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WhiteDawntoday at 11:41 AM2 repliesview on HN

Reminds me of this classic: https://xkcd.com/505/

Replace universe simulation with a LLM an it’s hard to consider a bunch of rocks shuffling on a beach as conscious.

Or alternatively, our own minds are simply (squishy, organic) rocks on a beach, which is quite humbling if you think about it long enough.


Replies

Kotlopoutoday at 12:03 PM

Indeed a classic (upvoted!), but it presupposes that there is a theory of everything that can be used to perfectly simulate the universe, and I'd like to remind everybody that we still don't know whether such a thing exists. Nor do we know whether it's possible to simulate "just" neurons and get meaningful results on some higher level. People have been trying at that for decades, so far without success. (nice overview here: https://ccli.substack.com/p/the-biggest-mystery-in-neuroscie...)

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deadbabetoday at 11:53 AM

Our bodies could just be rocks on a beach, but whatever it is about us that is capable of observing the output of our own internal thinking (preventing us from just being p-zombies) is not contained within the beach.

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