Programmer Humor

This is cool, but the framing rubs me the wrong way.

The assumption of human-like attributes is a bit of a stretch when you can build an LLM in any substrate

"I can theoretically run arbitrary computer programs inside another computer program" does not hold any philosophical weight.

We've known what Turing-completeness means for many decades now. ANY program you run on your computer can theoretically run on ANY Turing-complete substrate, which includes all kinds of ridiculous things. You could do this with PowerPoint or Minecraft, too. Or with a sufficient number of rocks on a beach.

If this is your first time learning about Turing-completeness, then...well, that's cool! Just don't let it rock your world too hard. :)

Whether LLMs have any "human-like attributes" has nothing to do with the substrate, beyond the point that different substrates will lead to different levels of performance in practice, and some emergent properties might only manifest at higher levels of performance in practice.

Whether a Turing machine (i.e. conventional computer) can theoretically do the same things as a human body is still an open question. (I say "human body" instead of just "human brain" because the brain is not responsible for all of human cognition and behavior, despite popular belief.) It might be fully impossible (unlikely, IMHO), it might require a completely unrealistic scale (most likely, IMHO), or it might be downright trivial once we figure out how.