You could apply the concept to other things too, yes. A commenter elsewhere pointed out that one might analogize one’s genotype to an LLM’s weights, for instance.
Nevertheless I found the post’s specific comparison interesting because I’ve spent some time reasoning over what exactly a soul is, and what it would mean if a soul definitely existed as it does in ex. Puella Magi Madoka Magica (hence the joke image at the top of the post), and I found that the LLM weights comparison rederives a lot of my thoughts on the subject pretty easily. It’s fun to me that there’s a real-world example to work from.
Same with computer programs. The LLM example is more compelling because they act a lot more like a human soul.
If you wanted to use the words that way, you could say that humans have a soul in the same sense that computer programs are real things, independent of the computers they’re run on. That is, there’s something that’s immaterial and not bound to one physical substrate, even in a materialist worldview.
A tomato is like a hammer in that they are both a bunch of atoms stuck together into a persistent 3 dimensional structure.
Sure, for some definition of “like”.
You seem to be pointing to the very general concept of an information/computation structure.
This is a concept that applies to humans and LLM’s, but also to worms and operating systems.
You could apply the concept to other things too, yes. A commenter elsewhere pointed out that one might analogize one’s genotype to an LLM’s weights, for instance.
Nevertheless I found the post’s specific comparison interesting because I’ve spent some time reasoning over what exactly a soul is, and what it would mean if a soul definitely existed as it does in ex. Puella Magi Madoka Magica (hence the joke image at the top of the post), and I found that the LLM weights comparison rederives a lot of my thoughts on the subject pretty easily. It’s fun to me that there’s a real-world example to work from.
Same with computer programs. The LLM example is more compelling because they act a lot more like a human soul.
If you wanted to use the words that way, you could say that humans have a soul in the same sense that computer programs are real things, independent of the computers they’re run on. That is, there’s something that’s immaterial and not bound to one physical substrate, even in a materialist worldview.