I'm pulling the "twitter is a microblog" rule even though twitter is pretty mega now, hope that's ok.
this post was submitted on 03 May 2026
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The actual article isn't nearly as stupid as the tweet makes it seem. I recommend giving it a read. It's behind a shitty paywall, but if you use Firefox's reader mode (Ctrl-Alt-R, or the little papper icon to the right side of the address bar) as soon as the page loads, you can read it.
His argument is basically that LLMs are able to do things we previously thought only conscious beings would be capable of doing, and so, if they aren't conscious, then perhaps consciousness isn't as important as we thought it was:
Some people will surely contest his claim that LLMs are as competent as evolved organisms. There's definitely a bit of AI boomerism at play here (we have benchmarks that show just how incompetent LLMs can be), but I don't think that invalidates his point, because LLMs can be very competent in the domains they're trained to be competent in -- they just aren't AGI.
As LLMs have developed and have been able to cram more and more "thoughtlike" behaviour into smaller RAM and less computation, I've steadily become less impressed with human brains. It seems like the bits we think most highly of are probably just minor add-ons to stuff that's otherwise dedicated to running our big complicated bodies in a big complicated physics environment. If all you want to have is the part that philosophizes and solves abstract problems and whatnot then you may not actually need all that much horsepower.
I'm thinking consciousness might also turn out to be something pretty simple. Assuming consciousness is even a particular "thing" in the first place and not just a side effect of being able to predict how other people will behave.
Brains aren’t impressive because of their compute (which is both immense and absurdly efficient) or their ability to predict the future (technically the main function of evolved minds). They’re impressive because they’re conscious. The fact that organic brains can also engage in hierarchical abstraction, which no digital computer (or Turing machine) can do by definition, is icing on the cake.
(The halting problem and Godel’s incompleteness and Traski’s undefinability theorems all seem to suggest that analog, not digital computation is more likely to be involved in consciousness, if at all.)
You're going to have to do a lot more to justify the leap from Godel's Incompleteness and the Halting Problem to "digital is limited, analog is not", because neither of those things have anything to do with digital processes at all, and in fact both came about before we'd invented digital computers.
To me this comment sounds like when popsci gets ahold of a few sciency words and suddenly decides everything is crystal vibrations universal harmonics string theory quantum tunneling aligning resonance with those around you.
The situation is the following.
We’ll probably need analog computation, currently in its infancy, to get artificial (inorganic) consciousness.
I study metaethics and philosophy of mathematics. These problems are real, and I am being honest with you.
That is not the situation. 😛
Analog signals are not digitally irreducible without presuming there's no level of noise floor under which greater detail is irrelevant, Turing's machines are not digital by their construction and predate the concept by a long time, and the first computers we built were analog and we invented digital computers later because they were cheaper and more efficient and easier and more reliable.
Also the halting problem doesn't say "there are things which a computer can't know but a human can", it says "there are some things that cannot be known".
Similarly Gödel proved that there will always be true things about a system that cannot be proven from within the system, that is using its axioms. That was a real bummer for folks trying to prove all of math with a small set of axioms. But that does not mean there are things math can't know that humans magically can, it just means there's other math, outside the axioms, that are true without following from them, in math. He proved it with math, after all. It doesn't claim to give any special abilities to human brains.
And also, again, nothing Gödel or Turing ever said has anything to do with the concept of "digital" anything. I think you're using the term "digital" to mean "rulesy"? Which is not even close to what it means?
I won’t argue with you, because some of what you wrote isn’t even wrong.
However, on the off chance that you actually care about what is true, I urge you to take a theoretical computer science course. Lectures from MIT and Carnegie Mellon are available on YouTube.
Stop watching podcasts with pseudo-intellectual media grifters and read the actual research literature by real philosophers and mathematicians on these otherwise arcane topics.
I'm only about 15% sure you yourself aren't an AI bot making a beautifully ironic and satirical play here. But I think we can agree not to argue any longer 🤝
No one else is reading this, so you can stop. You and I both know you’re a complete ignoramus about these topics. I guess I just don’t “get” your kind. Antivaxxers, flat-earthers. I don’t understand the motivation to lie — to yourself and everyone else. Like… why? Don’t answer that. I know you’ve no idea. All of it is just so cringe.