Comment by scarmig
2 months ago
If you somehow managed to perfectly simulate a human being, they would also act deterministically in response to identical initial conditions (modulo quantum effects, which are insignificant at the neural scale and also apply just as well to transistors).
It's not entirely infeasible that neurons could harness quantum effects. Not across the neurons as a whole, but via some sort of microstructures or chemical processes [0]. It seems likely that birds harness quantum effects to measure magnetic fields [1].
0: https://www.sciencealert.com/quantum-entanglement-in-neurons... 1: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-migrating-bir...
> in response to identical initial conditions
precisely, mathematically identical to infinite precision .. "yes".
Meanwhile, in the real world we live in it's essentially physically impossible to stage two seperate systems to be identical to such a degree AND it's an important result that some systems, some very simple systems, will have quite different outcomes without that precise degree of impossibly infinitely detailed identical conditions.
See: Lorenz's Butterfly and Smale's Horseshoe Map.
Of course. But that's not relevant to the point I was responding to suggesting that LLMs may lack consciousness because they're deterministic. Chaos wasn't the argument (though that would be a much more interesting one, cf "edge of chaos" literature).
Sure .. all the same it's always worth emphasizing that neither the tumbling of a tennis racket under gravity nor the axis flipping of a spinning wingnut in an orbiting satellite are deterministic in any predictive sense no matter how well initial conditions are measured ... they are only "deterministic" given out of band god like powers.
Clearly you're aware of this, however I find that the majority of casual referrers to determinism are not.
Doesn’t everything act deterministically if all the forces are understood? Humans included.
One can say the notion of free will is an unpacked bundle of near infinite forces emerging in and passing through us.
Doesn’t everything act deterministically if all the forces are understood? Humans included.