Comment by goatlover
14 days ago
It's better to say we live in a reality where physics provides our best understanding of how that fundamental reality behaves consistently. Saying it's "physical" or follows laws (causation) is making an ontological statement about how reality is, instead of how we currently understand it.
Which is important when people make claims that brains are just computers and LLMs are doing what humans do when we think and feel, because reality is computational or things to that effect.
There are particular scales of reality you don't need to know about because the statistical outcome is averaged along the principle of least action. A quantum particle could disappear, hell maybe even an entire atom. But any larger than that becomes horrifically improbable.
I don't know if you've read Permutation City by Greg Egan, but it's a really cool story.
Do I believe we can upload a human mind into a computing machine and simulate it by executing a step function and jump off into a parallel universe created by a mathematical simulation in another computer to escape this reality? No.
It's a neat thought experiment but that's all it is.
I don't doubt that one day we may figure out the physical process that encodes and recalls "memories" in our minds by following the science. But I don't think the computation model, alone, offers anything useful other than the observation that physical brains don't load and store data the way silicon can.
Could we simulate the process on silicon? Possibly, as long as the bounds of the neural net won't require us to burn this part of the known universe to compute it with some hypothetical machine.