After seeing the story of the fruit fly brain simulation I figured stuff like the nematode would be trivial.
The lack of active plasticity in LLMs causes a lot of frustration imo. Having agents make the same mistakes over and over and not be able to correct course without prompt engineering is the biggest symptom.
Obviously a static mind is more helpful from a performance perspective, especially if you consider model deployments into gateware.
Maybe this will be an inherent limitation to LLMs that won’t be solvable without a new approach.
It seems that there was a perfectly legitimate simulation based on the connectome that got published in 2024, and a very bullshit-y startup that briefly went viral later when it claimed to upload a fly to a computer. Not sure which one you saw.
LLMs are nice here: we don't need a theory of everything to simulate them. You can indeed use pebbles on the beach.
Scott Aaronson said that in theory a finite look-up table can win eg a ten minute Turing test (any finite length is fine). Of course, to borrow his argument further, the naive table would be galactic in size. So the real magic is in being able to compress the responses of that table into something human sized / LLM-server sized.
Is it even possible that a complete simulation of the rules of this universe (let alone the content of it) could exist in this universe?
I am no expert but I did manage to read most of GEB [0] so I feel fully qualified to say that it feels like something Gödel would have opinions about?
[0] the honest nerd's "did sleep in a Holiday Inn last night"
Yes, it is possible! See how a Quine is constructed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quine_(computing)
As an analogy: you can have a zip archive that expands to itself. Or even more so: to itself (the simulation of itself in itself) plus something arbitrary (standing in for the rest of the universe).
The 'intron' can be arbitrarily large.
You can add the complete schematics for your CPU. And the standard model of particle physics.