What do you think a human brain is…

This is like saying the person you see in the mirror is categorically a human being because both of you produce similar reflections of light rays

The person I see in a mirror is a human being. The person I see in a mirror is me. What do you think a mirror is?

Then why is he left-handed?

Because the primary is right handed.

I enjoy asking my grandkids why mirrors reflect left to right and not top to bottom.

They do "reflect top to bottom".

Hold a written word in front of your eyes to read it.

Now flip it to the mirror to read the reflection:

Did you flip it horizontally? Then it reflected left-to-right.

Did you flip it vertically? Then it reflected top-to-bottom.

I think "reflect top to bottom" is intended to mean "swap top and button". A mirror reflects left, right, top and bottom perfectly. It's front and back that it swaps.

Someone saying that a mirror swaps left and right is comparing it to a photograph, and only because we, as bipedal creatures, really prefer to orient images of other humans with heads up.

You know, I never thought about that.

This was my small "mind expansion moment" for today. Thanks!

Someone saying that a mirror is swapped left and right is because they rotated themselves 180 degrees about the vertical axis to face the vertically aligned mirror. If they used a horizontal axis instead, they would have swapped top and bottom. And if the mirror is horizontally mounted on the floor, anything goes. You'd probably say it swaps up and down, which is front and back from the mirror's point of view.

> It's front and back that it swaps.

This sub-thread is becoming unfairly more interesting than the main conversation at this point.

So he is not the primary?

Call him Bob.

Nomenclature is just a convention of convenience and can be ever so judgemental.

Particle / anti-Particle ... way to lead the jury, hey?

What we do know is that when Bob walks up to a mirror he sees adastra22.

The glass is likely there to stop them touching and spawning a new universe.

Notice how in your own example, the anti-particle is not the particle, and Bob is not adastra22.

I did notice that these things are labels and not objects.

Good point.

And it would revolutionize our current understanding of physics to find out that p = p̄

If you do not think there is a difference between "your reflection in a mirror" and "you", it opens so many fascinating questions. I'm curious:

- Do you think a live video, shown on a phone screen, of you, is "you"?

- Do you think a still photograph of you is "you"?

- Do you think a set of bytes representing that photograph (or video) digitally is "you"?

- Do you think a compressed version of that photograph is "you"? Is there a limit to how much I can size down the image or compress it until it's no longer "you"?

- Do you think the base-10 number equivalent to that digitized picture is also "you"? Can I memorize "you" if I learn all the digits of that number? Can I write "you" on a piece of paper from memory? Is Pi a person?

- There is a very large number of reflecting surfaces in the world. How many of you are there?

- Does the "you" in the mirror persist if you walk off the frame and can no longer see yourself in the mirror? What happened to him? Does he live in a left-handed world? What happens if I shatter or paint over the mirror?

- If I draw you, is my drawing "you"? Does the accuracy of the drawing influence whether it is really "you" or not? If so, then does the accuracy/quality of the mirror influence whether it is "you" or not in the reflection? Are "you" fatter or slimmer, depending if the mirror is warped?

- If you're standing far from the mirror, but I'm close to it and I can see "you", why can I talk or signal to you and you don't respond?

> Is Pi a person?

Not only that! Does the decimal representation of π (which is infinite in length) contain all persons who ever existed, and will ever exist? Since π itself is a known reason, but its decimal representation is infinite, it means π cannot contain itself. So if it can contain every person that ever existed, but can't contain itself (which could conceivably contain everyone), then what does that even mean?

Aaargghh.

I do love the idea that Pi contains all of us. It means everytime you put on a wedding ring, time a pendulum, look at a rainbow, or land on a spherical planet, you can whip out your ruler and get access to every single human that ever lived or will live. What a concept!

Spot me after the next rain. I'll be in the color indigo, right above the pot of gold, waving back.

The image you see in the mirror is a reflection of a human. Or, more precisely, a 2-dimensional projection of the frontal outer surface of a human.

One half of one dimension less than a human. But sure looks convincing on the surface.

Technically it's you in the past. Just slightly.

Suppose if we wanted to get philosophical it could go in the "ceci n'est pas une pipe" direction but I agree

an animal organ?

We already have 8 billion human brains, and we routinely duplicate them biologically.

AI is something else, as it should be.

> We didn’t replicate the human brain. We built systems that can statistically approximate some of what the human brain might output in certain limited situations.

Which is equivalent to

"We didn't replicate the human brain. We partially replicated its functionality."

In a "clean room" style implementation, as well. We've looked at the outputs, wrote a spec, and built from there.

In that sense, I guess at least LLMs are not infringeing on the kind of patents that would get the owners of AI labs hit by lightning.

Given how much we know of the human brain this may be partially how we work

Maybe we should be asking what our own "system prompts" are ?

One of the reasons this analogy is unconvincing is that humans have compared themselves and their inner workings to "the current technology of the time" for millenia:

- ~3rd century BCE : The invention of hydraulic engineering (eg aqueducs) in the 3rd century BCE led to the popularity of a hydraulic model of human intelligence, the idea that the flow of different fluids in the body accounted for both physical and mental functioning.

- Pre-Socratic Greece : The ancient Greeks saw the mind as a chariot pulled by horses of reason and emotion.

- 1500s-1600s: Automata powered by springs and gears had been devised, Descartes suggested that cerebral hydraulic automata produced behavior by powering "animal spirits" through the nerves.

- 1700s–1800s: The mind worked like clockwork.

- Industrial revolution (1800s) : In the industrial revolution, the mind was understood as a steam engine.

- Late 1800s : Hermann von Helmholtz compared the mind's workings to telegraphy and hydraulics; the brain was likened to a telegraph network or a complex switchboard

- 1895 : Sigmund Freud in 1895 described a Project for a Scientific Psychology using a crude neural network model and borrowed concepts from thermodynamics, speaking of psychic energy, pressure, and discharge, essentially a hydraulic model of the psyche.

- 1930s–present : "our brain is a computer"

- and 2022-now: "We are LLMs!"

I can't wait to become a quantum chip, an NFT, and so on, as new things arrive. It doesn't make any of those models accurate. They're just the metaphor of the day.

I suppose you could argue that none of those had the actual engineers behind them attempting to replicate "intelligence" though. Just because random people made metaphors doesn't mean the engineers designing them had any illusion that it was nothing like the brain.

My personal opinion is that eventually we may just get advanced enough genetic engineering combined with brain / computer networks that the real A.I. will just be a brain like thing grown in a lab but more specialised. Or who knows - our own brains might have some quantum inner workings as well we are unaware of !

Counterpoint: Our engineers are currently trying to replicate "intelligence" and we think it's like the brain because today we think the brain is where "intelligence" reside, and today we strongly believe that "we" are our brains.

I would argue that the inventors of those past technologies were trying to replicate other things (movement, energy, pressure, pneuma, psyche, physis, whatever) that felt deeply human to them, and that in the zeitgeist of his time, Hero of Alexandria (1 BC) could also have said:

> I suppose you could argue that none of the stories of the past had the actual philosophers behind them attempting to replicate "pneuma" though.

Paracelse was trying to create a homonculus by using semen, manure, and blood in the 16th century or so.

A few decades or centuries from now, maybe engineers will try to replicate "consciousness" (though it's pretty clear that Anthropic is already trying) when it has become clear to 22nd century people that giving an object "intelligence" gets you no closer to recreating humanity than "movement through pneumatics" does.