You can simulate a brain to some degree, maybe, but you won’t get the whole thing short of just… using an actual brain, that is physically identical to the one you’re simulating, down to at least the quantum level (and who knows what else?). It’s not at all certain that this can be reduced to math.
The calculations for operating an LLM definitely can be reduced to math. No reduction needed, in fact—they are math.
This isn’t an argument (to my mind, anyway) against even the possibility of machine whatever-you-like (consciousness, understanding, whatever) but against the idea of equivalence because we could simulate either one—in fact, we can’t simulate one. The other, essentially is already simulation, no further steps needed.
What you’re getting at (if I may attempt to present your argument) is that we could reduce either to its components and make it look ridiculous that it might be doing anything particularly advanced.
However, in fact we definitely can reproduce exactly what one of them does with a bunch of thick books of lookup tables and some formulas that we could mechanically follow by hand, and it might even be possible to do so in practice, not just hypothetically (at significant, but not impossible, expense) while we do not know we can do that for a human brain, short of just using exactly the brain that we want to “simulate”.
> "It’s not at all certain that this can be reduced to math."
It isn't certain that it can be, but can you give any plausible reason why the Universe might allow understanding to (meat + electric patterns) and deny it to (silicon + electric patterns) ?
The calculations for operating an LLM definitely can be reduced to math. No reduction needed, in fact—they are math.
This isn’t an argument (to my mind, anyway) against even the possibility of machine whatever-you-like (consciousness, understanding, whatever) but against the idea of equivalence because we could simulate either one—in fact, we can’t simulate one. The other, essentially is already simulation, no further steps needed.
What you’re getting at (if I may attempt to present your argument) is that we could reduce either to its components and make it look ridiculous that it might be doing anything particularly advanced.
However, in fact we definitely can reproduce exactly what one of them does with a bunch of thick books of lookup tables and some formulas that we could mechanically follow by hand, and it might even be possible to do so in practice, not just hypothetically (at significant, but not impossible, expense) while we do not know we can do that for a human brain, short of just using exactly the brain that we want to “simulate”.