[Workaccount2]

>Thought is certainly associated with change of state, but can't be reduced to it.

You can effectively reduce continuously dynamic systems to discreet steps. Sure, you can always say that the "magic" exists between the arbitrarily small steps, but from a practical POV there is no difference.

A transistor has a binary on or off. A neuron might have ~infinite~ levels of activation.

But in reality the ~infinite~ activation level can be perfectly modeled (for all intents and purposes), and computers have been doing this for decades now (maybe not with neurons, but equivalent systems). It might seem like an obvious answer, that there is special magic in analog systems that binary machines cannot access, but that is wholly untrue. Science and engineering have been extremely successful interfacing with the analog reality we live in, precisely because the digital/analog barrier isn't too big of a deal. Digital systems can do math, and math is capable of modeling analog systems, no problem.

[geye1234]

It's not a question of discrete vs continuous, or digital vs analog. Everything I've said could also apply if a transistor could have infinite states.

Rather, the point is that the state of our brain is not the same as the content of our thoughts. They are associated with one another, but they're not the same. And the correctness of a thought can be judged only by reference to its content, not to its associated state. 2+2=4 is correct, and 2+2=5 is wrong; but we know this through looking at the content of these thoughts, not through looking at the neurological state.

But the state of the transistors (and other components) is all a computer has. There are no thoughts, no content, associated with these states.

[Workaccount2]

It seems that the only barrier between brain state and thought contents is a proper measurement tool and decoder, no?

We can already do this at an extremely basic level, mapping brain states to thoughts. The paraplegic patient using their thoughts to move the mouse cursor or the neuroscientist mapping stress to brain patterns.

If I am understanding your position correctly, it seems that the differentiation between thoughts and brain states is a practical problem not a fundamental one. Ironically, LLMs have a very similar problem with it being very difficult to correlate model states with model outputs. [1]

[1]https://www.anthropic.com/research/mapping-mind-language-mod...

[geye1234]

There is undoubtedly correlation between neurological state and thought content. But they are not the same thing. Even if, theoretically, one could map them perfectly (which I doubt is possible but it doesn't affect my point), they would remain entirely different things.

The thought that "2+2=4", or the thought "tiger", are not the same thing as the brain states that makes them up. A tiger, or the thought of a tiger, is different from the neurological state of a brain that is thinking about a tiger. And as stated before, we can't say that "2+2=4" is correct by referring to the brain state associated with it. We need to refer to the thought itself to do this. It is not a practical problem of mapping; it is that brain states and thoughts are two entirely different things, however much they may correlate, and whatever causal links may exist between them.

This is not the case for LLMs. Whatever problems we may have in recording the state of the CPUs/GPUs are entirely practical. There is no 'thought' in an LLM, just a state (or plurality of states). An LLM can't think about a tiger. It can only switch on LEDs on a screen in such a way that we associate the image/word with a tiger.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

> The thought that "2+2=4", or the thought "tiger", are not the same thing as the brain states that makes them up.

Asserted without evidence. Yes, this does represent a long and occasionally distinguished line of thinking in cognitive science/philosophy of mind, but it is certainly not the only one, and some of the others categorically refute this.

[geye1234]

Is it your contention that a tiger may be the same thing as a brain state?

It would seem to me that any coherent philosophy of mind must accept their being different as a datum; or conversely, any that implied their not being different would have to be false.

EDIT: my position has been held -- even taken as axiomatic -- by the vast majority of philosophers, from the pre-Socratics onwards, and into the 20th century. So it's not some idiosyncratic minority position.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

Clearly there is a thing in the world that is a tiger independently of any brain state anywhere.

But the thought of a tiger may in fact be identical to a brain state (or it might not; at this point we do not know).

[Workaccount2]

Does a picture of a tiger or a tiger (to follow your sleight of hand) on a hard drive then count as a thought?

[famouswaffles]

>Rather, the point is that the state of our brain is not the same as the content of our thoughts.

Based on what exactly ? This is just an assertion. One that doesn't seem to have much in the way of evidence. 'It's not the same trust me bro' is the thesis of your argument. Not very compelling.

[geye1234]

It's not difficult. When you think about a tiger, you are not thinking about the brain state associated with said thought. A tiger is different from a brain state.

We can safely generalize, and say the content of a thought is different from its associated brain state.

Also, as I said

>> The correctness of a thought can be judged only by reference to its content, not to its associated state. 2+2=4 is correct, and 2+2=5 is wrong; but we know this through looking at the content of these thoughts, not through looking at the neurological state.

This implies that state != content.

[famouswaffles]

>It's not difficult. When you think about a tiger, you are not thinking about the brain state associated with said thought. A tiger is different from a brain state. We can safely generalize, and say the content of a thought is different from its associated brain state.

Just because you are not thinking about a brain state when you think about a tiger does not mean that your thought is not a brain state.

Just because the experience of thinking about X doesn't feel like the experience of thinking about Y (or doesn't feel like the physical process Z), it doesn't logically follow that the mental event of thinking about X isn't identical to or constituted by the physical process Z. For example, seeing the color red doesn't feel like processing photons of a specific wavelength with cone cells and neural pathways, but that doesn't mean the latter isn't the physical basis of the former.

>> The correctness of a thought can be judged only by reference to its content, not to its associated state. 2+2=4 is correct, and 2+2=5 is wrong; but we know this through looking at the content of these thoughts, not through looking at the neurological state. This implies that state != content.

Just because our current method of verification focuses on content doesn't logically prove that the content isn't ultimately realized by or identical to a physical state. It only proves that analyzing the state is not our current practical method for judging mathematical correctness.

We judge if a computer program produced the correct output by looking at the output on the screen (content), not usually by analyzing the exact pattern of voltages in the transistors (state). This doesn't mean the output isn't ultimately produced by, and dependent upon, those physical states. Our method of verification doesn't negate the underlying physical reality.

When you evaluate "2+2=4", your brain is undergoing a sequence of states that correspond to accessing the representations of "2", "+", "=", applying the learned rule (also represented physically), and arriving at the representation of "4". The process of evaluation operates on the represented content, but the entire process, including the representation of content and rules, is a physical neural process (a sequence of brain states).

[geye1234]

> Just because you are not thinking about a brain state when you think about a tiger does not mean that your thought is not a brain state.

> It doesn't logically follow that the mental event of thinking about X isn't identical to or constituted by the physical process Z.

That's logically sound insofar as it goes. But firstly, the existence of a brain state for a given thought is, obviously, not proof that a thought is a brain state. Secondly, if you say that a thought about a tiger is a brain state, and nothing more than a brain state, then you have the problem of explaining how it is that your thought is about a tiger at all. It is the content of a thought that makes it be about reality; it is the content of a thought about a tiger that makes it be about a tiger. If you declare that a thought is its state, then it can't be about a tiger.

You can't equate content with state, and nor can you make content be reducible to state, without absurdity. The first implies that a tiger is the same as a brain state; the second implies that you're not really thinking about a tiger at all.

Similarly for arithmetic. It is only the content of a thought about arithmetic that makes it be right or wrong. It is our ideas of "2", "+", and so on, that make the sum right or wrong. The brain states have nothing to do with it. If you want to declare that content is state, and nothing more than state, then you have no way of saying the one sum is right, and the other is wrong.