▲ 84 points
back
66 comments
> The program must fit in a genome-sized instruction set of about 1 gigabyte
True but this can be a lot larger, maybe even a 1 exabyte instruction size since it depends on he programming language used to express the program. And even accounting for the invariance of runtimes at scale*, the constant factor might be gigantic since we have to build up a lot of cellular machinery first. Reminds me of the Carl Sagan quote: To make a sandwich,you must first construct the universe!
* For example, to translate a program from language A to language B, you can dedicate a constant size to write a language A to B translator. Thus at large program sizes , the kolmogorov complexity (i.e instruction set size) is fairly similar between programs since the size of the program dominates the size of the translator program which is constant. But the constant factor for cellular machinery might be gigantic**
** Or not if we only need a rough simulation
It's "to make an apple pie from scratch".
You can make a sandwich with two slices of bread and whatever filling.
A wish sandwich is a type of sandwich where you do indeed have two slices of bread, but you sincerely wish you had some meat.
But is a hotdog a sandwich?
No, it’s a taco, because the bun is one piece rather than two, as required for a sandwich.
I think the question and article is fascinating. I do think that one should not only look at the genetic representation, and the algorithm a cell runs, but also the formalized environment that runs the simulation.
I’ve been thinking about this for a few years and I truly believe these cells need to be able to “move” in either a 3d lattice similar to a cellular automata or become nodes in some cyclic graph (or maybe both).
For the genetic representation, I had an insight that DNA/RNA looks strangely similar to SKI calculus (combinators) and have been using a Church encoding to translate the SKI program to an “action” per turn (move, connect, spike, divide, etc.). It has a nice property that the cell’s “program” and the spikes between them, and the input/output to the simulation itself can be the same thing (just a string of combinators).
Either way the author is spot on when it comes to this sort of thing having the properties 1) “always on” (no separate training mode), 2) local interactions, 3) everything stems from a genome, 4) each cell is its own little mini-program with the same genetics as everyone else.
All I can say is that evolutionary program is hard and takes either massive compute or large timescales to run the simulations. Fascinating stuff though
You'll need a simulated environment because brain development depends a lot on the environment, it's not purely genetic.
Imo, there isn't anything fundamentally special about the brain as a cognitive substrate. Even a pool of water could have cognition (reservoir computing), i feel that it's a general property that can emerge in any sufficiently high-dimensional physical system with enough internal degrees of freedom to explore many configurations, and enough coupling and stability to remain coherent, and enough plasticity for experience to leave persistent changes in its future dynamics.
And subjecting such a system to sustained external objective pressure...where some internal organisations perform better than others and it would progressively accumulate some useful structure about its environment.
The brain is just a really old artefact of billions of years of blind environmental weathering of matter being repeatedly shaped by the requirement that its host continue to exist as a coherent, persistent entity.
In short the brain is not fundamentally special in the principles that make cognition feasible.
What i'm trying to say in response to this article is that he's working at a far higher level of abstraction than is required. It's putting software before physics.
Also this somewhat chimes the same tune from the bitter lesson; it’s extremely non-trivial to reverse-engineer from the top down the residue of eons of evolutionary search. You’re basically trying to infer some smarter way of achieving this one absurdly overfit artefact it left behind...won't be betting against the full brunt of mother nature's massively parallel search.
All true, but I think its a valuable exercise to try to design/understand/exploit these dynamics
Now I'm wondering what this rock I'm holding is thinking.
Imo, thinking is just adaptation happening on a shorter timescale.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_arch
It's doing all that it can.
> It's doing all that it can.
The problem is in the word "can".
What if its actions are completely determined by the rules of physics? I.e., it cannot do anything other than one thing, whether it applies thinking or not.
pleasedon'tdropmepleasedon'tdropmepleasedon'tdropmepleasedon'tdropme
This isn't quite the question the article is asking, but if you expand it just a bit to a brain rather than a simulation of a biological brain specifically, the specification complexity of a modern AI is not that large. You can get a good idea of the foundation of the system with some 3blue1brown videos. While just watching those and deeply understanding isn't enough to score a job at a frontier AI lab, I'd expect that a lot of what the labs do is similarly not that complicated to specify... it's coming up with the ideas, tuning them, and then trying to test them at the now-staggering scale it takes to prove them out for commercial use that is most of the issue.
The complexity of the AI itself, the final weights, is vastly higher, because that incorporates all the data that was flowed through the "brain".
In a decent encoding you could probably still fit the initial state of the frontier models comfortably in just a few kilobytes of code-golfed code, including the update functions and every necessary for the actual training. Recall the specification complexity is the smallest program that can create the initial state, not the initial state itself; the specification complexity of "give me a trillion 64-bit numbers generated from this psuedo-random number generator" is on the order of that very English sentence in size, not 8 tebibytes of specification complexity.
Is the result a biological brain? Obviously not. Biological brains do not do what the LLMs are doing. But unlike someone asking this question 20 or 30 years ago, where "yeah, but what if some other architecture could work too?" was still largely hypothetical, and neural nets were still largely toys, now it isn't. We may argue if an LLM is as smart as a human but I would say that at least on its playing field it is quite clearly smarter than most biological brains in existence on most measures we care about. I have to qualify "on its playing field" because it is fundamentally a text completion engine, so for instance even very very tiny biological systems still beat it on things like "ability to drive an ant body around to do useful tasks". That's a separate field of AI right now. Stay tuned on that matter, but it's not how things work today for sure.
There is still something to what biological brains do that we are not matching; as I like to say, humans do what they do without the entire contents of the internet being poured through their head multiple times over. But the idea that maybe we don't have to exactly match biology to get something useful is no longer just a theory.
The human genome is essentially a billion-year-old quantum engineering document that we can read but can’t “yet” write.
Asimov’s positronic brain was the conceptual framework with the wrong formula.
Yep and most classical computer engineering approaches have rarely tackled it appropriately in my opinion.
Expecting a von-neuman-machine with at most viaion/audio encoded tin binary to replicate a quantum processing machine with multi spectrum inputs audio/visual/tactile/electromagnetic/olfactory encoded in ternary(ACGT) is only going to simulate a very basic image. Not to mention the philosophy of the mind/brain dichotomy (including the gut brain[1]) that connects the physical/enviromental/emotional.
In the instance that the physical (silicon/photonic) recreation is not possible the next best direction would be learing how to program the DNA for wetware devices[2].
[1] https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/body/the-gut-brain-con...
[2] https://www.impactlab.com/2025/10/18/the-wetware-frontier-wh...
One aspect missing from TFA is that in biological brains a lot of the training is performed during query time. If we assume 1 GB of DNA is enough to encode the brain's overall structure we still do need training data (e.g. visual/auditorial/tactile) to build out the strength of the synaptic connections.
DNA is more like a barcode.
I have this science fiction story in my head that consciousness can evolve from organic to mechanical and back to organic as it is perhaps the most energy efficient method to encode complexity.
Jeff Hawkins and his team have been trying to understand human brain and postulate a theory of intelligence based on neocortex structure.
It's if statements all the way down, except you run all of them in parallel and then flip a coin. Let me get my keyboard.
"Consciousness" is tick based and it does not require a massive human brain. Even the smallest of animals react in real time to stimulus. There's a filter that lowers the amount of tokens the next tick has to process. That's why you can watch a video and two different people will notice entirely different things about it. Forgetting is our brains culling what they process. Being awake eventually degrades that process. You can see this in every study on tokenized llms showing a decrease in accuracy as the context fills up. So too does your brain. That is why we sleep.
Short answer yes. We can build a brain.
As for quantum effects. It's just the machine. Not the mind itself. It's sort of like asking how a CPU works and then expecting that to inform your science on cognition.
> "Consciousness" is tick based and it does not require a massive human brain. Even the smallest of animals react in real time to stimulus.
Reacting to stimulus is a behavioral response. Consciousness is subjective experience. We know humans have subjective experiences (and suspect many other animals do), but not every stimulus reaction is conscious, and consciousness is not limited to perception (feelings, empathy, dreams, imagination, visualization, earworms, inner dialog, memories).
> We know humans have subjective experiences
No, we don't. The humans claim that they do, but they may as well be philosophical zombies who claim to have such experiences without actually experiencing them (just as animals don't actually experience pain even if they behave as if they do).
A question out of honest curiosity: Would you say that it is unknown whether any humans have subjective experiences, or just any humans outside yourself? I've seen the former view being expressed previously and can't wrap my mind around it.
You think animals don't experience pain?
You're confusing multiple concepts.
The tick is at the top of an async jobs queue. The jobs provide the tick with constant updates. And this is not in real time. If you are injured say a sudden injury. You won't even notice until 2-3 ticks after.
Behavior is an emergent property of this. Not it's base.
You're arguing web servers are conscious.
Behavior isn't consciousness. Also, brains aren't digital computers or LLMs. They're part of a living organism.
I agree that the program to create brains will be small, but the logic presented to explain that is false because it ignores the size of the compiler.
For example you can have a program that is 1 bit long and encode either a browser or an OS, provided the compiler/interpreter is big enough.
there is a theory by the brilliant Roger Penrose and extended by others that the brain is just not neurons but also quantum effect
which would make it impossible to emulate via current technology
excellent PBS Space Time on that
Two strikes against the hypothesis:
- LLMs suggest that human-like "cognition" can be somewhat mimicked by purely mechanical means.
- Exposing the brain to an MRI would affect cognition if there was a quantum element to it.
> LLMs suggest that human-like "cognition" can be somewhat mimicked by purely mechanical means.
This is not a strike against that hypothesis. Quantum systems can be simulated using non-quantum computers but that doesn't make non-quantum computers into quantum computers. Similarly, mimicking some aspects of human cognition doesn't mean you can replicate all of human cognition with the same method.
Everything is subject to "quantum effects". Not necessarily trying to squeeze superposition and entanglement into a pint pot.
oh and to address your second idea about MRI
when mice were exposed to cosmic ray bursts (to test for effects on past and future astronauts traveling to moon and mars)
the mice learned much much more slowly and forgot things much much faster
how's that for "cognitive corruption" ?
(btw this is also why I laugh when Musk thinks he's going to Mars ever, it's not just a one-way trip, he wouldn't even survive the journey itself with current technology and unlike earth there's no magnetic field or enough atmosphere on Mars to deflect them)
> unlike earth there's no magnetic field or enough atmosphere on Mars to deflect them
These are solvable with known methods.
They make the whole thing rather less romantic.
If you're going to the trouble of e.g. burying your base under regolith or wrapping a planet in a big coil and lots of PV to make an artificial magnetic field, it very quickly becomes apparent that for essentially all possible disasters short of "oops we made a black hole and it caused a magnitude 15 earthquake and all the crust everywhere liquified and mixed with all the water so even ocean bases weren't safe", it's much, much easier to survive disasters on Earth without actually leaving Earth, than to go to Mars and have a normal day.
If someone made a robot factory that went mad and converted all the nitrogen in our atmosphere into ammonia (killing all the plants that no longer had access to the atmospheric nitrogen), while also producing enough smog to halve how much sunlight we got, and dumped a lot of endocrine disruptors into our water cycle, the top of Mount Everest and the Sahara desert would each still be much more hospitable than Mars is today.
> ... effects on past and future astronauts traveling to moon and mars ... wouldn't even survive the journey itself with current technology ...
It's hard to tell given your phrasing but it almost sounds like you're insinuating that traveling to the moon is technically impossible, which would be quite a bold claim given the success of the Apollo missions. Apologies if I misinterpret.
if you mean LLM seems like cognition
LLM emulate cognition, there is a huge difference, it's a mimick process not genuine
if you read about psychopaths/sociopaths, they do not comprehend emotions but they can learn to emulate them by watching others and mimicking them
that's exactly what LLM is doing, it is taught to assemble words in a way that mimics all the humans in its huge datapool, so it comes off as "cognition" because that's what the humans it's emulating were doing
"Feign vulnerability" -GPT4 in one of its many glitches
Sociopaths can feel emotions, they just lack empathy. So they can consciously manipulate others.
LLMs don't have conscious processes that perform that kind of reasoning.
If anything the fact that they are blackboxes to their own behavior and are able to non-verbally empathise, is the opposite of what you describe.
Your requirment for something supernatural/quantum to decide between emulation and real thing is self referential.
Everything is subject to quantum mechanics. If you meant something like a non-trivial quantum interaction that is nor modeled in the chemical and electrical theories of the brain presently, still, as far as I am aware quantum effects don't need anything beyond Turing to simulate. If I am wrong, someone let me know.
The video talks about "orchestrated objective reduction".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reducti...
Without a falsification this theory is simply an extension of the age old dogmatic view that humans are somehow divine or superior to all other organisms, in a way that views were held before Darwin.
The argument boils down to "the brain is really weird, and quantum is really weird, so there's got to be a connection!"
Why would it be impossible to emulate quantum effects?
I think the elephant-in-the-room arguments against Penrose's quantum microtubules [0] are the complex behaviors exhibited by organisms without neurons hosting quantum effects. As a result, I think the more promising area is in bioelectrical explanations [1].
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reducti...
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developmental_bioelectricity