[lz400]

>If we took your brain and perfectly digitized it on read-only hardware, would you expect to still “think”?

it wouldn't work probably, brains constantly alter themselves by forming new connections. Learning is inseparable from our intelligence.

[WalterSear]

Our intelligence, yes. But that doesn't establish it as essential for thought.

[lz400]

I mean, _we_ probably can't think with our wetware on a read-only substrate. It doesn't establish it as essential, just that the only sure example in nature of thought doesn't work that way.

[theptip]

Do you have any particular brain systems in mind that are essential for consciousness and also require mutable state?

[lz400]

I'm not an expert but as far I understand, plasticity is central to most complex operations of the brain and is likely to be involved in anything more complex than instinctive reactions. I'm happy to be corrected but it is my understanding that if you're thinking for a while on the same problem and establishing chains of reasoning, you are creating new connections and to me that means it's fundamental in the process of thinking.

[theptip]

Also not an expert :) I thought plasticity is an O(hours-days) learning mechanism. But I did some research and there is also Short Term Plasticity O(second) [1] which is a crucial part of working memory. We'd need that. But it seems it’s more of a volatile memory system, eg calcium ion depletion/saturation at the synapse, rather than a permanent wiring/potentiation change (please someone correct me if this isn’t right :) ).

So I guess I’d just clarify “read only” to be a little more specific - I think you could run multiple experiments where you vary the line of what’s modeled in volatile memory at runtime, and what’s immutable. I buy that you need to model STP for thought, but also suspect at this timescale you can keep everything slower immutable and keep the second-scale processes like thought working.

My original point still stands - your subjective experience in this scenario would be thought without long-term memory.

1: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/computational-neuroscie...

[lz400]

It would be funny if what you get from a read only human brain is a sort of memento guy who has no capacity to remember anything or follow a conversation... kind of like an LLM!