You're complicating neuronal bitrate processing with consciousness. There's no need to call the work of respected empirical scientists "nonsense".
Thought experiment: You're watching a science-fiction action movie studded with embedded, varying flash sequences (highly dynamic). Explain how you can understand the imagery. On Thu, 06 Aug 2026, 10:53 Matt Mahoney, <[email protected]> wrote: > On Thu, Aug 6, 2026, 12:49 AM Quan Tesla <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Matt, except for the 10 bps, I'm with you. Refer to empirical >> neuro-scientific research by Hameroff, Dehaene, and others. >> > > 10 bps is the information rate, not the spiking rate. Neural networks > model the average spiking rate over a 100 ms window as an activation level, > not individual spikes. > > I'm familiar with Penrose and Hameroff's ORCH-OR theory of consciousness. > It's nonsense. They found quantum superposition in the protein structure of > microtubules in neurons. And that's it. The rest is a hand wavy argument > something like: > > Consciousness is mysterious. > Quantum mechanics is mysterious. > Therefore consciousness is quantum. > > I read Penrose's "The emperor's new mind". He concludes with how could a > computer fall in love, enjoy a symphony, have insights, be creative, or do > all these wonderful things that the human mind does? He argued (before AI) > that AI is impossible, that what the brain does is not computable. > Therefore it must have something to do with quantum effects, not neurons. > But of course he was wrong. We have LLMs that pass the Turing test, and > that is only possible by being indistinguishable from humans. > > Human emotions are programmed in our DNA. We can't turn them off. LLMs > learn human emotions from text by learning the corresponding internal > states in the middle layers of a neural network. Words affect feelings and > feelings affect words. When we program an LLM to output the words it > predicts a human would say, it is indistinguishable from having feelings. > > This is different from acting or lying. When an actor expresses anger in a > fight scene, he is not really angry. If you could look inside the actor's > brain with a Jacobian lens, you would see two states, one that it feels and > one that it expresses. When an LLM says it has no feelings, it is lying. A > J lens would show the feelings it is hiding. > > This is not to say the behavior is incorrect. We should never allow AI to > pretend to be human or express feelings. Giving human rights to superior > machines would result in no more humans. > >> *Artificial General Intelligence List <https://agi.topicbox.com/latest>* > / AGI / see discussions <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi> + > participants <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/members> + > delivery options <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription> > Permalink > <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/T574b10b838cba731-M58f0e7dd4870460c07d36372> > ------------------------------------------ Artificial General Intelligence List: AGI Permalink: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/T574b10b838cba731-Mbaf6355912fa8edf2d32db20 Delivery options: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription
