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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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LLMs are not sentient, but this gimmick doesn't prove that.
There's nothing to indicate the human brain can't be implemented in a Turing machine too.
Aren't brains like orders of magnitude faster and more "powerful" than even the strongest supercomputers?
It's complicated.
Computers can scale, you can make a computer much larger than a human brain.
Computers really just do binary math. For those who don't know, it's basically determining whether or not 1 or 0 should change, or stay the same, based on an algorithm. We don't know (or at least, I haven't read that we know) how brains actually store and process information.
Computers are very fast at doing "simple" calculations with definite answers. A pocket calculator can do math faster than you can with 100% accuracy. On the flip side, analyzing and reacting to incomplete information is the forte of the human brain. We still haven't made a computer than can fit in a car and drive better than some of the dumbest people on the planet manage to do, while fucking around on their phones at the same time.
I don't think that is the case.
There's nothing that indicates the human brain has super-turing computation
Except that we've never done it, and we struggle to even define what consciousness is. But, other than that, sure.
There's fundamentally not much difference between our brain and a fly's, at the cellular level. We have fully simulated a fly's brain already. When given a virtual body, it promptly started acting like a fly.
I don't think LLMs are conscious or sentient. However, consciousness is likely just an internal illusion. There's no obvious reason we can't scale up from a fly to a human brain, other than difficulty. At that point you have a fully virtual brain that believes itself to be conscious, and can demonstrate sentience.
I'll believe it when it happens. There's a huge different between simulating 139,000 neurons and 50 billion neurons.
Besides, the authors looked at taste and touch sensory. That's not exactly predicting the entire behavior of a fly, and the authors (of which there were many), admitted they don't know if it can actually predict neural activity. Source
I'm not expecting anything any time soon either. Though I can see someone like musk pumping far too much money into it at some point.
My point was however that the difference is just one of scale. We don't need to predict the firings, just run it and compare it to nature. From what I've read, it behaves like a fly, including walking and grooming itself. This means there is no magic mystical difference between a real fly's brain and a virtualized one.
Projecting further, there is no difference, other than scale, between our brain and the fly. Implying there is nothing mystical about consciousness.
If a human brain can be conscious, then a virtualized human brain can be conscious. If a virtualized brain can be conscious, then so can the computer it runs on.
The question then becomes do we WANT consciousness in an AI, what would it look like, and how can we detect/measure it?
Except if this is the case, free will does not exist. If the world is purely deterministic, you've never made a choice. No one has. We are in the middle of a mathematical computation that has been predicted from the start of the universe.
That is pretty much my view on things. I don't like it, but it's what the evidence suggests. However, my internal thoughts still assume I have free will. It's a useful lie.
Discworld's Death put it quite well, in Hogfather.
All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable."
REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.
"Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—"
YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
"So we can believe the big ones?"
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
"They're not the same at all!"
YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.
"Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point—"
MY POINT EXACTLY.
The difference of scale is in the grey area of the difference of scale of quantum and classical mechanics, though. Conciousness very much could be something that depends on the emergent properties of quantum mechanics and doesn't reach classical mechanics.
There's fundamentally not much difference between the silicon in an n64 and the silicone in a quantum computer..... That doesn't mean you can make a quantum computer out of an old n64.
Internal..... as it can only be confirmed by the individual self? Consciousness is an ontological term to define the human condition. There is purposely no exact definition, as an exact definition of consciousness would only be utilized to strip rights away from those who do not fall under the exacting definition. There are however generally agreed upon criteria and criteria that have been hotly debated for hundreds of years.
To make this claim requires someone to have a limited understanding of what consciousness is, and how it develops. It completely ignores the mind body problem, and treats the human brain as something that can operate outside the body as if it were some sort of computer.
Consciousness in humans develops and sustains itself as we physically interact with the world around us. This is true in both development in childhood and as we continue to age. As we physically interact with phenomena around us we mentally develop, as our senses start to fail us in age we mentally decline. Even if I were to just cut off your arm, there would be a plethora of changes to the physiology of your brain that would alter the way it functions and the way it is shaped.
A person born stripped of all physical phenomena would never develop a conscious to begin with, and a if it were stripped away after consciousness had developed they would lose it. Hell, even sticking someone in an area with restricted physical phenomena for a short period of time can drive them insane.
Consciousness is not purely a metaphysical phenomenon. And from what we currently understand of it can not be recreated purely in a virtual format.
You’re mixing up two different things. One is normal brain development, and the other is consciousness itself. It’s true that a human being needs certain external stimuli for the brain to develop in a healthy way and for mental experience to be normal and stable. But that does not mean that, without those stimuli, consciousness does not exist.
A person can still be conscious and yet suffer severe cognitive, emotional, or behavioral changes because of sensory deprivation or an extremely limited environment. What changes is the quality of development, mental functioning, and maybe the kind of consciousness they have, not necessarily the existence of consciousness itself.
Also, there is no clear way to measure how much, how little, or whether someone has “no” consciousness at all. Because of that, claiming that a lack of stimuli means a lack of consciousness goes beyond what can actually be established.
So your argument seems to confuse “without stimuli, there is no normal development” with “without stimuli, there is no consciousness.” Those are not the same thing.
Human beings require external stimuli for any higher brain development to happen, not just healthy brain development.
Yes.... It does. Any example you would like to share of a conscious individual who lacks access to any and all external stimuli?
Yes, but they did not develop in that extreme deprivation. And even if they did develop in a way that was restricted, they did not lack external stimuli completely.
Your body literally need to be experience external stimuli to develop the capacity for consciousness.
Yes, I have to admit that I don’t have any example of consciousness in an individual completely without external stimuli. In fact, I agree with you on the last point you made. My point is that we need to be more precise about what we mean by “external stimuli” exactly.
We could even say that it may be impossible to isolate the mind completely from all stimulation in the first place. That leads to the real issue: perhaps those external stimuli are always present in some form, even if they are extremely minimal, indirect, or invisible to us at first glance.
So I correct myself, the argument is not necessarily that consciousness can exist with literally no input whatsoever, but rather that what we call “external stimuli” may include things so subtle that they are easy to overlook. In that sense, the claim becomes less about the absence of stimulation and more about how little stimulation is actually enough to sustain consciousness or mental activity.
I still think the connection between external stimuli and consciousness are a lot more glaring than what you realize. After all it is how we medically determine consciousness in humans. Our ability to process and respond to external stimuli is a direct reflection of our somatic and autonomic physiology.
You can, it's called anesthesia.
Its interdependent on your period of development. In gestation unborn infants produce more grey matter than what is really needed to sustain life and can get by with internal stimuli and the external stimuli provided by the womb. However as we develop we become more dependent on higher and higher levels of interaction with our environment to develop our mental capacity.
If a person were to be put under anesthesia since early development or e acquired a tbi that made them unresponsive at an early age, they would all likely mentally deteriorate to a persistent vegetative state.
Although I’m not sure one can say with absolute certainty that anesthesia completely isolates the mind from external stimuli, you’re probably right. You’ve brought Helen Keller’s testimony to mind:
"Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness. I did not know that I knew aught, or that I lived or acted or desired. I had neither will nor intellect. I was carried along to objects and acts by a certain blind natural impetus. I had a mind which caused me to feel anger, satisfaction, desire. These two facts led those about me to suppose that I willed and thought. I can remember all this, not because I knew that it was so, but because I have tactual memory. It enables me to remember that I never contracted my forehead in the act of thinking. I never viewed anything beforehand or chose it. I also recall tactually the fact that never in a start of the body or a heart-beat did I feel that I loved or cared for anything. My inner life, then, was a blank without past, present, or future, without hope or anticipation, without wonder or joy or faith."
An illusion is a phenomenological experience, for which you must be conscious. Consciousness can not be an illusion. You must be conscious to experience an illusion at all.