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Comment by tuvix | Hacker News Reader

I’m not talking about the actions we take or how we might perform at certain tasks, I’m talking about how our brains actually work. My point is that we have no idea how I’m able to imagine an apple and see it in my mind’s eye. It’s basically biological magic to us at this point.

There are processes at work there that we don’t even have the language to describe.

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Not only that, but we do it with a processor that is basically required to operate in a narrow temperature band below 40C, using a mere 86 billion neurons (although the equivalence with either machine-learning "neurons" or LLM parameters is not at all clear) operating on a few dozen watts; and with this we operate many other systems besides language processing. It's not clear that our reasoning process requires language, either.

(86 billion is the number ChatGPT, ironically enough, has given me a couple of times. I remember hearing for a long time that it was estimated to be somewhere in the ballpark of 100 billion. This is not my field of study.)

I recently read a blogpost from a human neuroscience student who came across this question (https://ccli.substack.com/p/the-biggest-mystery-in-neuroscie...), and she looked up the study behind this number (https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:1f559b3b-97fd-48c2-b2ac-29...), and it seems that the actual current state of knowledge is that the number is somewhere in the range 60-100 billion, with probably some of that variation being biological and some coming from uncertainty in the measurement techniques, hard to tell, because all the data comes from nine brains.

For now, caring about a topic (or having somebody you trust care for you) still gets you better information than asking an LLM.

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