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Comment by cmiles8 | Hacker News Reader

Humans have an inherent flaw in that our brains are wired to see intelligence and reasoning where there is none. Our brains fill in data that simply isn’t there.

Folks see Jesus in burnt toast. Monet was a master of exploiting this where what’s really just blotches of color our brains fill into beautifully detailed images.

Our experience with LLMs is no different. Folks believe there is some deeper intelligence there but it’s all still just 1s and 0s on a computer chip. We’re interpreting things happening that simply are not happening.

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The brain is just ones and zeros on salty mush.

You either have to accept that the brain can be described with math (like everything else we have ever known in the universe), or that there is a supernatural phenomenon that exists in the brain.

This is an inescapable conclusion that boils down to "Do you believe magic is real or not?"

Magic is real and you can have your unique special human intelligence.

Magic is not real, and the brain is just another computer crunching numbers.

I think it's been pretty well demonstrated by neuroscientists that the brain is not a binary computer. That doesn't mean that those scientists erred on behalf of supernatural religion or anything like that.

As long as you believe a brain is just a physical system - then it can be simulated to any degree of accuracy with plain ol' binary computers.

Nobody is actually trying to do that, because it's too hard, they don't know enough about how the brain works, and/or they can't compete on efficiency; pick whichever reasons you like, or add more, but don't pretend that AI researchers have figured out how to simulate a brain.

You're arguing about whether it's possible or not. You're saying it's not possible.

It is possible.

Not really. He said no one who knows anything about the brain thinks it's a binary system.

AFAIK, that is true.

Whether it's possible to replicate what happens in the brain on a binary system or not is a separate thing entirely. It's also not what LLMs are attempting to do.

You're reading him too narrowly. He's answering the question of whether the brain can be modeled (math or magic), and arguing against it. Or maybe he's arguing for a middle ground. Hard to say exactly, he's not very clear.

Except the brain can be modeled with arbitrary precision - so he's got an uphill battle in either case.

TLDR: Yes, he literally said "binary computer" but from the context it's clear he means more than that.

No need to straw man, they aren't pretending anything. It's just a fact about computational theory.

Just because I can't count every grain of sand on Earth, doesn't mean sand grains are uncountable. Those are two distinct facts.

The practicality of a binary brain is distinct from the possibility of it.

Why would someone believe that the brain is just a physical system?

Genuinely I don't understand this.

Because the metaphysical is definitionally outside the realm of science and rationality, and every bit of scientific and technological progress humankind has made has come from discarding superstition and approaching the world as a physical system.

If the brain isn't just a physical system, then we may as well give up. There's certainly no point discussing it, as any assertions will be untestable and one persons elaborate and well thought out theory will be just as valid and predictive as the next persons "consciousness is created by invisible purple unicorns" theory.

So if we are going to discuss it, we should start from the assumption that there is no magic or witchcraft or religion involved.

> If the brain isn't just a physical system, then we may as well give up

Forgive my obtuseness, but if it turns out that the brain is more than just a physical system, what are we giving up? On science as a whole?

Isn’t science predicated on reliably predicting reality? Do we know how to describe reality accurately?

I asked below as well, but how does the observer effect work as a physical system? I get we don’t know so you can’t really answer, but if we can’t accurately describe reality then our science is woefully incomplete! Given that incompleteness I really don’t understand how we can rule out “invisible purple unicorns”?

I appreciate your explanation so far, thank you !

The issue is that we have yet to prove or find evidence for the existence of anything but the physical. When we do find a new phenomenom in one of these ways, it becomes a part of physics. What would it mean to concretely discover a non-physical phenomenon? It would have to genuinely be magic of some sort, and defy rationality and description, to not simply be a new part of physics. (And if it defies rationality and description, it doesn't advance us scientifically, except to let us know we must abandon science in that domain.)

> I asked below as well, but how does the observer effect work as a physical system?

Just to be sure - the observer effect doesn't refer to a human observer, but rather to any measurement of a quantum system.

It is unsatisfying that quantum mechanics posits that particle states are fundamentally probabilistic. It's possible that in some sense there is an underlying order such as string theory that is impossible to test or verify. In that case, it would make sense to consider string theory as metaphysics. A fun exercise, but not scientific and not useful for understanding the world. By definition it would not be helpful in predicting or modeling the world, otherwise that would serve as a way of testing the theory.

More on the subject:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physicalism

> It is unsatisfying that quantum mechanics posits that particle states are fundamentally probabilistic.

You can alleviate this mostly by accepting the MWI.

Under the MWI, all the possibilities do occur, and the probability manifests because when you split into an infinitude of yous, each of them is just one you, and has no way of predicting which you it will be on the other side.

So the MWI makes the wave equation deterministic when viewed from the outside. The trouble is that we are inside it.

It turns out that God does throw dice - it's just that all the combinations come up at the same time.

> Why would someone believe that the brain is just a physical system?

Because we've never in the history of science discovered a non-physical (supernatural) system. So it would be quite a surprise.

So we should assume no non-physical systems exist? And discourage the study of such a thing because reasons?

How does the observer effect work?

Yes. In exactly the same way we assume that bigfoot doesn't exist. Or ghosts. Or leprechauns.

This is very basic scientific reasoning, friend.

Having had paranormal experiences myself, I find myself questioning pretty much everything. I appreciate your reply, thank you.

That's fine. Just understand that modern science will likely explain this by a malfunction of your senses - because no evidence of paranormal activity has ever been shown.

If you want to argue outside of science you should state it up front - especially on a site like this.

Music isn't binary either, and yet here we are with totally digitized lossless music ecosystem.

What does the ability to encode or decode data in binary have to do with the brain being or not being a binary computer?

It shows that it doesn't matter. There is nothing a brain can compute that a base 2 system cannot.

People can drill really really hard on the fact that the brain doesn't function with purely 2 states, but it gets you nowhere. It's the same illusion as "pure analog music sources are "better" than digital sources". They're not, and it's a totally immaterial topic when discussing how the music sounds (audiophiles, come at me). Either system can produce the same sound, indiscernibly, even to the fanciest test equipment.

The brain also cannot escape that it's digital clone mirrors it's inputs and outputs to an arbitrary point of perfection.

Mathematical modelling in binary, is not the same thing as the thing being modelled.

you can represent floating point numbers in binary

Maybe the brain is just another computer crunching numbers, but with real epistemic representations, rather than just predicting a token, based on a corpus of syntax.

Brain is not just ones and zeros, it can be viewed as combination of infinite quantum states.

Infinite? Or "huge number"?

Infinite in the sense that quantum superposition can have infinite range. So it really is a huge number out of infinite possible combinations.

> You either have to accept that the brain can be described with math (like everything else we have ever known in the universe)

Oh the irony of you talking about believing in magic. What do you base this wild claim on? Can you cite a single known physicist or mathematician that agrees?

> And so in its actual procedure physics studies not these inscrutable qualities, but pointer-readings which we can observe. The readings, it is true, reflect the fluctuations of the world-qualities; but our exact knowledge is of the readings, not of the qualities. The former have as much resemblance to the latter as a telephone number has to a subscriber.

-- Arthur Stanley Eddington

I'd be delighted if rather than an old dead guy quote, you could provide an actual example of something math comes up short in describing, for lack of mathematical ability of course, not lack of human knowledge or practicality.

So yes, you can cite no serious scientists. And you don't understand the words of those, be they current ones or any of the heroes of either field, when they explain why that is.

You don't even need to believe them, just think about how you would ever be sure you know objective reality fully. Actually do it.

When I was a little kid, my go to thought experiment was imagining atoms as balls that we can't crack open that are filled with sand, and that even if we could find the formulas that describe their movements perfectly, we could never know if that's how atoms move, or if there's something inside them (the sand). Really dumb, but I was like 9 yo and knew nothing, never heard of Gödel or quantum mechanics (what's your excuse?). But I still could understand, not intuitively, but by actually thinking (not just talking) about it, that you can never be 100% sure from inside. Even if you found out everything, and your model of the world matches it perfectly, you could never be sure that it is so. And it turns out this is true and an old discovery. If you could disprove it, you would be famous for millenia, maybe forever. Bluffing on HN won't get you there.

You don't have to stoner riff, just give an example...

Where does math come short?

Does it matter if "intelligence and reasoning" are there if what they produce is indistinguishable (or outmatches) what a human could produce?

You only have your own experience to judge that you are even reasoning. You assume others have similar experience and so reason like you because they are able to do all the things that you do - and they look human like you. We can't prove there's a there there in other humans. What happens when the robots are doing everything humans do? What happens when they tell us they are reasoning, when they say they have an internal experience? Maybe there's nothing there, but you can't prove it. Moreover, it's likely they'll be able to affect the world and you in most of the same ways as humans can, whether there's a there there or not.

I can give Monet a pass as he probably didn't fully understand WHY it happened and it was just art, but the way tech companies exploit our brains (algorithmic dopamine hits, LLMs, etc) is pure insidiousness. The fact they act like victims when the backlashes come is what really grinds me.

This just reads so anthropocentric to me. Humans are wired to see intelligence only where intelligence is human-like. We see autonomous action-response and planning as the keys to intelligence. I would expect that, dear primate based Homo sapiens.

We are experiencing non-humanoid intelligence without AGI. That is awesome. And we don’t have a clue how to protect ourself from AGI.

Likewise, we intelligent primates have this great system of coordination called market economics that lets us destroy our home planet with our eyes open. That’s what we call intelligence!

(Not 100% personal opinion and deliberately inflated from the I’ve been thinking about.)

How do you know it’s not when looking into the mirror, that we see Jesus in burnt toast?

Folks see AI seeing Jesus in burnt toast, and then admit it as one of the folks. :)

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