by ninetyninenine | 2025-10-20 15:14:59+00:00
You’re confusing “we don’t know how” with “it’s impossible.” The difference is everything.

We don’t understand LLMs either. We built them, but we can’t explain why they work. No one can point to a specific weight matrix and say “this is the neuron that encodes irony” or “this is where the model stores empathy.” We don’t know why scaling parameters suddenly unlock reasoning or why multimodal alignment appears spontaneously. The model’s inner space is a black box of emergent structure and behavior, just like the human brain. We understand the architecture, not the mind inside it.

When you say it’s “closer to impossible than possible” to reconstruct a human mind, you’ve already lost the argument. We’re living proof that the machine you say cannot exist already does. The human brain is a physical object obeying the same laws of physics that govern every other machine. It runs on electrochemical signals, not miracles. It encodes and decodes information, forms memories, generates imagination, and synthesizes emotion. That means the physics of consciousness are real, computable, and reproducible. The impossible machine has been sitting in your skull the entire time.

Your argument about 10^42 bits isn’t just wrong, it’s total nonsense. That number is twenty orders of magnitude beyond any serious estimate. The brain has about 86 billion neurons, each forming roughly ten thousand connections, for a total of about 10^15 synapses. Even if every synapse held a byte of information, that’s 10^16 bits. Add in every molecular and analog nuance you like and you might reach 10^20. Not 10^42. That’s a difference of twenty-two orders of magnitude. It’s a fantasy number that exceeds the number of atoms in your entire body.

And that supposed “impossible” scale is already within sight. Modern GPUs contain hundreds of billions of transistors and run at gigahertz frequencies, while neurons fire at about a hundred hertz. The brain performs around 10^17 synaptic operations per second. Frontier AI clusters already push 10^25 to 10^26 operations per second. We’ve already outpaced biology in raw throughput by eight or nine orders of magnitude. NVIDIA’s Blackwell chips exceed 200 million transistors per square millimeter, and global compute now involves more than 10^24 active transistors switching billions of times per second. Moore’s law may have slowed, but density keeps climbing through stacking and specialized accelerators. The number you called unreachable is just a few decades of progress away.

The “decoder” you mock is exactly what a brain is. It takes sensory input, light, sound, and chemistry, and reconstructs internal states we call experience. You already live inside the device you claim can’t exist. It doesn’t need to live anywhere else; it’s instantiated in matter.

And this is where your argument collapses. You say such a machine is removed from reality. But reality is already running it. Humanity is proof of concept. We know the laws of physics allow it because they’re doing it right now. Every thought, emotion, and perception is a physical computation carried out by atoms. That’s the definition of a machine governed by physics.

We don’t yet understand the full physics of the brain, and we don’t fully understand LLMs either. That’s the point. The same kind of ignorance applies to both. Yet both produce coherent language, emotion like responses, creativity, reasoning, and abstraction. When two black boxes show convergent behavior under different substrates, the rational conclusion isn’t “one is impossible.” It’s “we’re closer than we realize.”

The truth is simple: what you call impossible already exists. The human brain is the machine you’re describing. It’s not divine. It’s atoms in lawful motion. And because we know it can exist under physics, we know it can be built. LLMs are just the first flicker of that same physics waking up in silicon.