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Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

>Just create an arbitrarily accurate digital model of a human brain and step through time

This is a thought experiment, there's no actual evidence that you can create an accurate digital model that is equivalent to an analog and biochemical brain. Just claiming that you can reduce biological organisms to computational processes does not make it so, it's just an idea that hackers find cool.

That either sentience or intelligence is just "numbers and algorithms" is conjecture with not much going for it. We as humans use numbers and algorithms (which are really figures of speech, not things), to explain physical reality, not the other way around.

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> We as humans use numbers and algorithms (which are really figures of speech, not things), to explain physical reality, not the other way around.

The numbers and algorithms here aren’t what anybody is saying could be sentient. Those numbers and algorithms are representations used to coerce physical objects into doing computation. Processors don’t care about the algorithms you see on your computer screen. So then the questions are “can computation be sentient”, or “are sentient things sentient by way of computation”, and I think that’s much, much harder to answer.

I do agree, my point is rather that the question "“can computation be sentient” is trivially answered as, no it cannot. Is a computed brain sentient is like asking, 'is a computed sun hot?'. Computation is a subjective interpretation of a physical process. You don't get wet from a machine that computes the weather.

A digital machine and an analog one aren't equivalent merely because their behaviour can both be explained in the same terms. (i.e. computationally). That's not to say by the way you can't make some kind of sentient digital system, just that computation isn't really relevant to answer that question.

Computation does take energy and precisely modeling the sun would take a lot of it. Makes me wonder: would precisely computing the physics of something hot produce more heat than computing something cold?

Higher temperature systems tend to have more microstates than lower temperature ones, so it seems like in principle you need less information to encode the state of a cold system than a hot system. I'm not sure how to translate that to the energy cost of computation of that system though.

> there's no actual evidence that you can create an accurate digital model that is equivalent to an analog and biochemical brain.

There are mountains of evidence in favor of the Standard Model, which is computable. Therefore, there actually _is_ evidence that the human brain can be similarly computed. (Whether our technology can ever come near to this kind of power is where I have doubts). What there _isn't_ evidence for is that there is anything non-computable within the human brain.

What about bells theorem, which implies that the universe has inherent non determinism associated with it?

Meaning that computability doesn't matter if there's inherently randomness at the smallest scales

You can have computation that requires randomness either in its output or in its processing.

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