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Comment by ryandvm | Hacker News Reader

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).

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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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