this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2026
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Im no academic, so apologies for the lack of substance. I mostly just get stuck in rabbit holes reading about philosophy and consciousness while I should be working.
Check out these theories for some interesting ideas:
My summarized take is that modeling consciousness is akin to modeling the three-body problem or the double-pendulum. Even if the system is deterministic and capable of being modeled, you’ll forever be bottlenecked by finite precision in your model. The system itself is one where errors grow exponentially. For example, tiny differences in the double pendulum’s initial angle (like 0.000001°) rapidly amplify over time to produce wildly different trajectories. It is computationally intractable without unlimited precision — hence, this is why I said you’d need to model the entire universe. This is deterministic chaos, and we have no reason to think human-brains aren’t heavily dependent on its utility.
Interesting. I was working off of the assumption that any entity the size of a human brain could be modeled, at some point in the future, simply because we can make artificial computational devices that are bigger than, and thus capable of being more complex than, it. But obviously that assumption is just blind intuition, and lacks the nuance and established theory you're bringing to the table. I'm kind of embarrassed that I believed that would be enough time throw my hat into the ring. I'll have to check those out.