Comment by f_klem

There's two meanings to "the body is a complex machine" and I think you're missing the forest for the trees here.

1) The abstract "dictionary" version: It'd be technically correct to say that the body is a machine under the definition of "A machine is a thermodynamic system that uses power to apply forces and control movement to perform an action.".

2) But there's also the less abstract/technical: "The body is alike the complex machines we have built", and this is much less true. Especially for the brain. The "neuron" analogy in machine learning is effective, but entirely wrong; We do not fully know how even a single neuron works, nevermind any complex system made out of multiple of them.

With regard to AI, there's a lot of people extrapolating "There is no magical animating spirit, the brain is just a pile of stochastic molecules following the laws of physics" into "The brain is an inert pile of matter, computers are an inert pile of matter, ergo AI/LLMs are like the brain!"

Especially so by people who have a financial/legal interest in doing so. "AI is just like a brain, fire your employees and buy our LLM now!", "AI is just like a brain, so it's totally not copyright infringement!"

I find the claim subjective experience may be illusory absolutely baffling. I can only speak for myself with certainty, but I am entirely sure I have subjective experience. All the other propositions I believe could be false but I don't see how I can be wrong about experiencing something. I could be a brain in a vat (or weights on a GPU) and be specifically programmed to only come to false beliefs and still I can be sure that there is an experience I am the subject of. I cannot provide empirical evidence for my experience, that is why it is subjective. I cannot be entirely sure you are experiencing anything, and when I encounter people who don't share the same baseline intuition here I do begin to wonder if this is truly a universal across humanity. But I can't think of any other assumption which I would be more comfortable as a foundational axiom other than, "I am experiencing something." I do not require additional evidence for it because I experience the truth of it directly

I think the truth lies somewhere between these two extremes. An LLM is not a human brain, and does not try to emulate one. It should not be a surprise that an LLM does not behave like a human brain. So we can not infer things either way. The best we can say is that an LLM appears to exhibit very similar behavior to a human brain, under certain constraints. So maybe we can infer that the human brain has something in it that operates in a similar way to an LLM (like the human "unconscious", or "intuition" maybe). It seems obvious to me that a human brain and an LLM are not comparable things, for many reasons. So we can not make inferrences one way or the other.

Interesting, so you would say that your experience is .. illusory? In what medium exactly? Illusion requires a substrate of some kind. "Awareness"? What's that?

Neurons are themselves things we experience (indirectly). Once seen through a microscope or known about in some fashion the only way they "exist" is by you having the experience of knowing them. It's not the other way around. One thing is more fundamental here. What is this experience? What are the atoms of this? "Atomic particles"? How would you even approach an answer if your building blocks are themselves part of what needs to be explained?

The hard problem cannot even be touched if you start out like this.

Refuting the "subjective experience" axiom does not lead to 'any "subjective experience" is completely tied to neurons', you also need to explain why the subjective experience is tied to neurons. And that's precisely what computational theories of mind do not account for: the link between subjective experience and neurons. I am not arguing that neurons (or the brain) are not a necessary condition for subjective experience.

It’s the opposite.

Descartes made clear that subjective experience is the ONLY thing we know. Everything else is theories to explain the phenomena we subjectively experience.

We theorize that there is a physical world and other beings like us having similar subjective experiences, because that seems the best explanation for our subjective experiences. But we might be living in the Matrix, with all the people we think we are interacting with and just sophisticated simulations.

> at requires explanation beyond the material, that is axiomatically assumed without evidence

Nobody talked about anything out of neurons. The question is still open.

"that is axiomatically assumed"

passive voice doing a hell of a lot of work in this phrase

> It's raising the possibility that our thinking could be modeled as a machine. Given that, as you acknowledge, we don't have a clue how our mind works, it seems premature to rule out this possibility.

In order to raise the possibility that our thinking can be modeled as a machine, there needs to be a previous question: 'can our thinking be modeled at all?'. And before that, already the idea of possibility: 'our thinking could be something that can be modeled'. Since we know 'we can think', asking 'can machines think?' needs the assumption that machines and brains are alike. If there is no assumption, then we should ask 'if brains and machines are alike, then we could raise the possibility of thinking a machine could also think'. But when we say 'brains and machines are alike', we are implicitly saying 'brains are like machines'. There is no problem asking 'can machines think?', but there is indeed a problem with implicitly assuming that brains and machines are alike when we do not known it yet. I am critiquing the idea of assumptions here, not the research.

Indeed, scientific type thinking like that where you ask a question that you can do experiments on to see if machines can pass the test is probably the way to progress. The philosophical waffling mostly just goes in circles.

To investigate consciousness you'll probably get further trying to build conscious machines with agency and comparing them to biological ones than reading Heidegger.

It's not a huge leap to imagine biological cells might have a rudimentary consciousness

Pan-psychists might argue that your subjective consciousness is an aggregate of all the cells/molecules, etc in the system

"While each biological cell operates largely on its own chemical cues, they all coordinate through complex nervous and chemical networks to create your unified, subjective experience."

You might be a rigid materialist

> Do you disagree with the assumption that cells are machines? They seem pretty machine-like to me. You just said it: they are machine-like. No, cells aren't machines for two reasons: 1) machines, by definition, are artifacts created by human beings. 2) The nature of a living organism is completely different from that of 'machines'. (even if we a re able to replicate a cell in a lab, like the group from Craig Venter did). Autopoiesis being one very big difference, another being emergence-within-the-environment (life) vs design-conditioned-by-will (machines)

> ... if the mind is an emergent phenomenon from machines (cells) then it seems quite likely that a mind could emerge from other, different machines. Since cells cannot be defined as machines, the argument about mind emerging from machines does not hold.

> I certainly don’t think individual cells have any subjective experience or sense of agency.

There's definitely research and scholarship that would beg to disagree with you there. At least in terms of completely writing off the notion of "agency" when it comes to cells.

Dr. Michael Levin's lab is doing some pretty cool work. https://drmichaellevin.org/

> Do you disagree with the assumption that cells are machines?

Yes? Literally no machine ever built by humans is capable of (or even hinting at beginnings of capability for) replication or novel synthesis like cells are, let alone autonomously, it’s quite unconceivable that anyone would take this to be a reasonable assumption in the first place.

> If we agree weights producing text may emerge consciousness, given large enough, then DBs must've gained it long ago.

If we agree that silicon can perform calculations, then beaches must have been working out log tables long ago.

> Modern psychology more or less has settled around the idea that consciousness is a product of the body.

The kind of consciousness we know. Jumping to the conclusion that that's the only kind possible, or even stronger that the way ours evolved is the only way this could have happened, is completely invalid.

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None of the works I mentioned solved or try to solve the mind/body problem or the issue of consciousness.

They are a frame of reference for not stepping into the common fallacies that the AI research field is based on.

Hard disagree. We only discovered the role that glial cells play in processing around 2014. We're still uncertain how patterns of activation consolidate through long term potentiation, let alone how signaling encodes information. We understand quite a bit about the role of the hippocampus and subiculum in encoding memories; but we don't understand the structural layout of engram complexes - which were themselves mapped for the first time only in 2022!

Taking effective results in machine learning, and somehow assuming that they apply to cognition - simply because neural nets were inspired by our limited knowledge of neural signaling and structure - is like trying to apply aircraft engineering to studying ornithology. For a better articulation of this point (from the reverse direction) check out the paper 'Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor?' from 2017 - https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jo...

> I highly recommend the philosophers read some neuroscience Philosophers do read neuroscience and technical reports on AI.

> The whole "model weights" thing in AI is modeled after the synaptic connections and between actual neurons In reality, it is a really poor and basic model of what is actually happening in a real brain

Brains and modern AI systems (LLMs for example) are structurally different. (Don't get confused by topology. A structure is more than topology: it is also what the structure is made of, thus the properties of the material contribute and define what can emerge atop the structure)

> There are also differences between discrete neuron firing and weights as signals, but there is enough similarity to make artificial neural nets useful and do things similar to what real one do.

There is barely a surface-level similarity. The best example I can come up with is this…

Imagine the most intricate and beautiful tall building that you can think of. Think like an older skyscraper in Chicago or a palace. There are water features and moving parts everywhere but also tiny little handmade carvings and materials throughout.

Now imagine we have no reference designs and no blueprints - we hire an architect to attempt to study the building by looking at it from a distance and understand everything they possibly can about it. She can go into the building to check but every time she does, it stops functioning normally.

That architect is a neuroscientist.

Then the ML researcher is like a graphic designer who sees the work that the architect is doing and makes a napkin sketch of the building the architect has been studying, to use for a project later. Sure the designer has some of her representations. But the difference in complexity between the designer’s napkin sketch and the architect’s analysis is massive. Several orders of magnitude.

Then another many orders of magnitude is the level of detail that the architect can understand about this strange building without being able to fully interact with it, versus the actual complexity of the building.

So yeah, an AI is modeled after neurons in the sense that they represent a couple of surface level features of neurons. But the difference in complexity is about as much as a napkin drawing of a grand building represents the actual structure and details of the building, no matter the level of skill that the graphic designer has

Indeed, I know there is research going on placing agency and free will as illusions of our own subjective experience. Yet, there is a big gap from a purely mechanistic view of the mind to the idea/phenomena of subjective experience.

Yikes dude. You may need to expand your horizons a bit.

> On the contrary, I highly recommend people in Philosophy of mind and linguistics should start reading AI research papers because their theories and ideas are highly outdated, even ancient. Your books are from 1927 and 1972 respectively and Turing's article is from 1950s. And they are relatively new with respect to other works in Philosophy.

People in philosophy and cognitive linguistics do read AI research. Don't get fooled by the publishing dates: although Heidegger's work dates from 1927, the work is contemporary. The same happens with Dreyfus' work. Again, publishing dates don't mean anything here. Maybe you can clarify why they are outdated.

> If one doesn't adequately understand what we have in 2026, how can they theorize about it? As others they don't understand how the mind/brain work, BUT ALSO they don't understand how the AI works.

I would say that people involved in the critique of AI do know how it works. But I've found that is normally the case that people in AI research does not have the framing provided by works in philosophy or cognitive linguistics.

> I think philosophy people and Linguist will catch up in a century, like they did with Turing. Philosophers of this century are not in humanities or literature. They are in science and engineering. What do you base your claims on? Plenty of philosophers work in humanities, literature, sociology as well as science and engineering. Philosophers not catching up? The critique on automation and AI already dates from the early 20s if not before.

> Heidegger was trained on priesthood and Theology. You should read greater minds like Hinton, LeCun etc. if you want to think on these things. They are the real Philosophers.

Sorry, but this does not make too much sense. Hinton and LeCun are great in their own fields. But seriously, they are not philosophers, they are inventors.

we know the brain does not use gradient descent. (i agree it doesn't matter)

I like Leibniz's comparison of the brain to a mill, which he invokes in an argument[1] that seems to be the predecessor of the modern "hard problem:"

> supposing that there were a mechanism so constructed as to think, feel and have perception, we might enter it as into a mill. And this granted, we should only find on visiting it, pieces which push one against another, but never anything by which to explain a perception.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz%27s_gap

> I don't think cognitive linguistics has that much to say about AI nowadays. Let alone philosophy. I would like to read those sources.

> The biggest contributions from linguistics are probably "human languages mostly have statistical regularities rather than hard rules" and "the sum of data humans get from birth to language acquisition is insufficient to learn a language from scratch". Which LLMs already work with, and work around, respectively. From there, nothing.

Again, what's the source for 'biggest contributions from linguistics are...'? It is a big contribution to the development of LLMs, but different cognitive linguistics authors already challenged this idea already 20-30 years ago. LLMs work with and around the problems you cite because of massive data/money, not at the fundamental level. It is all a game of statistics and data, which has been already challenged by cog. ling.

> And philosophy just exists to be a distractor. Well, this is just telling me that you either know too much about philosophy and reached that conclusion (which might make sense, know of some philosophers who also think that) or you just read too little.

> So all of that "treating human mind as a machine is wrong" amounts to "human mind must be powered by magic fairy dust"

This is the common fallacy people in AI/IT make . One of the benefits of reading philosophy is that you find your way out of them.

> Want to know why Turing did what he did? The actual tests Turing though about are themselves flawed (not that I discovered that, has been known for some time already)

“Reflections on trusting trust” is the paper that posits a compiler which is edited once so that when it compiles a program, it adds a security vulnerability to it, and when it compiles it’s own source code, it adds this edit into itself. Then it is used to compile its own source code once. Then this edit is removed.

Now any study of the program or compiler source code will not show any vulnerability, but compiling the program will make a vulnerable program, and recompiling the compiler from its clean source code will not fix the situation.

This carrying down of a pattern which is not written down anywhere, a flaming torch lighting a torch lighting a torch, is analogous to four billion years of life on Earth. We talk like DNA is an everything-code that defines a human and a human brain, but it’s the implicit behaviour of cells (‘compiler’) and the mechanisms inside them which interpret DNA. The unbroken chain of life getting more and more complex and never being restarted from scratch, with the behaviours not written down anywhere for us to study. How does DNA arrange for x, y, z to happen? Maybe it doesn’t at all.

Accidentally stumbling on a mechanism that is simple enough to be recreated with every human birth might be possible, accidentally stumbling on a mechanism that took evolution billions of years to find and which it has hung onto by copying it and has never recreated it from scratch, could be much less likely, in a much bigger search space.

Vegan ML engineer here. In total agreement with you. People are just moving the goal post to keep themselves protected from the obvious conclusion: there is nothing really all that special about us humans. Perhaps subjective experience is simply the internal state of a self supervised continuous learning algorithm and we don't like that conclusion very much.

As other commenters pointed out, I'm not getting into the mind/body problem. But that's what people normally do: you challenge the assumptions, and all of a sudden they assume you are already coming to a conclusion. And no, just because I challenge the assumptions, I don't need to provide a counter conclusion.

I don’t think the OP is discussing mind-body dualism. There are many materialists who believe that consciousness maybe a non-computational process.

But it is worth pointing out that something like 80% of the world (it fluctuates depending on the survey but its around that) believes in some non-physical spirit, life force, or soul.

It’s a very HN bubble thing to start a discussion with the assumption that everyone must be a materialist.

There is no way of dealing with these topics via a non-anthropomorphic perspective. That has been already (in my view) proved by Heidegger and then Derrida.

Last time I read about panpsychism, it was deeply flawed. But I can't remember the sources (sorry).

Not OP, but I have read Being and Time on and off over the years, and every time, I am blown away how precise Heidegger describes things and the being of things. Granted, I am German, so I can directly read the source without needing a translator. That might change things.

Regardless, I think Heidegger gave one of the fullest metaphysic-free accounts of the human experience and what Being is. And he starts from scratch. You essentially can read him without having to first study the whole western continental philosophy and he will construct the whole system by himself. Tremendous work

Yes. I read the spanish translation (with occasional reading of the german original). A lot is lost in translation (I do not regard english translations too high). So yes, it is a difficult reading, on a difficult topic. He is not playing with words, but defining concepts in a very specific way. What I would recommend is reading Heidegger through other authors (Being-in-the-world, also by Dreyfus, would be a starting point).