of our neural circuitry to make that determination. But having dozens of different possible models and not knowing which one is "right" in the sense of describing our actual brain (while any one of them is a reasonable theory of consciousness for other systems) is very different from not even having a single model of consciousness, as you seem to be implying.

quantadev 2y ago
Right, I get your view of things. Probably our common ground of beliefs is that LLMs are mechanistic and they can do genuine human-level reasoning, as long as we expand the word reasoning to be slightly more general than "human reasoning". The brain is also built on Perceptrons (essentially) and can do reasoning via perceptrons like LLMs (agreeing with you there). My special claim about wave resonance is a bit more specific and nuanced. I'm claiming that it's only memory, qualia/consciousness(also, emotions, pain, ets) that's made of waves. So we can agree that when you're thinking in terms of logic and reason itself, you may be using mostly the Perceptronics and not the waves. But I think the "pattern matching" ability of the brain (which is 90% of what it does, my view, excluding the I/O [sensory+motor neurons]) is totally built on resonance. I claim memory and resonance are identical. When something happens that reminds you of something else (even Deja Vu) that's literally your brain being entangled with all past copies of itself and able to resonate in real-time with all of them across the causality chain of the Block Universe because they're ALL part of a single entangled structure. EDIT: So consciousness is where your brain gets "agency" (executive decision making) from. So you can think of this "agency" aspect of a brain as "The thing that runs LLM prompts, using your Neurons as Perceptrons", and yes those LLM prompts that perform reason might be totally mechanistic just like computer LLMs.

quantadev 2y ago

Right, I get your view of things. Probably our common ground of beliefs is that LLMs are mechanistic and they can do genuine human-level reasoning, as long as we expand the word reasoning to be slightly more general than "human reasoning". The brain is also built on Perceptrons (essentially) and can do reasoning via perceptrons like LLMs (agreeing with you there). My special claim about wave resonance is a bit more specific and nuanced. I'm claiming that it's only memory, qualia/consciousness(also, emotions, pain, ets) that's made of waves. So we can agree that when you're thinking in terms of logic and reason itself, you may be using mostly the Perceptronics and not the waves. But I think the "pattern matching" ability of the brain (which is 90% of what it does, my view, excluding the I/O [sensory+motor neurons]) is totally built on resonance. I claim memory and resonance are identical. When something happens that reminds you of something else (even Deja Vu) that's literally your brain being entangled with all past copies of itself and able to resonate in real-time with all of them across the causality chain of the Block Universe because they're ALL part of a single entangled structure. EDIT: So consciousness is where your brain gets "agency" (executive decision making) from. So you can think of this "agency" aspect of a brain as "The thing that runs LLM prompts, using your Neurons as Perceptrons", and yes those LLM prompts that perform reason might be totally mechanistic just like computer LLMs.