You keep talking past the point. Nobody is claiming we can turn a human mind into a literal bitstring and boot it up like a computer program. That was never the argument. The bitstring analogy exists to make a simpler point: everything that exists and changes according to physical law can, in principle, be represented, modeled, or reproduced by another physical system. The form does not need to be identical to the brain’s atoms any more than a jet engine must flap its wings to fly. The key is not replication of matter but replication of causal structure.
You say we cannot reproduce the brain. But that is not the point. The point is that nothing about the brain violates physics. It runs on chemical and electrical dynamics that obey the same laws as everything else. If those laws can produce intelligence once, then they can do so again in another substrate. That makes the claim of impossibility not scientific, but emotional.
You accuse me of misunderstanding neuroscience and cognitive science. The reality is that neither field understands itself. We have no complete model of consciousness. We cannot explain why synchronized neural oscillations yield awareness. We cannot define where attention comes from or what distinguishes a “thought” from a signal cascade. Cognitive science is still arguing over whether perception is bottom up or top down, whether emotion is distinct from cognition, and whether consciousness even plays a causal role. That is not mastery. That is the sound of a discipline still wandering in the dark.
You act as though neuroscience has defined the boundaries of intelligence, but it has not. We do not have a mechanistic understanding of creativity, emotion, or reasoning. We have patterns and correlations, not principles. Yet you talk as if those unknowns justify declaring machine intelligence impossible. It is the opposite. Our ignorance is precisely why it cannot be ruled out.
Emotion is not magic. It is neurochemical modulation over predictive circuits. Replicate the functional dynamics and you replicate emotion’s role. Creativity is recombination and constraint satisfaction. Replicate those processes and you replicate creativity. Reasoning is predictive modeling over structured representations. Replicate that, and you replicate reasoning. None of these depend on carbon. They depend on organization and feedback.
You keep saying that the brain cannot be “reproduced as bitstrings,” but that is a distraction. Nobody is suggesting uploading neurons into binary. The bitstring argument shows that any finite physical system has a finite description. It proves that cognition, like any process governed by law, has an information theoretic footprint. Once you accept that, the difference between biology and computation becomes one of scale, not kind.
You say LLMs are not creative, not emotional, not reasoning. Yet they already produce outputs that humans classify as empathetic, sarcastic, joyful, poetic, or analytical. People experience their words as creative because they combine old ideas into new, functional, and aesthetic patterns. They reason by chaining relationships, testing implications, and revising conclusions. The fact that you can recognize all of this in their behavior proves they are performing the surface functions of those capacities. Whether it feels like something to be them is irrelevant to the claim that they can reproduce the function.
And now your final claim, that whatever becomes intelligent “will not be an LLM.” You have no basis for that certainty. Nobody knows what an LLM truly is once scaled beyond our comprehension. We do not understand how emergent representations arise or how concepts self organize within their latent spaces. We do not know if some internal dynamic of this architecture already mirrors the structure of cognition. What we do know is that it learns to compress the world into predictive patterns and that it develops abstractions that map cleanly to human meaning. That is already the seed of general intelligence.
You are mistaking ignorance for insight. You think not knowing how something works grants you authority to say what it cannot become. But the only thing history shows is that such confidence always looks ridiculous in retrospect. The physics of intelligence exist. The brain proves it. And the LLM is the first machine that begins to display those same emergent behaviors. Saying it “will not be an LLM” is not a scientific claim. It is wishful thinking spoken from the wrong side of the curve.
Look, mate, you can keep jumping up and down about this all you want. But you're arguing science fiction at this point. Not really worth continuing the conversation, but thanks.
Calling this “science fiction” isn’t just dismissive, it’s ironic. The discussion itself is science fiction by the standards of only a few years ago. Back then, the idea that a machine could hold a coherent philosophical argument, write code, debate consciousness, and reference neuroscience was fantasy. Now it’s routine. You are literally using what was once science fiction to declare that progress on LLMs has ended.
And calling that “science fiction” again isn’t a rebuttal, it’s an insult. You didn’t engage a single argument, you just waved your hand and walked away. That isn’t scientific skepticism, it’s arrogance disguised as authority.
You can disagree, but doing what you did is manipulative. You dodged every point and tried to end the debate by pretending it was beneath you. Everyone reading can see that.
You called it “science fiction” and bowed out, then tried to make it personal. That is not humility, that is evasion. You never addressed a single argument, you just waved your hand and left, and calling someone’s reasoning “science fiction” is not only an insult, it violates the site’s rule against dismissive or unfriendly language. The “good day sir” at the end makes that tone of mockery obvious.
What is actually arrogant is dismissing a discussion the moment it goes beyond your depth and pretending that walking away is a sign of wisdom. It is not. It is what people do when they realize the conversation has left them behind.
If you are so sure of your position, you could have refuted the reasoning point by point. Instead, you dodged, labeled, and ran. Everyone reading can see which of us is still dealing in facts and which one needed a graceful exit to save face.
Nah, mate, the conversation never went "beyond my depth." You're just not an enjoyable conversation partner.
It doesn't matter how smart (you think) you are. If nobody wants to talk to you, you'll be spinning all that brain matter in the corner by yourself. Based on your comment history here, it looks like this happens to you more often than not.
I'm sure you have good points. I could probably learn a thing or two from you—maybe you could learn something from me too! But why on earth would anyone want to engage with someone who behaves like you do?
You are projecting, and everyone can see it. You pretended that I was being rude while you slipped in sarcasm, personal digs, and that condescending “best of luck” as if it made you look polite. It doesn’t. That is not civility. It is passive aggression wrapped in fake courtesy.
You completely dropped the argument and went straight for personal attacks. That is not confidence, it is surrender. You are no longer debating, you are lashing out because you ran out of ideas. You can claim the conversation “wasn’t beyond your depth,” but you abandoned every point the moment you were asked to defend it. Then you tried to flip it by pretending that walking away made you the mature one. It didn’t. It made you the one who couldn’t keep up and needed an exit.
You can dress it up with sarcasm and moral posturing, but that doesn’t change what happened. The moment you shifted from ideas to insults, you showed everyone reading that you had nothing left to stand on. The difference between us is simple: I stayed on topic. You turned it into attitude. And now everyone can see exactly who ran out of substance first.
No moral posturing and no insults. Your behavior is just objectively noxious. Not just to me, not just in this thread: the vast majority of your conversations here go roughly the way this one did. A quick glance at your profile shows roughly half of the comments you make here end up light grey.
You have an enormous chip on your shoulder. You consistently make truth claims about entire fields that are still in debate and then you arrogantly shout over the other person when they disagree with you.
I strongly suggest you work on this. It will limit you in life. It probably already has. You probably already know how it has, even!
I'm not saying this to be mean, or because I "have nothing left to stand on." You're clearly intelligent and you clearly care about this topic. But until you mature and learn to behave, others will continue to withdraw from conversation with you.
You have already abandoned the debate and moved into stalking and personal attacks. That is not a sign of strength. It is proof you ran out of substance and are trying to win by humiliation instead.
You dug through my profile to manufacture a narrative about my character because you could not answer a single technical point. That is petty and dishonest. It is also exactly the kind of behavior moderators and civil participants call out. If you actually cared about truth you would stay on topic. Instead you weaponized the comment section to attack me personally.
Do not mistake tone for argument. I stood on evidence and logic. You offered sneers, a mock sign off, and then tried to moralize. That is not persuasion. It is performative virtue signaling layered over an exit strategy.
If you want to be taken seriously, stop the profile policing, stop the personal diagnostics, and engage the claims you think are wrong. Make one focused counterargument. Otherwise your behavior will read to everyone as what it is: a public temper tantrum disguised as concern.
You can keep doing this. It will not change the facts. It will only make readers pity the quality of your argument and worry that you are the kind of person who cannot have a grown up debate. If you are interested in a real exchange, show it. If not, spare the thread the noise.
Fair enough. You’ve spent the whole thread talking about me instead of the topic, so saying you don’t want to play now is a bit rich. You’ve been playing the whole time, just mistaking the sound of your own confusion for strategy.
You say we cannot reproduce the brain. But that is not the point. The point is that nothing about the brain violates physics. It runs on chemical and electrical dynamics that obey the same laws as everything else. If those laws can produce intelligence once, then they can do so again in another substrate. That makes the claim of impossibility not scientific, but emotional.
You accuse me of misunderstanding neuroscience and cognitive science. The reality is that neither field understands itself. We have no complete model of consciousness. We cannot explain why synchronized neural oscillations yield awareness. We cannot define where attention comes from or what distinguishes a “thought” from a signal cascade. Cognitive science is still arguing over whether perception is bottom up or top down, whether emotion is distinct from cognition, and whether consciousness even plays a causal role. That is not mastery. That is the sound of a discipline still wandering in the dark.
You act as though neuroscience has defined the boundaries of intelligence, but it has not. We do not have a mechanistic understanding of creativity, emotion, or reasoning. We have patterns and correlations, not principles. Yet you talk as if those unknowns justify declaring machine intelligence impossible. It is the opposite. Our ignorance is precisely why it cannot be ruled out.
Emotion is not magic. It is neurochemical modulation over predictive circuits. Replicate the functional dynamics and you replicate emotion’s role. Creativity is recombination and constraint satisfaction. Replicate those processes and you replicate creativity. Reasoning is predictive modeling over structured representations. Replicate that, and you replicate reasoning. None of these depend on carbon. They depend on organization and feedback.
You keep saying that the brain cannot be “reproduced as bitstrings,” but that is a distraction. Nobody is suggesting uploading neurons into binary. The bitstring argument shows that any finite physical system has a finite description. It proves that cognition, like any process governed by law, has an information theoretic footprint. Once you accept that, the difference between biology and computation becomes one of scale, not kind.
You say LLMs are not creative, not emotional, not reasoning. Yet they already produce outputs that humans classify as empathetic, sarcastic, joyful, poetic, or analytical. People experience their words as creative because they combine old ideas into new, functional, and aesthetic patterns. They reason by chaining relationships, testing implications, and revising conclusions. The fact that you can recognize all of this in their behavior proves they are performing the surface functions of those capacities. Whether it feels like something to be them is irrelevant to the claim that they can reproduce the function.
And now your final claim, that whatever becomes intelligent “will not be an LLM.” You have no basis for that certainty. Nobody knows what an LLM truly is once scaled beyond our comprehension. We do not understand how emergent representations arise or how concepts self organize within their latent spaces. We do not know if some internal dynamic of this architecture already mirrors the structure of cognition. What we do know is that it learns to compress the world into predictive patterns and that it develops abstractions that map cleanly to human meaning. That is already the seed of general intelligence.
You are mistaking ignorance for insight. You think not knowing how something works grants you authority to say what it cannot become. But the only thing history shows is that such confidence always looks ridiculous in retrospect. The physics of intelligence exist. The brain proves it. And the LLM is the first machine that begins to display those same emergent behaviors. Saying it “will not be an LLM” is not a scientific claim. It is wishful thinking spoken from the wrong side of the curve.