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Comment by terminalshort | Hacker News Reader

I can make a claim much stronger than "you could probably" The counterclaim here is that the brain may not obey physical laws that can be described by mathematics. This is a "5G causes covid" level claim. The overwhelming burden of proof is on you.

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There are some quantum effects in the brain (for some people, that's a possible source of consciousness). We can simulate quantum effects, but here comes the tricky part: even if our simulation matches the probability, say 70/30 of something happening, what guarantees that our simulation would take the same path as the object being simulated?

We don't have to match the quantum state since the brain still produces an valid output regardless of what each random quantum probability ended up as. And we can include random entropy in a LLM too.

This is just non-determinism. Not only can't your simulation reproduce the exact output, but neither can your brain reproduce its own previous state. This doesn't mean it's a fundamentally different system.

Consider for example Orch OR theory. If it or something like it were to be accurate, the brain would not "obey physical laws that can be described by mathematics".

>Consider for example Orch OR theory

Yes, or what about leprechauns?

Orch OR is probably wrong, but the broader point is that we still don’t know which physical processes are necessary for cognition. Until we do, claims of definitive brain simulability are premature.

the transition probability matrices don't obey the laws of statistics?

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