by vidarh | 2025-11-22 18:18:35+00:00
> No. The brain is existence proof that that particular physical substrate can achieve intelligence efficiently.

So in other words, it is existence proof that it can be done efficiently. You arbitrarily applied your false beliefs about what that statement implied.

If you want to claim that we don't have any evidence that it can be done in an arbitrary substrate, then you'd be right, but that is entirely separate argument I have no interest in.

> You are claiming "computational equivalence" means any Turing-complete system can efficiently replicate any other, but this does not follow from Turing's thesis at all.

I have never in my life made that claim.

I have at times argued I believe that efficiency is "just" an engineering problem, but I have certainly not ever argued that computational equivalence proves that.

Again you are falsely attributing opinions to me I do not hold, and it's frankly offensive that you keep attrbuting to me things I not only have not said, but do not agree with.

> The abstraction layers, the architecture, the implementation: these all matter for the actual question at hand.

They do not at all matter for the question of whether one architecture is theoretically capable of computing the same as the other, which is what I have argued it is.

> This concedes the key point.

It concedes nothing. It pointed out that my argument was about whether LLMs can be made to "represent ideas that is has not encountered before" and "come up with truly novel concepts".

Those were the claims I stated has no evidence in favour of them. Nothing of what you have written in any of your responses have any relevance to that.

As you concede:

> Exactly.

Then you go on to make another false assertion about what I have said:

> Your argument has contracted from making claims about actual LLM capabilities to an unfalsifiable position about theoretical possibility.

It has done nothing of the sort. You have repeatedly tried to argue against a position I did not take, by repeatedly misrepresenting what I have claimed, as this quoted statement also does.

There is also nothing unfalsificable about my claim:

Show that humans can compute even a single function outside the Turing computable, and my argument is is proven false.

> In the sense you are now defending, it is "possible" that monks with abacuses could run Crysis given infinite time and perfect execution. This tells us nothing interesting about whether current LLMs have unbounded creativity.

This is the only thing I have been defending. It may not be interesting to you, but to be it matters because without it being possible, there is no point in even arguing over whether it is practical.

If said Crysis-executing monks were fundamentally limited in a way that made it impossible for them to execute the steps, then it would be irrelevant whether or not there were ways for them to speed it up (say, by building computers...).

Since I was arguing against someone who denied the possibility that is the only argument I had any reason to make.

> Perhaps I am misunderstanding your original argument. Could you clarify what your argument is exactly? I want to make sure we are not talking past each other.

I told you how you misunderstood my original argument: I've argued over possibility. I've not made any argument about difficulty or complexity.

You've gone out to falsely and rudely claim that my argument has shifted, but it has not.

Here is my first comment in this sub-thread, where I state there is no evidence to support a claim that LLMs "will not be able to represent ideas that it has not encountered before" and won't be able to "come up with truly novel concepts". My original claim didn't even extent to claim full computational equivalence, because it was not necessary.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45996749