Comment by swid | Hacker News Reader

Comment by swid | Hacker News Reader

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I disagree on the premise that computers are able to simulate many different things; it would be just as easy to say that the universe cannot have curiosity; that the universe is just things playing out according to some preset rules.

But of course, people exist within the universe, and while our brains do function according to those rules; likely all rules that can be expressed with math and statistics; we do have curiosity. You can look at the level of abstraction of the universe, and you will not find subjective experience or choice, yet the “platform” of the universe demonstrably allows for that.

When I see arguments like yours and the parent’s, I cannot help but think the arguments would seem to apply just as well to an accurate simulation of the universe, which shows the argument must be flawed. You are a file in the universe, loaded into memory and being run in parallel with my file. If you believe physics can be expressed through math and humans have subjective experienced, then the right kind of simulation can also have these things. Of course any simulation can be represented digitally and saved to disk.

> it would be just as easy to say that the universe cannot have curiosity; that the universe is just things playing out according to some preset rules.

Behavior/dynamics depends on structure, and structure is scale dependent.

At the scale of galaxies and stars, the universe has a relatively simple structure, with relatively boring dynamics mostly governed by gravity and nuclear fusion.

When you zoom down to the level of dynamics on a planet full of life, or of a living entity such as a human, then things get a lot more interesting since at those scales there is far more structure causing a much greater variety of dynamics.

It's the structure of an LLM vs the structure of a human brain that makes the difference.

But I am saying that is the wrong comparison. The LLM doesn’t need to implement a human brain directly. It needs to implement a sophisticated enough simulation of people that the simulation itself contains ”people” who believe in themselves.

I don’t know LLMs do that, but they are excellent function approximators, and the laws of physics which allow for my brain to be conscious also can be considered some function to approximate. If the LLM can approximate that function well enough, then simulated humans would truly believe in their own existence, as I do.

And it isn’t really important whether or not consciousness is part of the simulation or not, if the end result is the simulator is capable of emulating people to a greater extent.

If you wanted to build a behavioral simulation of a human, and knew how to do it, then what advantage would there be to trying to get an LLM to emulate this simulator ?!

Better just code up your simulator to run efficiently on a supercomputer!

The LLM teaches itself the rules of the simulation by learning to predict what happens next so well.

Presumable, running a human simulation by brute forcing physics at a scale large enough to represent a human is completely infeasible, but we can maybe conceive how it would work. LLMs are an impressive engine for predicting “next” that is actually computationally feasible.

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