[bubblyworld]

People really are just stacks of molecules that can be broken down into their causal properties - moreover, we know those causal properties to a high degree of accuracy these days.

I'm suggesting that for any given human/environment pair, there is a lookup table that produces that person's actual behaviour in that situation. Modern physics lets us approximate this lookup table, and presumably better physics would give us a better lookup table.

Since human behaviour can in principle be described with a lookup table, I see this as a bad reason to rule out a system as "thinking".

Perhaps there is another way to describe neural nets, one that does not use the language of lookup tables, that makes it feel more like thinking and less like lookups.

One such approach I've seen is looking for embedded world models in neural nets.