On the contrary, it's precisely this assumption, that there is a "subjective experience" that requires explanation beyond the material, that is axiomatically assumed without evidence. It falls apart quickly, any "subjective experience" is completely tied to neurons, knock out the neurons and the subjective experience disappears, or stimulate the neurons to cause the experience.
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!"
Why do you need a specific organization of molecules for a phenomenon similar to consciousness to arise? Does anyone seriously consider a brain to be something other than “a pile of molecules following the laws of physics”? If so that’s not science or philosophy, that’s religion. You have a virtually complete phenomenological model of the universe for all intents and purposes and yet somehow the onus is on the person being like “hey no laws of physics are being broken ==> the brain is simply following the laws of physics”
How is it possible that people think of subjective experience and get rabbit holed into some mystical world where subjective experience is this special exception to everything else that is simply an emergent property of complex physical systems? “AI/LLMs are just like the brain” is a strawman, why does this claim need to be true for LLMs or any artificial system to be considered to have something akin to the thing you think of as consciousness? It’s more: consciousness is not some mystical or religious thing outside of the realm of physics, it’s an emergent property of a complex system. AI is a relatively complex system. We don’t really know or understand the relationship between the raw physics and again what we consider consciousness, so it’s simply a statement of “we can’t refute that these systems exhibit something similar” because we don’t know enough to refute that
I don't actually think the commentator you responded to is arguing for either of these narratives and I thought it was a pretty useful way to look at some of these arguments.
It doesn't need to be true but a lot of people make it/assume it.
There's a lot of, perhaps casual and uninformed, conversations that strongly imply a deeper understanding of the "physics" of brain chemistry than we actually have, mostly by comparing it to machines we've constructed.
(I believe) We don't need to replicate human neurons and dendrites and whatever else is in there in order to create a sapient "machine", but whether or not we've actually done that isn't being helped by arguing that what we currently have is all that similar to a human brain.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/neural-dendrites-reveal-their...
In which case: modern LLMs are still running in a capacity-starved regime!
Even Mythos 5, the 10-trillion monster LLM, the scaling law boogeyman, the harbinger of Vera Rubin NVL72, doesn't quite rise to 100T-to-1000T of synapses. Anything the light of today's AI touches still lives in the shadow of what evolution has managed to cram into a single human skull.
We're arguing about the limitations of AI while our best AIs are still very subhuman in the scale dimension. The one dimension we know how to push. And it's already this tight.
1) This definition could actually be expanded (for example, with definitions from Mumford or Reuleaux). But still this definition cannot be applied directly to living organisms. 2) This is in my opinion one of the sources of misunderstanding. We mainly operate on analogies and metaphors, so we have build this 'analogy space' around the idea that living organisms are machines. But it is only when we say 'alike' that we can truly gather some meaning out of it all, going beyond the 'behaves like' or 'is conceptualized as' when it gets messy.
> 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!"
This is exactly my point. There is a fallacy operating from "A is not B" to "A is C". And this fallacy is pervasive in the AI research field, the book from Dreyfus (What Computers can't still do) explains that in much detail.
true
> and does not try to emulate one
citation please.
something like the universal approximation theory comes to mind, transformer architecture clearly has the shape of a universal algorithm approximator
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.
Nobody talked about anything out of neurons. The question is still open.