Comment by Nevermark | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Nevermark | Hacker News Reader

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Well you have left your written record of (1) persistently confusing atoms with neurons, (2) an inability to explain where your confusion comes from outside of just repeating it, along side (3) snide responses to someone who in good faith took the time to explain the difference to you.

One more time:

Not understanding something is not the same as needing high compute. And the amount of compute we have today is colossal.

Simulating a high level system (neurons or transistors) is not the same as simulating their low level implementations (all the atoms and electrons in either of them).

Some large LLMs (interactive summaries of a large percentage of the entire human race's verbalized knowledge at moderate depth), can be run on a single MacStudio M3 Ultra with 512GB of RAM.

Modeling a bee brain will require a tiny fraction of that computationally.

> Most of what atoms do in any cell, including neurological cells, is operate a vast number of complex but common survival systems. And the very small fraction supporting specifically neurological behavior, do not meaningfully contribute at the level where specifics of individual atoms matter, but at a level many orders of magnitude higher in scale.

I don’t see where I reference neurons, care to quote me rather than adding misleading citation looking (1) strings to your text?

Indeed, looking towards full compute simulation of a physical system, I reference one of its smallest physical components - atoms - and draw an analogy to the transistor in compute. You make no argument for why an atom needn’t be simulated in a system but nonetheless hand wave it away, lifting yourself to neurons as if their behavior is well understood, finally acting as if clock speed of a transistor is somehow related to the unsourced “clock speed” of a neuron.

So, to me it seems pretty transparently obvious you’ve failed to grasp the two topics in play here - whether there is enough brute force compute available, and what models of simulating a system like a brain exist - and in your confusion, went ahead and self aggrandized your own typing to cast out the conversation that played out before you joined.

I encourage you to not respond, and instead to use that energy to read someone else’s argument from a steel man perspective rather than this diminishing arrogance you display.

> I don’t see where I reference neurons, care to quote me rather than adding misleading citation looking (1) strings to your text?

A brain operates at the level of neurons, not individual atoms.

The vast majority of atoms in the brain are there to do non-cognitive things.

The tiny fraction actually doing neural things are insanely redundant.

You can simulate a 1 kg ball dropping from 100 meters, to time its collision with the Earth, by simulating all its atoms. But the net mass of the ball is what matters. Not the individual atom masses and movements.

Likewise, you can simulate a brain by simulating all its atoms. But the net movements of transmitters are what matter, not all those individual atomic movements.

Neurons and transistors both operate on net signals precisely so they can be insensitive to individual atomic behaviors. If they were sensitive to individual atoms, they would be noise generators instead of reliable information processors.

And because they are designed to be insensitive to individual atomic behaviors, we don't have to model them at the atomic level.

(Which is impossible anyway. The quantum field equations for even two interacting atoms are complex. There is no visible future in which the atoms of a single neuron could all be simulated accurately, much less a brain. Even then, because of quantum noise, the atomic model wouldn't be any more accurate.)

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My apologies on being so blunt at the beginning of this conversation. That was unnecessary.

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