> Human brains aren't magic, special or different.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-62539-5

As the result, all living cells with DNA emit coherent (as in lasers) light [2]. There is a theory that this light also facilitates intercellular communication.

[2] https://www.sciencealert.com/we-emit-a-visible-light-that-va...

Chemical structures in dendrites, not even neurons, are capable to compute XOR [3] which require multilevel artificial neural network with at least 9 parameters. Some neurons in brain have hundredths of thousands of dendrites, we are now talking of millions of parameters only in single neuron's dendrites functionality.

[3] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aax6239

So, while human brains aren't magic, special or different, they are just extremely complex.

Imagine building a computer with 85 billions of superconducting quantum computers, optically and electrically connected, each capable of performing computations of a non-negligibly complex artificial neural network.

Human brains aren’t magic in the literal sense but do have a lot of mechanisms we don’t understand.

They’re certainly special both within the individual but also as a species on this planet. There are many similar to human brains but none we know of with similar capabilities.

They’re also most obviously certainly different to LLMs both in how they work foundationally and in capability.

I definitely agree with the materialist view that we will ultimately be able to emulate the brain using computation but we’re nowhere near that yet nor should we undersell the complexity involved.

(Motors and human brains are both just mechanisms, the reason one is a priori capable of learning abstract thought and not the other ?)

While I agree to some extent with the materialistic conception, the brain is not an isolated mechanism, but rather the element of a system which itself isn't isolated from the experience of being a body in a world interacting with different systems to form super systems.

The brain must be a very efficient mechanism, because it doesn't need to ingest the whole textual production of the human world in order to know how to write masterpieces (music, litterature, films, software, theorems etc...). Instead the brain learns to be this very efficient mechanism with (as a starting process) feeling its own body sh*t on itself during a long part of its childhood.

I can teach someone to become really good at producing fine and efficient software, but on the contrary I can only observe everyday that my LLM of choice keeps being stupid even when I explain it how it fails. ("You're perfectly right !").

It is true that there's nothing magical about the brain, but I am pretty sure it must be stronger tech than a probabilistic/statistical next word guesser (otherwise there would be much more consensus about the usability of LLMs I think).

I'm not arguing that human brains are magic. the current AI models will probably teach us more about what we didn't know about intelligence than anything else.

For some unexplainable reason your subjective experience happens to be localized in your brain. Sounds pretty special to me.

There isn't anything else around quite like a human brain that we know of, so yes, I'd say they're special and different.

Animals and computers come close in some ways but aren't quite there.

Right, I'm just going to teach my dog to do my job then and get free money as my brain is no more magic, special or different to theirs!

> LLMs and human brains are both just mechanisms. Why would one mechanism a priori be capable of "learning abstract thought", but no others?

“Internal combustion engines and human brains are both just mechanisms. Why would one mechanism a priori be capable of "learning abstract thought", but no others?”

The question isn't about what an hypothetical mechanism can do or not, it's about whether the concrete mechanism we built does or not. And this one doesn't.