Comment by pdntspa
2 hours ago
At first I was inclined to agree with you, but then I realized that the brain requires this whole complicated contraption (the body) to run and, really, do anything at all. And while I'm not familiar with the notion of 'quantum mind' I do think that biological processes aren't deterministic (at a cellular level).
And I think this does mirror the situation with LLMs -- you need this whole computer contraption and GPU, also running on electricity, to support the LLM's "thought" processes. And that if we model the brain's neurology sufficiently (which it seems we've done) we can achieve results that appear to be like thinking, even if it is an emergent behavior from "relatively" simple math.
Which actually makes me wonder the opposite -- are we, as humans, not much better than these LLMs? Suppose the body is just that super complicated computer contraption, honed by thousands/millions of years of evolution to achieve some semblance of homeostasis? If you reject the idea that we have a soul, we start to look very similar to the machines we build. "You are a brain inside a skull cockpit, piloting a bone mech covered in meat armor and skin" feels more and more relevant. That I'm just a meat circuit running brain chips and once you pull the plug on the source of electricity it all just... stops
Take a computer that can run the biggest LLM available today. It can also run any smaller LLM as well. It can also run software that isn't an LLM at all. Brains and LLMs are not at all equivalent as LLMs lack a stateful physical form while brains are very stateful. As you said once the brain is no longer maintained properly by the body it stops and transitions to a non-functional state that can be reversed. That isn't true for LLMs at all. You can copy them and run the same one on many computer, run different ones on the same computer, you turn that computer offs for long periods of time and then turn them back on keep on running the same LLMs as before on them.
Consciousness may be defined by computational irreducibility in the universe that we may never be able to directly observe with instruments: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2021/03/what-is-consciou...