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Reminds me of this classic: https://xkcd.com/505/

Replace universe simulation with a LLM an it’s hard to consider a bunch of rocks shuffling on a beach as conscious.

Or alternatively, our own minds are simply (squishy, organic) rocks on a beach, which is quite humbling if you think about it long enough.

2 comments

Indeed a classic (upvoted!), but it presupposes that there is a theory of everything that can be used to perfectly simulate the universe, and I'd like to remind everybody that we still don't know whether such a thing exists. Nor do we know whether it's possible to simulate "just" neurons and get meaningful results on some higher level. People have been trying at that for decades, so far without success. (nice overview here: https://ccli.substack.com/p/the-biggest-mystery-in-neuroscie...)

Thank you for the link to the post. It was a fascinating read and also entertaining.

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.

I was curious what fruit fly brain simulation you meant, and after fifteen minutes of looking around I ended up at a LessWrong writeup by an author from something called the Brain Preservation Foundation -- which presumably has an optimistic view of the field, but its director is an author on the original fly connectome paper, so this should not be utter crankery: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ybwcxBRrsKavJB9Wz/no-we-have...

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.

> [...] but it presupposes that there is a theory of everything that can be used to perfectly simulate the universe, [...]

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.

> but it presupposes that there is a theory of everything that can be used to perfectly simulate the universe, and I'd like to remind everybody that we still don't know whether such a thing exists

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"

> 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?

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).

There's also information in the compiler and the zip binary, without that I'm pretty sure it's not possible.

You can stick a full copy of the compiler and the zip binary into that archive, if you want to.

The 'intron' can be arbitrarily large.

You can add the complete schematics for your CPU. And the standard model of particle physics.

It is entirely possible (if perhaps unlikely) that the correct theory of everything is a relatively straightforward expansion of the current standard model.

I would argue that for the situation of the comic to occur, it's only necessary to have a theory of everything that's sufficiently good to simulate a universe that's close enough to ours that it's hard to notice the difference.

Our bodies could just be rocks on a beach, but whatever it is about us that is capable of observing the output of our own internal thinking (preventing us from just being p-zombies) is not contained within the beach.

The "whatever" part, in strict terms, would be information. Jury is still out whether that is a fundamental component of the universe or not: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/is-information-fundame...

Well, thermodynamics is considered pretty fundamental, and the second law of thermodynamics is pretty much all about information. (But your link already touches that.)

People also interpret the 'unitarity' of quantum mechanics to mean that information is preserved.

This makes no sense at all as soon as you start trying to define where the internal/external line actually is.

I think you're being downvoted because you're announcing it as an absolute truth, of which we do not have evidence.

However I am open to your belief (and not on religious or theistic grounds which I assume many people might think you're talking about) because people have (non-religious) experiences that lend to such possibilities.