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Comment by willy_k | Hacker News Reader

Sure, if you take a materialist empiricist perspective, which is myopic at best. As humans we have the unique and wonderful ability to know truths by themselves. Machines do not have minds, and they can not.

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What position are you taking? (Genuine question.) Do you believe humans are conscious because of a special property we have? If you are a dualist, how do you explain the interaction in physical space between the non-physical special property and the physical brain?

The universe is material of course, the soul is made of matter, thoughts are made of matter and so on. The question is what kind of matter? Looking at the brain, we won't find any intelligence in the motion of its cells. They mostly stay in place. If we go one level deeper, we'll see molecules, and their motion reveals something more interesting: various neurochemical reactions. Yet, there is no intelligence at that level either. Going one more level deeper we'll find electrons and that's where things become somewhat intelligent. At the current level of science, we can't see what makes electrons move, but if we could, we would discover finer and finer forms of matter until we would reach an end. That finest level of matter for that particular person we would call his soul. I think it's the presence of those higher imperceptible levels of matter that creates consciousness. If it all stopped at the cellular or molecular level, we would be like complex mechanical watches, not very different from LLMs.

I do. God. I am partial to and bullish on the brain being a quantum-classical computer. There has been interesting research exploring that recently [0, 1, 2, 3]. That (quantum mechanics) seems to be escape-hatch, so to speak, from the otherwise deterministic, mechanical procession of the universe.

[0]** https://www.researchgate.net/publication/15280350_Quantum_op...

[1] https://pubs.acs.org/jpcbfk/article-pdf/128/17/4035/9613831/...

[2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/395650039_Parametri...

[3] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/385131105_Conscious...

For it to be an "escape hatch", there'd need to be a measurably different distribution of outputs than what you'd otherwise expect, that translates to functions that are not Turing computable. There is zero evidence for that.

You have absolutely no evidence for any of these assertions. This is a religious belief in the total absence of evidence, not science.

Good luck convincing others of these truths you know without evidence or argument, though.

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