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I'm not entirely opposed to the kind of animism that assigns a certain amount of soul, consciousness, or being to everything in a spectrum between a rock and a philosopher... but even so.

Multiplying large matrices over and over is very much towards the "rock" end of that scale.

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If we accept the Church-Turing thesis, a philosopher can be simulated by a simple Universal Turing machine.

If one day we are able to create a philosopher from such a rudimentary machine (and a lot of tape), would you consider that very much towards the "rock" end as well?


Can a Turing machine of any sort truly indistinguishably simulate a nondeterministic system?

If a Turing machine can truly simulate a full nondeterministic system as complex as a philosopher but it would take dedicating every gram of matter in the visible universe for a trillion years to simulate one second, is this meaningfully different than saying it cannot?

I suggest the answer to both questions are no, but the second one makes the answer at worst "practically, no".

My feeling is that consciousness is a phenomenon deeply connected to quantum mechanics and thus evades simulation or recreation on Turing machines.




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