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Comment by aschearer | Hacker News Reader

To what extent is our intelligence a consequence of our bodies, evolution? Would a computer have intuition? Fight or flight responses? As a species, we're still debating which mammals are "intelligent" and they share most of our circuitry and evolutionary history. Will we be able to recognize "intelligence" in another form? Or flipping it around, will it recognize our intelligence? Or will it see us much like we see a chimpanzee colony?

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Why shouldn't it be possible to simulate a full human mind, say, at atomic level? What does the intelligence/consciousness need that's impossible to simulate in software? I can't think of many reasons, besides perhaps true randomness?

> Why shouldn't it be possible to simulate a full human mind, say, at atomic level?

Who's designing and running the simulation, on what infrastructure?

Its a thought experiment, so whatever is required. Need a dyson sphere using a stars total energetic output for calculations? Need to network that? Fine, thats an engineering problem.

But in this case "whatever is required" to build an atomic level simulation is the ability to observe and understand the simultaneous state changes of an octillion atoms well enough to write an emulation of them in some other medium (which is arguably a "body" of sorts anyway). That seems like less of an engineering problem and more of a "do you believe in gods?" problem.

Yes, being able to observe a brain to the same depth as the simulation is assumed.

Not just non-destructive real time observation, but also understanding patterns in observed state changes sufficiently well to be able to create lossless abstract representations of them in another medium. All seven octillion of them, operating in continuous time.

There are information theoretic reasons to suspect the human mind can't parse itself in sufficient detail to write that program, but even without these I feel the rhetorical framing "why should it be possible?" makes more sense than "why shouldn't it". At least with "why shouldn't my dog be capable of understanding this HN exchange?" we've got evidence that mammals can learn that in our favour, and the step change between understanding "walkies" and thought experiments about hypothetical brain emulations is probably smaller than that between spotting which brain excites the EEG scanner more and atomic-level brain emulation.

This is not the point though.

I'm not discussing whether we, humans can create such a simulation. It is a thought experiment of what we think such a simulated mind would be like and whether it would have intelligence/self-awareness/consciousness/experience qualia/etc.

The topic is whether there is anything fundamentally important about the human wetware which couldn't be substituted by a computer.

The sticking point for me here is that you are pointing out that it could be very difficult but have not come out right and said you suspect it to be impossible - that would be a fine response to the top level question of what is stopping you from simulating a human in software; "the fundamental error in simulating those atoms is great enough that we would no longer see expected macro behaviors like predictable chemistry". I wouldn't expect you to say it with the same level of conviction, but assailing a question like that with practical concerns instead of the principle of the matter feels like it misses the point a little.

Asking "why should it be possible" is very reasonable - but you gotta ask it. My take on it is simple; the interactions between things can be reliably predicted - if not exactly then with a model whose outputs are indistinguishable from reality.

But the rough implementation details are pretty fundamental to what is being asked!

I don't think there are any logical reasons why a different set of atoms cannot be an equivalent mind with identical conscious experience (my mind constituted different atoms yesterday, yet perceives continuity!) though I'm unconvinced of the existence of an entity capable of engineering it (and agnostic on what permutations of atoms are and aren't capable of representing brain state). But that's a very different question to "is it possible for humans to create equivalent consciousness by writing high level code which symbolically represents the molecular behaviour we think is pertinent to thought as electrical signals as a binary code state machine" which is often implied by such a question, the answer to which I think is a fairly confident no. It's commonly suggested that scepticism about the ability of the human mind to be replicated in silicon suggests "something special" about it; when rephrased as a question about actually building it it becomes more of a question about whether there's "something special" about our theories of computation and i/o pattern matching that transcends fundamentally different chemistry, as well as the mother of all engineering problems.

That doesnt follow from anything that has been said. Do you have some reason to think that a simulation at that resolution and scale is fundamentally impossible? For purposes of the thought experiment you could go bigger or smaller - the practical considerations aren't important for that.

I think you would end up simulating a childhood, society, cultural history, etc, - basically a human world - if you want to develop a human intelligence. I feel like this is an even harder problem than simulating a brain by itself.

>To what extent is our intelligence a consequence of our bodies, evolution?

Entirely? We're meat machines.

>Would a computer have intuition? Fight or flight responses?

If your grandmother had wheels would she be a bicycle?

Yeah, if it walks like a duck ...

Cars have wheels. They aren't bicycles. If all grandma does is function like a bicycle, then she is essentially a bicycle made of meat.

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