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Comment by robmccoll | Hacker News Reader

You are a state machine. You have finite internal state that roughly adheres to a particular structure, you take in input, and as a function of internal state and input, you produce output and a new state. Sufficiently large models are a rough approximation. We are perhaps different stochastic parrots than the models we create, but likely stochastic parrots none the less.

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You are a hydraulic system. You are composed of interlinked pipes within which the pressure rises and lowers in order to produce all your thoughts and actions.

You are a chemical soup. Your body is a closed system of proteins and amino acids reacting with each other, driving behavior in order to sustain the reactions.

You are an electric grid. A system of interconnected wires where electric impulses respond to one another in a synchronized manner, from which your life force is derived.

And if you're Steven Wolfram all of those are just automata as well.

Probably better to say that we contain multitudes of probabilistic graphs that resemble state machines, but those graphs do not make up our entire system. Further, those graphs interact constantly with stochastic systems (the environment, other graphs, etc) through couplings of varying degree.

I believe that the different topologies of the kind of "idea graph" in the human mind is becoming less diverse. That, as media consolidates and becomes more accessible in all parts of the globe, the diversity of modes of thought decreases as people become, more or less, Americanized

Perhaps Americanized isnt the right term. Fundamentally, there is something at play where the more “known” the less magical the brain is. That is, it doesnt have to think outside the box because the box is seemingly fully explored.

Why do hard thing when everyone says hard thing is too hard. What if there was no everyone? Is thing that hard?

I dont think original thinking is going to go away but i do think it will be owned by those who control the all thing which absorbs it from the mass of information.

Yes, completely agree. Marshall Mcluhan used the term "extensions of man" in the subtitle for "Understanding Media" to refer to information technology (in his day, TV). He said that in the same way a car or our clothes become an extension of our bodies, information technology becomes an extension of our central nervous system, and as the world becomes more connected through information, we begin to form a global village, where people on the other side of the country or even the earth begin to share a common memetic understanding. Things far away become immediate and personal and the layers which we filter them through become thinner, giving a kind of sameness to how we react to new information

A state machine is a very specific thing in Comp Sci, and I’m not clear you have a strong grasp on it.

You’re not a state machine. A state machine does one serial task, which is why the input+state can create a consistent and deterministic output+state. There are no secondary input streams or exogenous factors to consider for calculating a state machine transition.

Humans create output from many streams of input, arriving at across many different time horizons. Because of this, you cannot create a deterministic model of a human’s state transition for a given input - a requirement of state machines.

This isn’t philosophical or semantics. Mathematically, you’re not a state machine.

Not all state machines are deterministic.

> You have finite internal state

As Terry Pratchett might have said - what about quantum?

What about it? That only exponentiates the state space, it doesn’t make it non-finite.

> You are a state machine.

Humans are analog, state machines are not. And the analogue I will use here is that a model of anything is not the thing itself by definition.

> We are perhaps different stochastic parrots than the models we create, but likely stochastic parrots none the less.

To parrot is to "to repeat by rote"[0]. Algorithms, such as LLM's, do so as that is all they can do.

I choose to not limit myself to being a parrot. Which is why I am not one.

As Descartes proffers:

  The only thing we have power over in the universe is our 
  own thoughts.[1]

0 - https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/parrot

1 - https://www.azquotes.com/quote/1521522

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