Unless you ascribe to some meta-physical soul - you believe human consciousness is encoded in matter - in the interactions between atoms. Actually at a much higher level of abstraction- neurons - but it’s all simulatable in principle. Thus, yes, it could literally be a bunch of x86 instructions.
1. that artificial neurons are very restrictive model for actual neurons, let alone brain/organism, as there is more going on in neurons than a thresholded 0-1 activation
2. a brain does not function in isolation, but as regulator of the bodily functions (along with even more things). If you look at the brain in isolation to the body you don't really understand fully what it is doing unless you narrow your view a lot. Eg the brain modulates production of hormones, which in turn affects stuff like heart rate which then comes back to the brain as signal, in a feedback loop. Not to mention actual behaviour and interaction with the world. Toy models of organisms are not organisms.
3. "interaction between atoms" (or rather matter in general, as we have to take into account electrons, photons, gravity and a lot of other things that matter) is too general, too big, artificial neurons are a very useful (for applications) abstraction inspired by biological processes, but not modelling said underlying biology fully. Nobody can imo right now know if "computation" is a good model for "atom interactions" as in whether we can adequately enough model "atom interactions" in a computationally tractable way, and surely we do not do that right now except in very narrow scopes, and we have good reasons to believe that the current computational paradigms/turing machines are inadequate in doing that efficiently enough.
This sort of tech-centric distillation of visceral human experience into simple analogies is so grating. We can simultaneously acknowledge that consciousness is not well defined and not "testable" with certainty while also acknowledging that there is something different between the conscious experience we are all aware of as humans, and instructions executing on a chip. The only thing that has changed in the discourse about AI and consciousness vs. "is my home desktop conscious in 2004" is the quality of the simulacrum that LLMs produce vs. pre-ML chatbots.
A very large number of people could do the calculations of an LLM by hand using pen and paper. It would take a long time, but if the result were conscious then were would the consciousness exist? In the humans? Is it consciousness within consciousness?
Well if you go that route, a computer simulating digestion has almost no physical features in common with actual digestion of a stomach. The same holds for consciousness and brains and computers. Them saying it’s just instructions is shorthand for pointing out the physical differences of brains and computers.
It’s all just particles, but the higher level differences are vast, and only brains are implicated for first person perspectives via science.
The brain is (part of) an allostatic system and part of a living organism which reproduces itself constantly. Certainly not "a bunch of instructions".
Unless you ascribe to some meta-physical soul - you believe human consciousness is encoded in matter - in the interactions between atoms. Actually at a much higher level of abstraction- neurons - but it’s all simulatable in principle. Thus, yes, it could literally be a bunch of x86 instructions.
The problem is
1. that artificial neurons are very restrictive model for actual neurons, let alone brain/organism, as there is more going on in neurons than a thresholded 0-1 activation
2. a brain does not function in isolation, but as regulator of the bodily functions (along with even more things). If you look at the brain in isolation to the body you don't really understand fully what it is doing unless you narrow your view a lot. Eg the brain modulates production of hormones, which in turn affects stuff like heart rate which then comes back to the brain as signal, in a feedback loop. Not to mention actual behaviour and interaction with the world. Toy models of organisms are not organisms.
3. "interaction between atoms" (or rather matter in general, as we have to take into account electrons, photons, gravity and a lot of other things that matter) is too general, too big, artificial neurons are a very useful (for applications) abstraction inspired by biological processes, but not modelling said underlying biology fully. Nobody can imo right now know if "computation" is a good model for "atom interactions" as in whether we can adequately enough model "atom interactions" in a computationally tractable way, and surely we do not do that right now except in very narrow scopes, and we have good reasons to believe that the current computational paradigms/turing machines are inadequate in doing that efficiently enough.
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Distinction without a difference.
That’s like saying simulating a supernova and a supernova are both extremely hot.
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To take this seriously we must extend consciousness to nearly all of the tree of life.
This sort of tech-centric distillation of visceral human experience into simple analogies is so grating. We can simultaneously acknowledge that consciousness is not well defined and not "testable" with certainty while also acknowledging that there is something different between the conscious experience we are all aware of as humans, and instructions executing on a chip. The only thing that has changed in the discourse about AI and consciousness vs. "is my home desktop conscious in 2004" is the quality of the simulacrum that LLMs produce vs. pre-ML chatbots.
Maybe OP is a dualist.
A very large number of people could do the calculations of an LLM by hand using pen and paper. It would take a long time, but if the result were conscious then were would the consciousness exist? In the humans? Is it consciousness within consciousness?
Well if you go that route, a computer simulating digestion has almost no physical features in common with actual digestion of a stomach. The same holds for consciousness and brains and computers. Them saying it’s just instructions is shorthand for pointing out the physical differences of brains and computers.
It’s all just particles, but the higher level differences are vast, and only brains are implicated for first person perspectives via science.