ANNs can't represent everything involved with a functioning brain, never mind a highly specific ANN architecture. Any consciousness or similar would need to arise via an independent mechanism.
> Any consciousness or similar would need to arise via an independent mechanism.
Probably, but even then only due to there being a lot mechanisms and we don't know which of them is related to the subjective experience of existing that is the meaning of conscious I assume you're using here (there's something like 40 definitions of "consciousness").
But because we don't really know where the capacity for an inner experience even is, it's not impossible that even an LLM, which totally isn't designed with the goal of having it, might nevertheless have it.
(I really hope they don't, I statistically suspect they don't, I just can't rule it out).
> Some modern philosophers advocating pantheism think they just might.
This is a terribly low bar. The map of “ Some modern philosophers” “think [something] just might” [something] is an incoherent patchwork.
I think that theorizing about things without hard evidence has value. What-if’s teach us a lot, by raising important questions, and keep our ideas flexible, preparing us for the next crazy insight that nature reveals.
But that isn’t the same as attributing any reliability to the as yet unproven enthusiasms of philosophers.
There is a clear case for a survival benefit for creatures whose awareness and control extends into their own thinking. Thus a reason consciousness would be one of many strategies evolution may produce.
What natural phenomena is explained by a conscious rock hypothesis? What would cause a rock to organize in such a way? Where is this information about itself encoded and experienced in a rock? It’s not a coherent conjecture.
Natural formation rock consciousness both lacks evidence and is absurd, as there isn’t even a coherent reason to think it might or could.
Your computer processes information, and can be configured to process information about itself. At least the possibility and potential utility exists that conscious computers may one day exist.
Oh, in that case I agree. My understanding is LLMs (or at least GPT-architectures) aren't Turing machines, so they can't simulate arbitrary other systems even if you made them very big, and because of this my guess is that it would be extraordinarily unlikely for them to just happen to have the right shape and power for simulating a full human brain.
> Update 3 Jan 2017: This man has a specific type of hydrocephalus known as chronic non-communicating hydrocephalus, which is where fluid slowly builds up in the brain. Rather than 90 percent of this man's brain being missing, it's more likely that it's simply been compressed into the thin layer you can see in the images above. We've corrected the story to reflect this.
In ANNs, pruning 90% of the weights without substantial loss isn't unheard of. I guess this may be analogous: continuous pruning and fine tuning over a lifetime. Though, is removing 90% of the brain more analogous to 90% of weights, or 90% of the rank?
At this point it feels like we’d required the resources of an entire planet to run a single full-fidelity virtual brain. Which leads to interesting science fiction premises.
