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ben_wlast Sunday at 9:41 AM1 replyview on HN

QM and GR can be written as matrix algebra, atoms and electrons are QM, chemistry is atoms and electrons, biology is chemistry, brains are biology.

An LLM could be implemented with a Markov chain, but the naïve matrix is ((vocab size)^(context length))^2, which is far too big to fit in this universe.

Like, the Bekenstein bound means writing the transition matrix for an LLM with just 4k context (and 50k vocabulary) at just one bit resolution, the first row (out of a bit more than 10^18795 rows) ends up with a black hole >10^9800 times larger than the observable universe.


Replies

sophrosyne42last Sunday at 9:40 PM

Yes, sure enough, but brains are not ideas, and there is no empirical or theoretical model for ideas in terms of brain states. The idea of unified science all stemming from a single ultimate cause is beautiful, but it is not how science works in practice, nor is it supported by scientific theories today. Case in point: QM models do not explain the behavior of larger things, and there is no model which gives a method to transform from quantum to massive states.

The case for brain states and ideas is similar to QM and massive objects. While certain metaphysical presuppositions might hold that everything must be physical and describable by models for physical things, science, which should eschew metaphysical assumptions, has not shown that to be the case.