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A Microsoft researcher built a goat-powered LLM in Age of Empires II to prove it's not sentient
(www.xda-developers.com)
this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2026
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"If you captured and simulated every neuron in the human brain, you’d be left with a feedforward process simulating a particular neural state of a particular person. No feeling, no reflection, no introspection, no semantic meaning. Just a neat toy."
Seems to me you think there's something special about humans, I don't believe there's any proof to that.
Yes its orders of magnitude more complex then a fly brain, that doesn't mean it's impossible to simulate.
There's no proof to a soul, our whole existence is our meat which evolved naturally over extreme timescales via random forces and natural selection, I see no reason to believe we could not do the same with our intelligence in a much shorter period of time comparatively.
I don’t, though. I get where you’re coming from, because I too often point out other people’s hidden assumptions about things like a soul or magic sauce to consciousness. I don’t subscribe. I follow something closer to a procedural understanding of consciousness.
I think it does. You aren’t going to simulate human consciousness if human consciousness is a procedure. At least, not how you’d simulate stock exchanges.
The difference is simulation versus synthesis. Your simulation would be a feed forward process and humans are not feed forward processes. Humans are phenomenologically driven entities. Your simulation would be a behaviorally consistent model at best — no phenomenology. Sorry to say, but that’s just not the same thing. It wouldn’t work the same way, wouldn’t feel the same, and you definitely wouldn’t have “figured out consciousness” just by building such a simulation. It would be a neat toy, like LLMs, but it wouldn’t be sentient. That’s obvious to me.
Yeah, and I’m really not arguing for a soul. I’m arguing that simulation is subpar to recreation. If you simulated every neuron, you haven’t achieved anything really remarkable — except an awesome benchmark for computer power and a place in the history book. That’s it.
If you want a grand unifying theory of consciousness, you need to understand that phenomenology (the thing science ignores) is pretty damn central to the whole thing. That’s not arguing for a soul. That’s saying, pinch yourself — you are awake and you are not a robot.
At what point to you would it move from simulation to essentially the same configuration just in a different container?
I still think you're conflating the aspect of life we experience as somehow separate from the procedure our brain takes to present that to you.
Never.
Intelligence is substrate independent, and does not depend on consciousness or phenomenology. Phenomenology is probably substrate dependent, though. Meaning, the meatbag wrapped around our skeletal system really does matter. Phenomenology is also what makes us feel anything at all.
You can make all the intelligence you want, bootstrapping it off our neural architecture. You’re still doing us a disservice if you call it human. It’s more like a new species, with much more intelligence and virtually no phenomenological experience.
But calling it a new species is also arguable, because whether or not it would be “alive” is arguable. I’d just call it a neat toy.
I don't understand why you think it'd be out of the question for it to have phenomoligcal experiences, why couldn't we build a way for it to smell if it has the same pathways to be able to interpret that? How would that be meaningfully different?
Think about hearing aides or other similar "enhancements" wherein were simply adjusting the input in a way and the brain is still able to process it.
I would agree it wouldn't be the same as a literal human, thinking like Fallout 4 style synths, I consider them people (in universe of course lol) even if they're not literally humans.
The difference is having a phenomenological experience versus data processing. A phenomenological experience actually feels like something. We have literally no reason to believe phenomenology isn’t deeply dependent on the body. In fact, we probably have more evidence that it does depend on the body. Science doesn’t do a good job at justifying phenomenology though… and you aren’t going to conveniently recreate phenomenology using brute force via a technique that hinges itself on conveniently ignoring subjective information such as how things feel.
If your simulation has the “same pathways” to smell, congratulations—you just remade biological life. You made the nose, brain, and the connections between the two. If you didn’t do that, then you made a fancy copy cat machine. It doesn’t actually smell, not anymore than ChatGPT actually thinks.
Maybe you can give it a device that lets it convert air-born chemical signals into information it can act on. That’s a feature of intelligence though… not really a phenomenologically active experience. If you asked this intelligence machine “can you smell like I do?” I imagine it might respond, “no. I can process chemical information much like you do, but my ability to do so is based on data whereas yours is based on feeling or intuition.”
You literally cant experience the world like a computer would—without personal and phenomenal subjectivity. Equally so, a computer cant experience the world like you would. Even simulated, that’s not the same thing as feeling something.
Honestly, … I’m not saying this machine wouldn’t have applications. It very well may be like a supercharged LLM, for all I know. It’s just not human, no more than a Birch can ever be a Redwood.
Addressing that more specifically, I think it’s because I have yet to see a single scientific development in the wake of understanding the cause and nature of phenomenology. It’s ignored, rightfully so. Science doesn’t need to concern itself with phenomenology, at least hasn’t so far.
People have similarly argued that consciousness “arises” when an information machine is sufficiently complex. This claim of weak emergence seems ignorant to me; “arise” is doing a lot of magic handwaving. I’d argue it’s the same for phenomenology — you’re not going to stumble upon how to make a machine feel just by brute forcing more complexity.
Also, we should not be so naïve to think that understanding phenomenology is unnecessary for our goals [only because it’s not in the scientific spotlight]. Phenomenology is central to our experience and every other complex life forms experience (given a CNS).
Slime mold is intelligent, bear in mind. No nervous system, I’m doubtful it “feels” anything, but it’s intelligent. Imagine that you reprogrammed some slime mold to process information such that its external behavior perfectly resembled a human. It morphed into a humanoid shape, did human things… but you’d still say it’s not human. It’s all the intelligence, none of the humanity.
Would you consider my humanoid slime mold a “person?” You’re free to, but I think it’s arguable. My dog really connects with me… I don’t believe my slime mold would ever really connect with me.