[ccozan]

I think the OP is right. All the input to a human brain can be expressed as numbers, at any given time a specific radiation, vibration, or chemical reaction is hitting our "sensors" and by the law of physics this is just numbers ( in terms of differentiation, brain does not know absolute values ).

Our output ( mechanical and vibrations ) is also fully quantifiable, thus numbers.

One giant lookup table.

[clooper]

Provide some concrete numbers for solar radiation then as a lookup table. You guys are confusing abstraction and idealization with what it means to be a thinking person. There is no such abstraction and idealization happening with software. The software is really just a number, there is no idealization or abstraction happening when I claim that GPT is a sequence of bits representing a numerical function.

[microtonal]

You can't really have it both ways, being reductionist when it comes to computers (it's just a finite set of numbers, so there is no reasoning), but not permitting to use the same line of argumentation with humans (it's just a finite set of particles).

At any rate, this is an ages-old discussion in philosophy, so most likely we are not going to settle this in a Hacker News thread.

[bubblyworld]

Abstraction is a property of a description of a thing, not the thing itself. In reality, what we call "GPT" is the highly organised behaviour of many electrons, probably distributed across many computers, each with extremely complex hardware of various kinds, etc etc. Calling it a sequence of bits representing a numerical function is a choice of description - an abstraction, even!

In this case it's a good description, because it correlates with the GPT in reality quite well. But they are not the same thing.