We need to distract the public from the Soviet bomb sniffing balloons we're flying... er, embarassing sex files we're hiding! What should we do?

UFO stories?

How did you manage to spell UAP wrong when writing it out correctly immediately after?

What letter in UFO do you think stands for "aliens?"

You absolutely can though. There is nothing stopping you from seeding the run with a single LLM, or even substituting the function definition for random() with:

random() { // determined by fair dice roll
        return 5;
}

We can trivially and easily do this.

And further, it seems you are now suggesting that substituting the above random function for this one:

random() { //
    input = ask-user-for-fair-dice-roll();
    return input;
}

and now you sit there rolling dice and inputing the results, and the computer program gains consciousness?

really?

The difference, of course, is that we currently DO actually know EXACTLY how an LLM works. We can snapshot the model and seed the random number generator to make it generate exactly the same output from exactly the same input every single time. We can pause it, set breakpoints, inspect and dump data structures.

It IS simply a program running on a CPU, and using RAM.

Is it possible that's all humans are in the end? Sure its possible, I can't prove otherwise. But we are not remotely in a position to assert that its the case.

You invoke philosophy which is entirely appropriate. There are fairy tales for example of artists painting things so realistic that they come to life. And it poses an interesting question here: is there is a difference between a simulation and a real thing? Can a simulation of life, be "alive"? Or must it forever remain a simulation.

And a related, and perhaps ultimately simpler question is can a *turing machine simulation of life* be "alive".

A lovely illustration of the question:
https://xkcd.com/505/

Can what you and I perceive as our lives, the universe around us, and everything REALLY be underpinned by some guy in a desert pushing pebbles around in a big desert somewhere?

Can the arrangement of stones in a desert, and some guy updating moving them aorund, in some pattern he interprets as representing the information that describes our universe actually "BE" our universe?

Is is the pattern of rocks is JUST a pattern of rocks. Is the guy moving them around JUST moving them around. Is the interpretation of the pattern as a representation of the state of a universe, just that, a representation?

Or you truly think there is a galaxy with a planet with people on it having a conversation on slashdot,'frozen in time' waiting for some guy to move the rocks into the next pattern and that somehow results in the experience we are sharing right now?

Or put more succinctly - can an abstract representation of a thing be the thing? be it bits in a DRAM module memory or pebbles arranged in the sand? can it be the thing it represents? Can the painting of a zebra if its done skilfully enough be a zebra?

Yeah, but you also send some of it. That's negative data (the opposite of receiving) so it cancels out.

P2P to distribute updates, which can dramatically reduce the amount of data sent over the wire.

Google's wire, sure. Your wire, no.

You are (nominally) a democracy. The voters are responsible. That's what it means.

Voting is important. Maybe stop treating it like a football game. You bet, a first good step would be getting rid of the paid sponsorships in the stadium.

Damn, that's half of all the sick leave taken in just a quarter of the week!

They pile rocks on top.

Hey, can you imagine how much better the plumbing in your house would be if the pipes were a bunch of 1 inch sections connected by joints?

I don't know why you'd think the short sections would have to be aligned less precisely. A 1 mm error multiplied by a a couple thousand joints between 10 m sections has a good chance of being a lot bigger than a 1 mm error multiplied by 80 joints.

I used to think that maybe I, a simple country ignoramus, just wasn't equipped to understand the Wonders of the Modern Age.

Nonsense. The key is to keep that humility and read a book or use the informative parts of the Internet.

It's already been spent... on you.

The people of the United States, represented by their duly elected representatives, illegally collected this money, and then spent it. Mostly on the military, to judge by the latest funding requests. So yeah, the perpetrators of the crime have to pay the restitution. It doesn't matter that you hired someone else to do the crime on your behalf.

That's ridiculous. Tariffs come with records (copious amounts) on both sides. The government knows exactly who paid them, and those people have a nice receipt from the relevant authority.

There might be some squabbling over exactly which payments fall under the specific tariff regimes that were ruled illegal, and getting your current government to actually follow the law is dicey, but there's nothing that needs to be investigated.

Family-owned businesses traditionally don't prioritize "extracting maximum value".

Lol.

You might have also heard the names like Carnegie, Rockefeller and Vanderbilt. They weren't called "robber barons" for nothing.

I am not joking. Quantum mechanics is called that. You can look it up.

Your next two paragraphs, sure. There are lots of interpretations of quantum mechanics, and also lots of interpretations of quantum field theory, the relative of quantum mechanics that isn't obviously wrong. They range from strictly deterministic to probabalistic.

That's not relevant to the thread though. The OP said "mechanical." Strictly speaking "mechanics" involves describing the relationships among physical objects, but we can squint our eyes a bit and consider that the OP meant predicting behaviour, but it does not mean strictly deterministic. Quantum mechanics makes very good predictions. Those predictions are probabalistic. Newtonian mechanics also makes pretty good predictions (though nowhere near as good as QM). Those predictions are ALSO probabalistic. Both are "mechanics." The difference, if there is one, comes down to interpretation.

Neither generative models nor the human brain are deterministic. Both are mechanical, unless you happen to have some mystical beliefs about one or both.

We need a better concept.

You've illustrated the problem but I'm not sure the "solution" you're suggesting exists. We have lots of different concepts to describe cognition, consciousness being only one of them. There are more stringent definitions for consciousness too, and that spectrum illustrates the basic problem: real concrete definitions admit too many things that many people would prefer they didn't, and the definitions that rigorously exclude those tend to boil down to "magic that only (some?) humans possess".

Turing didn't propose a quacks-like-a-duck test because he was an idiot.