My informed but ultimately presumably inaccurate guess is: if I buy about a million or so high end GPUs, and a few hundred petabytes of hard drives, I am somewhere in the ballpark of a human brain.
Given Moores law, that number is going to diminish. Given more knowledge about neurology valuable reductions in simulation complexity will be possible; you probably won’t need a chromodynamics simulation to accurately replicate personality, the thermal noise in our brainware is far too great to depend on that kind of accuracy.
But yes, a human interpreter is ultimately possible because human minds are neuron actvity and neuron activity is physics and physics are as far as we know, turing computable.
Either way, what I’m trying to argue against is the “you are an organism” thing. Not “everything within my skin” is necessary to run the program, I mean surely not the colon or metatarsal bones? To me it makes little more sense to call the entire body “me” than my car. Either way it’s a vehicle, even if at the present state of technology I’m kind of stuck with this one.
I suspect that when we, in a hurry to signal allegiance to reductionism and materialism, tell people things like “you are an organism” (or even “you are a brain”, unless a proper explanation follows), many among those listeners who are actually interested in truth (rather than just in absorbing acceptable beliefs of the Tribe of Scientifically Literate) will reasonably feel there’s something not quite right about this, that it dismisses something that’s actually important. They might not say so, being ashamed of possibly being seen as believing in souls or some other silly nonphysicalism, but it will still not ring true to them.
So I think getting this right matters. Otherwise we’re helping fuel the resistance to reductionism among the unconvinced.
My informed but ultimately presumably inaccurate guess is: if I buy about a million or so high end GPUs, and a few hundred petabytes of hard drives, I am somewhere in the ballpark of a human brain.
Given Moores law, that number is going to diminish. Given more knowledge about neurology valuable reductions in simulation complexity will be possible; you probably won’t need a chromodynamics simulation to accurately replicate personality, the thermal noise in our brainware is far too great to depend on that kind of accuracy.
But yes, a human interpreter is ultimately possible because human minds are neuron actvity and neuron activity is physics and physics are as far as we know, turing computable.
That’s what I think, too.
Either way, what I’m trying to argue against is the “you are an organism” thing. Not “everything within my skin” is necessary to run the program, I mean surely not the colon or metatarsal bones? To me it makes little more sense to call the entire body “me” than my car. Either way it’s a vehicle, even if at the present state of technology I’m kind of stuck with this one.
I suspect that when we, in a hurry to signal allegiance to reductionism and materialism, tell people things like “you are an organism” (or even “you are a brain”, unless a proper explanation follows), many among those listeners who are actually interested in truth (rather than just in absorbing acceptable beliefs of the Tribe of Scientifically Literate) will reasonably feel there’s something not quite right about this, that it dismisses something that’s actually important. They might not say so, being ashamed of possibly being seen as believing in souls or some other silly nonphysicalism, but it will still not ring true to them.
So I think getting this right matters. Otherwise we’re helping fuel the resistance to reductionism among the unconvinced.