Consciousness debate: digital simulation can't instantiate causal physics, Church-Turing won't save you
pwlot · x · 2026-09-06
A debate sparked by neuroscientist Anil Seth on X: he argues that while anything can be simulated, for most things simulation does not lead to realisation or instantiation.
Replying, pwlot elaborates: gravity and electricity can never be digitally instantiated no matter how many FLOPS you throw at them — at best you get a "dynamic description," and "the description is not the described." In his view consciousness piggybacks on a set of physical phenomena without which it cannot exist, an aspect widely ignored in consciousness discussions; no appeal to the Church-Turing thesis resolves this.
The exchange cuts to the core of the computationalist debate: whether identical I/O behaviour collapses the distinction between simulating and instantiating a mind.
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