this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2024
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You're implying that physical characteristics are inherently deterministic while we know they're not.
Your neurons are analog and noisy and sensitive to the tiny fluctuations of random atomic noise.
Beyond that: they don't do "if" logic, it's more like complex combinatorial arithmetics that simultaneously modify future outputs with every input.
Thanks for adding the extra info (not sarcasm)
Absolutely! It's a common misconception about neurons that I see in programming circles all the time. Before my pivot into programming I was pre-med and a physiology TA - I've always been interested in neurochemistry and how the brain works.
So I try and keep up with the latest about the brain and our understanding of it. It's fascinating.
Physics and more to the point, QM, appears probabilistic but wether or not it is deterministic is still up for debate. Until such a time that we develop a full understanding of QM we can not say for sure. Personally I am inclined to think we will find deterministic explanations in QM, it feels like nonsense to say that things could have happened differently. Things happen the way they happen and if you would rewind time before an event, it should resolve the same way.
Fair - it's not that we know it's not: it's that we don't know that it is.
Probabilistic is equally likely as deterministic - we've found absolutely nothing disproving probabilistic models. We've only found reinforcement for those models.
It's unintuitive to humans so of course we don't want to believe it. It remains to be seen if it's true.
Its worth mentioning that certain mainstream interpretations are also concretely deterministic. For example many worlds is actually a deterministic interpretation, the multiverse is deterministic, your particular branch simply appears probabilistic. Much more deterministic is Bohmian mechanics. Copenhagen interpretation, however, maintains randomness.
Sure but interpretations like pilot wave have more evidence against them than for them and while multiverse is deterministic it's only technically so. It's effectively probabilistic in that everything happens and therefore nothing is determined strictly by current state.
Though I should point out that the virtual neurons in LLMs are also noisy and sensitive, and the noise they use ultimately comes from tiny fluctuations of random atomic noise too.