Humans are Just Self Aware Intelligent Biological Machines

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I need to definitely educate myself on chaos theory and quantum mechanics, but as mentioned in normality unaffected you linked above, and my comment above, we (humans) seems to be very predictable atleast in the short term, and if you have the exact body state and the algorithms it runs you can predict what we will do in the next moment given an input.

I didn't look into what Sam Harris said but based on my involvement with Robert's books and videos, my interest in this is that, this way of looking at things makes us come out of the human exceptionalism argument, that we are just doing computation and not so different from AI doing computation, and gives us a more unified way of looking at consciousness and agency.

I am not trying to paint a depressing picture but want to make this view more mainstream.
This view actually made me feel more in control of my body, because I can choose the inputs I give it so that I can function at maximum capacity, while you can say that I was that kind of a person to begin with, I want to actively experiment and talk about my results and that could lead to more and more people doing it and getting great results for themselves.

If we do solve neural inputs and hacking the brain through companies like Neuralink, this paints a more rosy picture on how we can solve any issue related to the brain.

Some fun examples:

eat the most healthy food but hack your brain's input to think you are eating your favourite food.
exercise automatically while you are watching a movie and feel no pain etc.

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3 Humans are Just Self Aware Intelligent Biological Machines

by asksathvik

21st Feb 2025

2 min read

3

This is a linkpost for https://asksathvik.substack.com/p/ai-is-just-computation-are-you-scared

If you read Robert Sapolky’s Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will or even the more subtle Behave he makes a very clear argument for why there is no free will and that humans are just self aware intelligent biological machines

Free will in the general context means that you are in complete control of the decisions you make, that is farthest from the truth.

Sure you can hack your body and brain to listen to you more, but you cannot be free from it completely.

When I say humans are just self aware biological intelligent machines, I am also making the most subtle point that all living things are also biological machines with different levels of self awareness.

Cells have no self awareness but are definitely intelligent, they can adapt to various living conditions pretty easily so they are not just a simple set of basic rules.
- DNA somehow has all the information needed for the cell to do this.
At the other end we have humans - with the most self awareness and high intelligence.
But in the middle we have the whole evolution tree from fish to reptiles to amphibians to mammals..
- Consciousness or more simply self awareness is definitely a spectrum.

When Robert Sapolsky says there is no free will, he means that if we know your current body state perfectly, we can predict with 100% accuracy what you will do in the next moment given an input.

What is means that any choice you are making is pre-determined by your past, right from milliseconds before making that choice to millions/billions of years of evolutionary conditioning.

Say you go to a new restaurant and your wife is reading the menu to pick an item if you know your wife well enough, you can predict what she would like, even if it’s a restaurant which you never went to.

Doesn’t mean that she’s not making that choice. It’s just been pre-decided.
Yes, even though she is actually going through some options and trying to make a choice, if you know her, you can definitely predict it - this is a very simple argument for there’s no free will behind that choice.
If you can replicate her brain and body states perfectly, you can in the next moment, predict with 100% accuracy what she will do next, of course we need the algorithms that your brain and body is running as well.

And to clarify this doesn’t mean I can predict what she will do in an hour/day/month so on:

Human brain is actively learning from the environment, and our lives can turn upside down in a second.
Because environment is so unpredictable (at least with the current tech) its not possible to predict her body + brain state far in the future.
But if we can predict environment perfectly as well, then yes everything is pre-determined.

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Humans are Just Self Aware Intelligent Biological Machines

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[-]Seth Herd4mo62

Try it. Try predicting what someone you know well will get from the menu. You will be right only a portion of the time (unless your friends are super predictable; but I bet you can't predict what they'll say on their favofite topics).

We technically have no "free will" by that definition, but why should anyone care?

Predicting human behavior is extremely difficult, because any one of a million ideas could be floating in our heads while we make a given decision. Those ideas are often important; we have them for reasons.

So we have self-determination, which is more important than "free will" by this definition.

The care and effort with which we make decisions has an important impact on our futures. That's the type of free will worth wanting.

Now, there are also limitations to that. Biases and cognitive limitations keep us from making good decisions.

So our self-determination is limited.

These seem much more worth thinking about and understanding than some abstract in-the-limit determinism. Why would anyone ever care if a god could predict their actions, when no such god exists, and humans can only make bad guesses?

[-]asksathvik4mo10

I specifically mentioned wife instead of a generic friends specifically due to this reason, I have been with her 7.5 years now and we have grown together, and I have a good understanding of what she likes and how those likes are changing or are constant.
Why do you need god for this? If we sufficiently understand how the brain and body works we should be able to predict.
Anyways the post isn't about if we can do this now or in the future, its about how humans are just doing computation and nothing more, and how similar is that to a powerful AI doing computation, so that we can have a more unified view on what's conscious and what has agency.

[-]Richard_Kennaway4mo40

You can't even predict the weather more than a few days in advance, and you can't predict the movement of individual gas molecules for longer than a tiny fraction of a second, even if you knew their exact positions and velocities, which you can't. So these hypothetical determinations are of no consequence. Add quantum indeterminacy and your hypothetical exact prediction of the future becomes a probability distribution over possible worlds, i.e. an exact calculation of your ignorance.

The question I am more interested in is, why are all these people in recent years — Robert Sapolsky, Sam Harris, and others — proclaiming that no-one can really choose anything? Because regardless of all the careful explanations of what they really mean, which amount to denying their own headlines, it's the headline bailey that people will remember, not the tiny, empty motte on the hill that leaves normality unaffected.

[-]asksathvik4mo*10

Some fun examples:

eat the most healthy food but hack your brain's input to think you are eating your favourite food.
exercise automatically while you are watching a movie and feel no pain etc.

[-]TAG4mo*20

Free will in the general context means that you are in complete control of the decisions you make, that is farthest from the truth. Sure you can hack your body and brain ...

Why "complete" control? You can disprove anything , in a fake sort of way, by setting then bar high -- if you define memory as Total Recall, it turns out no-one has a memory.

Who's this "you" who's separate from both brain and body? Shouldn't you be asking how the machine works? A machine doesn't have to be deterministic , and can be self-modifying.

When Robert Sapolsky says there is no free will, he means that if we know your current body state perfectly, we can predict with 100% accuracy what you will do in the next moment given an input.

We can't, in general. Theres no perfect predictability in the human sciences.

I specifically mentioned wife instead of a generic friends

Then you you are picking a special case to make a general point.

If we sufficiently understand how the brain and body works we should be able to predict.

Why? Determinism isn't a fact. We don't have evidence of physical determinism, so we can't make a bottom up argument, and we dont have perfect predictability in psychology, either.

@Seth Herd

Why would anyone ever care if a god could predict their actions, when no such god exists, and humans can only make bad guesses?I

Predictability implies determinism, determinism implies no (libertarian) free will.

[-]asksathvik4mo10

Why "complete" control? You can disprove anything , in a fake sort of way, by setting then bar high -- if you define memory as Total Recall, it turns out no-one has a memory.
Who's this "you" who's separate from both brain and body? Shouldn't you be asking how the machine works? A machine doesn't have to be deterministic , and can be self-modifying.

What I meant was the consciousness part of your brain, the "you" who wants to do something. Its your ego.

Machine can be both deterministic and self modifying, its deterministic when doing inference and modifying itself during training, although models can do test-time RL as well to update their weights on the fly.

Also of course, I am very interested in learning how it works and that's why I am reading multiple books in Neuroscience and Psychology. (Jung and Jeff Hawkins)

I just want to be in touch with the ground reality, and I believe that there has to be a set of algorithms we are running, some of which the conscious mind controls and some the autonomous nervous system, it can't be purely random else we wouldn't be functional, there has to be some sort of error correction happening as well.

If I ask you to do 2+2, a 100 times, you would always respond 4, unless you are pissed off at the mundaneness of the task, so even if at the quantum level everything is probabilistic, its somehow leading to some sort of determinism at the end.

We can't, in general. Theres no perfect predictability in the human sciences.

You are confusing what we can do now vs what we can do with the relevant understanding. I said that if we do have the full body state + the algorithm then we can predict.

Then you you are picking a special case to make a general point.

No, I meant that if you observe closely for enough time, you can predict the actions of others, that amount of time observing everyday activities is possible only in the case of a partner, you might spend time with friends or family in a few contexts only.

Why? Determinism isn't a fact. We don't have evidence of physical determinism, so we can't make a bottom up argument, and we dont have perfect predictability in psychology, either.

We don't have perfect predicatability in psychology because we don't understand it yet. Just like we couldn't predict planetary motion with reasonable accuracy until we had the right models.

We are fairly predictable in the short run, and with sufficient observation predictable in the medium term as well, if we aren't any long term contract is bound to be void.

Predictability implies determinism, determinism implies no (libertarian) free will.

Yes!

[-]TAG3mo20

I just want to be in touch with the ground reality, and I believe that there has to be a set of algorithms we are running, some of which the conscious mind controls and some the autonomous nervous system, it can't be purely random else we wouldn't be functional, there has to be some sort of error correction happening as well

"Algorithms" and "purely random" are nowhere near the only options.

>If I ask you to do 2+2, a 100 times, you would always respond 4,

What if you ask.me for a random number?

>We don't have perfect predicatability in psychology because we don't understand it yet

You also need physical.determinism to.be true. But determimism isn't a fact

[-]Caprica4mo*20

Potentially, but at least for now I don't think we have enough evidence to back this. For what we see it seems the universe is not deterministic. So even if you could know 'your current body state perfectly' you would still need to include some randomness. If we could predict the future state of a system by its initial configuration then we basically solved chaos theory.

But I agree we are 'just' biological machines, and we can predict with high accuracy

[-]asksathvik4mo10

We need more than your exact body state, we need the algorithms your body and brain are running as well which I have mentioned in the post.

If the algorithm includes randomness, we will use it. As far as we can observe we are fairly predictable in the short term so it makes sense that whatever randomness exists at the quantum level is corrected when we get to the final decisions, any unpredictability could be due to other inputs we aren't aware of, like stress, hunger, health issues etc.

Thanks for the pointer to chaos theory, I will look more into it, I need to spend more time to understand why can't we predict the future of chaotic systems, is it because of our current technology limitations or its impossible to predict independent of technology or science breakthoughs?

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