Let me tell you about a Microsoft AI researcher […] who recently spent quite a lot of time considering whether the legendary Microsoft real time strategy game Age of Empires II is conscious, and built a basic neural network within the video game using digital goats to prove his point. […]
De Wynter built an LLM within AoEII using goats. “The point of the paper is to formally show that we anthropomorphise too readily, and that sometimes the claims we make with regards to LLM capabilities are too strong,” he told 404 Media. “It’s not an easy task, given that ‘human-like attributes’ is a bit of an abstract term.”
Not the vanilla game with a limited map, and not on a 90s (or any existing) computer, and never in real time. But anything that can chain NAND gates to arbitrary size is Turing-complete, and we hve good reason to believe all atoms in the human brain obey laws of physics which can be simulated in a huge but finite Turing machine (there is still some debate over what we don’t undersrand at quantum level). In fact, nobody has proved we don’t live in a simulation because that’s impossible (like most religions by design and there are no practical consequences so this talk is just philosophical, don’t waste your time trying to “break the Matrix”). And if the underlying simulation of our reality is goats on a huge AoE server, would that make me and you not conscious?