[clooper]

People can not be reduced to lookup tables even in theory. No one even knows how a single cell does what it does let alone an entire organism like a person.

I'm not making an abstract claim about neural networks because all numerical algorithms like neural networks can be reduced to a lookup table given a large enough hard drive. This is not practical because the space required would exceed the number of atoms in the known universe but the argument is sound. The same isn't true for people unless a person is idealized and abstracted into a sequence of numbers. I'm not saying no one is allowed to think of people as some sequence of numbers but this is clearly an abstraction of what it means to be a person and in the case of the neural network there is no abstraction, it really is a numerical function which can be expanded into a large table which represents its graph.

[Legend2440]

>People can not be reduced to lookup tables even in theory

Sure you can. Simply enumerate all of the physical states that the atoms in your body could be in. Any finite-sized object has a finite number of possible states, and so can be represented by a finite lookup table.

Your argument is so broad as to be meaningless.

[clooper]

Then give some concrete numbers for the states of the atoms. My argument is not abstract, it is very concrete. Give me a neural network and I can generate the graph and prove the equivalence between the network and its graph representation as a table of tuples.

[zeroonetwothree]

You said "even in theory" which is obviously wrong, since the (local) universe is finite and deterministic, hence it is itself a giant lookup table.

[Karellen]

> the (local) universe is finite and deterministic,

Radioactive decay and spontaneous pair production say otherwise on the deterministic front.

[logifail]

> the (local) universe is finite and deterministic

"It is not possible for the Universe being deterministic at any level. Only theories can be deterministic, practical reality is never"[0]

Q: Can you calculate your local universe's past states given its present state?

[0] https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/99163/is-it-p...

[aruss]

Where are you going to get all that time and space to build a lookup table? Are you sure you're able to measure all state at enough precision to make an accurate table?

[ben_w]

Doesn't matter given the original statement spawning this subthread was:

> People can not be reduced to lookup tables even in theory

[mistermann]

What theories are you using to solve for:

- consciousness?

- the unknown?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necessity_and_sufficiency

- the misunderstood?

https://plato.stanford.edu/Entries/perception-problem/

The Science of the Gaps will do I suppose?

Culture could do it though I think.

[aruss]

Then I would say your theoretical model is wrong or incomplete or makes for a circular argument (it's an assumption and not proven that finite matter evolving through time reduces to a lookup table).

[somewhereoutth]

Simply not true. Of course it is comforting for computer people to believe the world they live in is a giant computer, but that is not our real reality.

[ben_w]

"""the number of bits required to perfectly recreate the natural matter of the average-sized U.S. adult male human brain down to the quantum level on a computer is about 2.6×10^42 bits of information (see Bekenstein bound for the basis for this calculation).""" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(data)

(That said, I think quantum physics makes it "all a Markov chain" rather than "all a lookup table").

[imtringued]

You are making the assumption that your body consists of a static set of atoms, but your body is a living thing. Your lookup table would end up containing the entire universe to account for extremely remote possibilities.

[gpderetta]

those would just be inputs.

[Centigonal]

My "what if someone made a lookup table of everything I ever said in response to something else" hypothetical is pretty flimsy - I realized that right after writing it.

The point I wanted to make is that concepts of sentience, consciousness, reasoning, intelligence, etc. are very philosophically loaded ideas.

Responding to your comment, I don't think anyone credible is arguing that a human being is somehow the same as a neural network. I think the question at play here is "what constitutes reasoning?" - and more specifically "can a deterministic process reason?"

This is not a new debate at all - an abacus can tell us truths about the world, but we don't consider the abacus intelligent. Is GPT-4 somehow different, or is it a very large abacus?

[clooper]

As a numerical function it can be implemented on an abacus so I don't think it's any different from a large enough abacus. It's practically not feasible but theoretically there is no idealization or abstraction happening when numerical calculations on a computer are transferred to an abacus.

[naasking]

> People can not be reduced to lookup tables even in theory.

Yes they can, this is a direct corollary of the Bekenstein Bound.