Post #2022494

2026-05-03 06:22 UTC

As LLMs have developed and have been able to cram more and more "thoughtlike" behaviour into smaller RAM and less computation, I've steadily become less impressed with human brains. It seems like the bits we think most highly of are probably just minor add-ons to stuff that's otherwise dedicated to running our big complicated bodies in a big complicated physics environment. If all you want to have is the part that philosophizes and solves abstract problems and whatnot then you may not actually need all that much horsepower. I'm thinking consciousness might also turn out to be something pretty simple. Assuming consciousness is even a particular "thing" in the first place and not just a side effect of being able to predict how other people will behave.

Replies (2)

@yeahiknow3@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2026-05-03 08:27

Brains aren’t impressive because of their compute (which is both immense and absurdly efficient) or their ability to predict the future (technically the main function of evolved minds). They’re impressive because they’re conscious. The fact that organic brains can **also** engage in hierarchical abstraction, which no digital computer (or Turing machine) can do by definition, is icing on the cake. (The halting problem and Godel’s incompleteness and Traski’s undefinability theorems all seem to suggest that analog, not digital computation is more likely to be involved in consciousness, if at all.)

Open ##2022509
@XLE@piefed.social 2026-05-03 22:55

> I've steadily become less impressed with human brains. You need to lay off the AI if it's making you this weirdly misanthropic. This is how tech bros justify causing harm: they genuinely don't care, because they think of the un-"enlightened" as less worthy of existing

Open ##2022510