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Comment by ypeterholmes | Hacker News Reader

That's precisely my point. The database connections involved in a neural network are the corollary, not transistors. What am I missing?

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The author is clearly talking about PHYSICAL connectivity in the brain. Thus why he says AI is unlikely to become conscious without the "advent of new technology". The brain is a physical neural network. AI is a software simulated neural network. Nowhere in the article does the author confuse the two.

The physical number of transistors is irrelevant. If in software you were able to perfectly simulate the 100T physical neuronal connections in a real brain, then you would perfectly recreate that brain's conscious experience.

Granted, you would be doing it with a frame rate limited by the processing power of the computer, but that just means that a thought that takes a human 1 second to arrive at might take much longer for the AI (for now).

I don't think that's what the quote is saying. I realize you are putting a shim layer between implementation and computational level, which was popular for many years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_of_analysis#Marr's_tri-l...

But at this point the TYPE of computation performed by neurons, which is unlike what modern computers do-- for example, brains do not appear to have addressable memory units separate from compute units-- do seem to be differing enough to perhaps explain some of the gaps between computers and minds. Some even think neural computation is a different category of computation altogether: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23126542/

What? No. Consciousness isn't magic. Consciousness doesn't emerge purely from computation, that's just nonsense. Do you realize computers can have encrypted memory? How the heck can you possibly hope to perfectly recreate conscious experience with encrypted memory? How about virtual memory? Is consciousness seriously parsing the virtual memory table to reassemble the memory of a process, dereferencing pointers, parsing UTF8 bytes, interpreting computer code? Be real.

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