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Comment by wartywhoa23 | Hacker News Reader

You replied "yes" to my question, but

> I didn't realize I was in a dream when I was in a dream.

Lucid dreaming is exactly the conscious realization of the fact that you are in a dream. So, your actual answer is no for this one.

> Regarding psychedelic trips, I don't do drugs

So, no for this one too. Also, doing drugs and undertaking a handful of explorations of your mind are very different things, mind you..

Let's pretend you won and there's no consciousness beyond mere interactions between collections of purely mathematical abstractions you call atoms. Where and how do those abstract interactions take place? What sets the rules for those interactions? Where are the values stored?

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I have had dreams where I could control it to some extent too. But its very rare and I don't much remember its experience.

You may have misunderstood what I meant by interactions, I meant as in electrical, chemical, nuclear etc interactions of atoms. So the rules are naturally the usual physical laws of the universe. To the best of our knowledge, values are stored somewhere in our human body, we of course don't fully know the mechanism the brain works, but if you think some data exists totally outside our body, that's a big statement and you need to prove it.

Well, all electrical, chemical, nuclear interactions are purely mathematical. Dig down into the "matter" and the very science you appeal to agrees with the fact it doesn't know what it is. An atom is a collection of electrons, protons and neutrons, and what are those? An electron is a lepton, which is just a word for "this mathematical abstraction partakes in these equations in these ways", and protons and neutrons decompose in a couple more such abstractions. All matter is suddenly abstract math.

Now, in this abstract world of "matter", certain collections of abstractions (COAs for short) called "humans" have been experiencing a vast array of possible abstract interactions with other COAs called "the world". They first tried expressing the feedback of those interactions on a part of their COA called "the brain" with modulating the interactions called "sound waves", and later learned how to encode those into certain states of other COAs called "bits of information", which are not quite bits but COAs called "transistors", which store some abstract "electric charges".

Now the question is: how can capturing those bits and building an algorithm that predicts the next multidimensional array of bits based on the current one REALLY capture the essense of the original underlying interactions and feedbacks the human COAs had, and how can those algorithms experience those exact interactions and feedbacks?

Yes indeed if technology and science was stopped from lack of perfect knowledge we'd never have done anything at all. Making your washing machine or car didn't require knowledge of quantum theory for quantum theory has negligible impact on systems of that scale. Unless you can prove human beings need this ultra low and deep level of physical modeling to work, then such a statement is nonsense. A llm might well have enough structure for consciousness to emerge. They do have a sensory organ, and at present that sensory organ takes in text and to some extent images. I also do not posit that all consciousness must be exactly similar to ours, eg octopuses exist.

You took my first two paragraphs as a straw to grasp and avoid even trying to address the third.

How is seriously considering your disconnected talk a "straw"? You literally speak you don't believe in atoms in multiple places or think humans have something more than atoms/physical structure. Then you claim its some not-allegory. First you ask if I do drugs, then it is not at all clear what relation the rest of what you said has to do with doing drugs or lucid dreaming. Then you claim to not believe in atoms. Then you do the muddle of claiming you need perfect knowledge and infinite precision to model or build a machine.

To your third para, I will ask if I write a "simulacrum" of a program that manages to factor large RSA primes consistently and quickly, does that program factor RSA? Another example, do you think if a software program does a FFT and a physical DSP circuit does an FFT doing something totally different? Consciousness could easily be supported on two entirely different forms of substrate. Neural nets can model almost any function, human brains are subject to physical laws which are also limited to Turing computable programs as far as our current knowledge goes, in case you somehow had a misconception of neural nets being weaker than they actually are.

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