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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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I said nothing about souls. If I'm talking about souls (without direct prompting), I'm deep in a psychotic episode.
I don't really get what you mean by the gestures broadly thing? I'm very open to an expansion on that thought, but have no current sense of what that means.
It's not just the vague idea of quantum hootnannies, it is the fact that intentionally inducing extra quantum hootnannies in the brain structure of animals has a noticeable impact on the effects of various anesthesia, i.e. the "anti-conciousness drugs".
I'm not claiming there is definitive proof, I'm simply stating there is some real, empirical evidence that supports the notion that consciousness is an emergent property reliant upon a maybe narrow range of emergent effects from quantum mechanics that are inherently absent from Turing machine computational models.
I spent a couple days on and off reading about this theory, I read a few papers in the field and some of Penrose's work (I didn't go grab his books). So, thanks. It was interesting. I have had some physicists mention to me in passing that quantum consciousness was a junk field, but I hadn't looked into it.
I agree, this is definitely bullshit.
Penrose himself attempts to dodge this in the first paragraph, but why are we groping for a special theory of consciousness at all?
Quantum mechanics is in everything, without it, fundamental processes (like light passing through your window) can not adequately be explained. Just because something has 'got a quantum' or whatever doesn't instantly make it special from a physical perspective (you don't see scientists tossing out conversation of energy or causality because stuff's 'got a quantum' or whatever).
You might be interested in some of the recent work demonstrating that anesthetics work on plants. Not a microtubule in sight.