[Alchemista]

This is silly, that's like talking about building a fusion reactor modeled after the sun. It is easy to propose something like that, but we always seem to be 10 years away from realizing it. In fact it could be easier to solve the fusion problem than trying to build a machine/software that closely approximates a human brain as you suggest.

Yes it would be wonderful if sci-fi was real, but we need to deal in what is possible in reality.

[thfuran]

Yes, that was obviously an extreme example. But we know that it is possible in reality to implement a physical system that does what we call thinking. There is, I think, no particular reason to suppose that it's physically impossible re-implement the functionality with much less meat. Supposing that you've done this, you then just need to more clearly define "thinking" and "LLM" to determine whether changing that re-implementation to be closer to an LLM results in it losing the ability to think before it gets there.

[daveguy]

I think you underestimate the efficiency of meat.

[thfuran]

Efficiency has absolutely nothing to do with it.

[Alchemista]

Efficiency has everything to do with it. To run your original thought experiment would likely take more computing capacity than humanity will ever produce with current silicon based processors.

It could be that we can "get there" with much rougher approximation, but that is by no means a given. If "getting there" does require a much more complex model that actually involves simulating human neurons with much more accuracy and precision, the computing power and energy needed, again based on semiconductor computers, might simply be intractable.

[thfuran]

I'm no more suggesting that you actually attempt to build an ANN to run a full quantum simulation of a person and their house than Einstein was suggesting that you go out and board a train that goes the speed of light. The reason it's called a thought experiment instead of a project proposal is that actually doing the thing isn't the point. It's about examining the consequences of a premise.

[daveguy]

The difference between your thoughts experiment and Einstein's is that Einstein's had some testable implications. Yours is closer to belief in a teacup drifting in deep space.

[genman]

Perhaps the question was not fully understood. A function is simply a mapping from one state into another. In principle we can define it over what ever state. As such we can consider a human thinking as kind of a function.

ANN are function effectively approximators.

The question was - if an ANN would very closely approximate the "human thinking" function then can we still say that it is not thinking?

[daveguy]

In order to train an ANN to approximate the "human thinking" function, we would have to know that function well enough to give it examples and counterexamples. Currently we are only training LLMs to approximate the "human blabbing" function.

[genman]

Imagine a human brain that has only read all what ANN has without any connection to the real world (no senses, mind you!). Would the output of this human being differ from "human blabbing"?