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Comment by AnimalMuppet | Hacker News Reader

It's not micrometers vs meters, or electrons vs macro objects. It's primarily a matter of sensor density. That is, I feel my fingers move in a way that a CPU does not feel an electron move. When I speak, I experience far more than a CPU experiences writing some bits to some output ports. And so on.

Does that mean that embodiment is required? No. But your definition of "embodied" misses the point of the discussion.

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It's trivial to give a regular CPU better sensing than you in dozens of variables (pressure, temperature, voltage, CO concentration, etc), so your point is rather weak.

I absolutely agree. You can, and better than humans. Not only better for any one sense, but also more senses than humans have.

But that isn't what Isinlor was talking about. They said "moving electrons around" within the normal CPU circuitry as if that was the same as actuators controlling the external world. It's not.

Moving electrons in silicon circuits = Moving K+ and Na+ ions in cells. Same principle. There is nothing inherently special, sacred or non-physical about our circuits. They are very energy efficient (compared to current standards), highly parallel and it is a kluge hard to reverse-engineer but other than that they are sensors, processors and actuators. This blueprint is universal, trivially so.

As UmbertoNoEco says, CPUs absolutely are actuators controlling flow of electrons.

In fact a single transistor is both a sensor and actuator.

In fact you can use them to do things they were not designed to do like trough row hammer:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Row_hammer

CPUs can also detect things like collisions with cosmic rays.

CPUs just can't produce macroscopic forces relevant on human scale.

Sensation isn't the issue here, perception is.

"Chemistry is not the issue, life is"

Exactly.

The baseline assumption in modern neurology is that meaning, for living things, is derived from their physical experience of the world. In short that no paper definition can ever substitute for experiencing first-hand what the "effect" of something is, what it does to you or to the world and what that entails for your body, your life. That is what "knowing" and "meaning" ultimately are.

These experiences are the basis for associations in our constant cognitive (and emotional, instinctive, sensory, symbolic, etc) modelling of the world. Associations beget complexity (dimensionality, modalities) of the model. Hence, "finely tuned" or "high definition" i.e. ever more "advanced" intelligences.

Given the overall crudeness and extreme simplicity of a CPU (or any man-made machine) compared to any living organism, I'm actually willing to bet that should CPU-based AI's "feel" something, it's on the order of 1/100th of what a shrimp feels, and they'd develop real-world intelligence at that level. Infinitely smarter than a potato, yet infinitely dumber than a fish. You don't run ape software on amoeba hardware.

You will also encounter issues here.

Transistor is a sensor. It detects voltage on the base pin. Transistor density and so sensor density on a modern CPU is really high. In fact modern CPU transistor density is 3 orders of magnitude higher than nerve density even on your retina.

It's at the order of ~100,000 rods/mm^2 for retina and ~100,000,000 transistors/mm^2 for modern CPU.

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