Um, really? How so? Show me the computations that model gut biome. Or pain, or the immune system, or how plants communicate, or how the big bang happened (or didn’t).
And now define “physical” wrt things like pain, or sensation, or the body, or consciousness.
We know so little about so much! it’s amazing when people speak with such certainty about things like consciousness and computation.
I don’t disagree with your main point. I would just say we don’t know very much about our own consciousness and mindbody. And humans have been studying that at least a few thousand years.
Not everyone on HN or who works with or studies AI believes AGI is just the next level on some algorithm or scaling level we haven’t unlocked yet.
But the reality is that we don't know if many of those things are computable. We just think it's likely they are, since the models we have of very simplified versions of them, or of very approximate versions, are computable.
But no one can use a physical model or computer to precisely compute, say, the fall of sand (where the exact position and momentum of every grain of sand is precisely known) - so we have no actual proof that the actual physical process is computable.
And, in fact, our best fundamental physical theory is not fully computable, at least in some sense - quantum measurement is not a deterministic process, so it's not exactly computable.
You can't compute the exact result of a quantum measurement. Now, randomness is a somewhat separate concept from computation. But still, a Turing Machine can't predict how a quantum system will behave after a measurement, so in some sense it's not computable. The best you can do is to compute the wavefunction and the resulting probabilities of the various possibilities.
From there you can build up simulations of atoms, molecules, proteins, cells, and the gut biome.
Obviously I'm not saying that it is computationally feasible to do an atom-level simulation of the guy biome, or pain receptors or the immune system.
But there's nothing fundamental that precludes it. It's just scale.
Also it's highly unlikely that biological intelligence depends on atom-level modelling. We can very likely use a simpler (but maybe still quite complex) model of a neurone and still be able to achieve the same result as biology does.
Um, really? How so? Show me the computations that model gut biome. Or pain, or the immune system, or how plants communicate, or how the big bang happened (or didn’t).
And now define “physical” wrt things like pain, or sensation, or the body, or consciousness.
We know so little about so much! it’s amazing when people speak with such certainty about things like consciousness and computation.
I don’t disagree with your main point. I would just say we don’t know very much about our own consciousness and mindbody. And humans have been studying that at least a few thousand years.
Not everyone on HN or who works with or studies AI believes AGI is just the next level on some algorithm or scaling level we haven’t unlocked yet.