alt Hacker NewsHypothetically? You need more than a brain to have consciousness. Dead brains, I believe, do not have it. So it's more than just a simulation of a brain, you also need to simulate the data flow through the brain, the retention of memories, etc. Then there's the problem that a simulation of a roller coaster is not a roller coaster. Is there any reason to believe that this simulation of a brain will in fact operate as a brain? Does the simulation not lose something? Or are we discussing some impossible level of perfect simulation that has never and can never be achieved, even for something a million times less complicated than a mammalian brain?
If you build that spreadsheet, let me know and I'll evaluate it. I've done that evaluation with LLMs and they're definitely not conscious.
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> I've done that evaluation with LLMs and they're definitely not conscious.
This is an important point to just make it a side comment like that. Tell us how we can evaluate if something is conscious.
I'm not suggesting to pursue AGI via Excel, this is just a hypothetical for a reason. The technical feasibility of this (low) does not really matter, but if you want to base your argument on it you are basically playing the "god of the gaps" game, which is a weak/bad position IMO.
My point is that dismissing possible machine consciousness as "it's just a spreadsheet/statistics/linear algebra" is missing a critical step: Those dismissals don't demonstrate that human consciousness is anything more than an emergent property achievable by linear algebra.
If you want human minds to be "unsimulatable", then you need some essential core logic that can not be simulated on a turing machine and physics is not helping with that.
> I've done that evaluation with LLMs and they're definitely not conscious.
What is your definition for "consciousness" here? Are you confident that you are not gatekeeping current machine intelligence by demanding somewhat arbitrary capabilities in your definition of consciousness that are somewhat unimportant? E.g. memory or online learning; if a human was unable to form long-term memories or learn anything new, could you confidently call him "non-conscious" as well?