the math of the simulation includes the math which defines the different substrate

2+2 on an emulated calculator gets a different answer than 2+2 on a real one, because there’s different math. Math being physics in this case but not when it undercuts your whole point. Conscious experience must only be possible in this substrate, despite zero evidence to the contrary… and faking the entire substrate with physics math doesn’t count because numbers work differently in rocks than in meat.

k.

If telling you to shut up is redundant then good riddance.

Creation science… 101!

You can tell the difference between a simulation and the thing it’s simulating.

The premise is - you fucking can’t. It acts ex-act-ly like the real thing, and for all the same reasons. Given that unreasonably high standard, you still insist, nuh uh. Would never be conscious. We’re beyond ‘but what if.’ You’re explicitly arguing that machine consciousness would not count. That any difference from exactly how humans work cannot be a mind. Fuck off. That’s just novel bigotry. Dog-torturing prejudice.

If you can have a long-ass argument with someone and go away figuring they’re a person like you - that’s consciousness. That’s the only way you can judge the inner life of any person you have ever met. And you want to pretend that someone meeting that standard, while you observe their brain at a subatomic level, is disqualified? Come back and fuck off again.

You cannot laud the perfect exactitude of… squishy biology and quantum foam… and still say nuh-uh when a whole-ass person arises from those exact processes. If you mean anything when you say it’s all just physics, then whatever physics are required for consciousness, can be faked. The resulting person really does think, as surely as an emulated calculator does real math. It’s not simulating math. It’s doing math. The device is simulated, but the answers are real. Get it?

Simulating physics from first principles is not “mimicking human behavior.” Don’t dismissively phrase it like a chatbot. If you insist the exact molecular exchanges in human neurons are a mandatory component, you could observe every subatomic event, not just the fact they talk to you like any other meatbag on the street.

I never insisted that it’s “only simulating consciousness.”

You just did! Again! You think an entire simulated human being, that acts exactly like a living person for the same underlying reasons, must be different - somehow. Your consciousness only arises from the laws of physics and the shape of matter, but if we simulated both of those exactly, and got indistinguishable results, then nuh-uh.

This is dualism. This is Descartes torturing dogs and insisting they only act like they feel pain, unlike us real humans, because we’re different and special. It’s straight-up Chinese Room horseshit, where no demonstrable evidence of conscious thought is enough, unless it fits your preconceived notions of what minds look like.

‘If it happens, it counts’ is not a tautology when you insist happening and counting are different things. To the guy in the simulation, any experience is real. His consciousness entails all the processes you insist must be accounted for. It works the exact same way as it does in real life with real meat.

If you would insist ‘well that’s only simulating consciousness’ - that counts.

Do you know what if means?

You want to make this a matter of philosophy, and then you suck at philosophy. Hey buddy, do you have facts about other real people’s experiences, or do you just have beliefs? Could you even demonstrate your own conscious experience to me?

And all of this is such tired Philosophy 101 crap, just so you can cling to ‘aha but what if,’ even though I have a concrete answer for what-if. Are we ruling out magic? Great, then physics can be simulated and a computer can host a mind that way. Its experiences would be identical to any free-range meatbag. If it wrote a book, you could read it. That would be real art. So in what fucking manner is its consciousness not real experience?

If you are simulating it, it is a different thing.

No.

If a simulated person experiences consciousness, that experience is real. That’s qualia, numbnuts. That is a mind.

I’m not gonna pick apart the word salad of ‘calculating the difference between substrates’ if you can’t even keep your philosophy straight.

Like planes don’t experience flight unless they flap.

This is stupid. I acknowledge that’s not an airtight logical counterargument, but just, come the fuck on. You are asserting that neurons made of silicon, with identical observable function, wouldn’t count somehow. Charitably: wouldn’t work, somehow. That at least distinguishes it from standard Chinese Room horseshit. But if we can fake every neuron to do the same thing, or simulate the entire physical environment to do the same thing, of fucking course it’s going to do the same thing. If the laws of the universe somehow mean only meat can experience being a true Scotsman, we can fake those laws.

You’ve picked a philosophical nit that is somehow at odds with Turing completeness. Unless you think physics are incomputable - it cannot matter what substrate they run on. It’s literally math.

Woo-woo nonsense. Indefensible without invoking the supernatural.

Everyone you’ve ever met is a meat robot, and they run on physics. How they feel about it does not change that.

And I already said, we invented p-zombies. LLMs display intelligence without consciousness. Your hand-wavy what-if doesn’t work as a gotcha because we’re already there. Nonetheless - these shortfalls are a big fucking hint that magic isn’t real.

“Grug too dumb for rules” is legitimately good programming advice.

Yeah yeah yeah, probably exploiting capacitance instead of on-spec functionality, I’m well familiar with this example. It’s not relevant - there’s eight billion human brains in the world, and they generally still function despite the wild shit we put them through. They are not fragile.

A human mind is not balanced on a knife-edge, where one tiny difference breaks everything. They’re complex enough that sometimes blowing a railroad spike clean through just alters functionality. It’s still a mind. Subatomic interactions surely cannot be crucial here.

And again, this is only the extreme example. Y’think all known laws of the universe are mandatory? Great, simulate those too. Same answer: meat has no monopoly on thought because metal can fake the meat. There is no philosophical basis for even suggesting AGI is impossible, unless you start talking about souls.

Good Grug brain.

‘We can’t do labor-saving automation because capitalism.’

Poof, a magic wand grants your exact vision of a leftist utopia. Can we use it now?

‘Also no.’

it’s totally possible that only a biological brain can produce minds as we understand the word “mind”.

Bollocks. Thought is a process, like math. Nothing meat does with signals is impossible in other substrates.

At the utmost extreme: surely we can simulate physics at whatever level is necessary for virtual brains to function. Physical neurons are not gonna rely on quantum chromodynamics. Mere chemistry will probably suffice.

And hand-waving things that are like-minds-but sounds like Chinese Room nonsense.

I mean, AGI is inevitable, but it’s never gonna come from these dinguses. They can’t even look past LLMs far enough to pursue text diffusion.

To imagine we cannot possibly build a mind, or that it cannot possibly improve that same effort, is baffling. It changes the shape of the universe.

Being reasonable about the tech is kind of a pain, here. At least we only got one flavor of campist, so anyone seeing outright “boosters” is jumping at shadows. I just think the chatbot that can code is neat. Maybe we can do stuff with it. Maybe it doesn’t need to spy on everyone forever.

We accidentally invented p-zombies and they’re already more intelligent than script kiddies. Once the grifters move on we can see what that’s good for.

It’s the configuration complexity clock.

You hardcode values in an established, full-featured programming language.

That gets annoying, so you push some into config files.

That’s not powerful enough, so you let the config files include conditionals.

Soon your config files are more like scripts, but it’s so easy to keep adding features…

And suddenly you’re back to hardcoding, but in a newer, jankier programming language.

Energy efficiency has improved by orders of magnitude - leading to much higher energy use. It’s the Jevons paradox and it’s as old as coal-gas lighting. Last year some guy recreated GPT2 for twenty bucks. Corpus to model in one hour. OpenAI never said how much the original cost, but there was at least one comma.

But yeah, LLMs are fundamentally limited, because ‘what’s the next word’ shouldn’t work. The fact it’s accidentally this flexible and powerful, even with its many infamous fuckups, is a reminder that neural networks in general will permanently alter computing. Models trained on supercomputers can run on any potato. Any problem with good examples can be addressed, without first being solved.

And if you’d had a Osborne, not even that.

Engineers are like wizards. Sometimes we get vaguely offended a thing does not exist, and then weird shit happens.