Giving DCP an Intel CPU and a volt meter to reverse engineer the modern PC
Posted: Sat Sep 27, 2025 5:40 pm
DCP, as he is wont to do, recently copied and pasted the following to his blog:
Even given a crash course on electrical engineering, logic gate design, and an assembly language reference manual, I think DCP would be hard pressed to map out the sequence of events happening in a microsecond when he loads his blog into the computer.
In fact, if DCP did not already have it on good authority that this CPU is capable of such a thing, I think he would concede that it's impossible to tell if the process is entirely physical or not. It seems a bit fanciful that this lump of what is essentially melted sand would be able to perform such complex computations so quickly. It even happens without so much as a hint of what it going on inside it. There is no sound, discernable temperature change, or visible vibration in the CPU. It sits motionless performing its magic.
A simpler explanation is that the CPU has some magical external force doing all the computation. Some giant abacus in the sky, which is capable of doing this vast amount of work. Notedly, when some devices are taken offline, the Internet continues to function. Large portions of the internet can be disconnected, and still DCP's blog loads. This seems to be an indication that there must be some magic ethereal portion of the Internet that is non-physical.
To push the analogy even further, we now have AI agents which are capable of passing the so-called "Turing Test." A human being can now have trouble determining if the text messages they're receiving from an unknown source are produced from silicon, or produced from human meat matter.
All of this to say that whenever DCP's book on the hard problem of consciousness is released, his God of the Gaps argument is sure to be laughably outdated.
Now DCP could retort "well a team of thousands of engineers and millions of man hours could reverse engineer the CPU with just a volt meter." Possibly. But that is essentially what science is now working on - doing the best they can to map out the brain with the tools available. The pessimist may call it an unsolvable problem, but I think the optimist position is much more exciting and worth waiting to see the results rather than labeling it a miracle from the God of the Gaps. I'm grateful that science isn't staring at roadblocks and sneering like DCP is.
Since DCP is fond of analogies, here's a fun one for him. I would like him to, given a standard Radio Shack volt meter and an Intel CPU, prove that there is no magic non-physical substance that produces his blog on the screen. The Intel CPU runs the web browser, loads the information from the network, and sends it out to the video card as a human readable representation of the text from his blog. This appears absolutely impossible to anyone without the knowledge of how this works.DCP wrote:I share here a small handful of the passages that I marked while reading Lucid Dying. The first of them refers to Sir John Eccles (1903-1997), an Australian neurophysiologist and philosopher who won the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on the synapse:
Sir John’s theory was that the brain, in particular an area toward the front of the brain called the supplementary motor cortex, acts as a liaison through which the mind interacts with the brain. Yet the mind does not reside within it. That is to say, no one knows where the mind is, or from where our conscious self emerges, and no one since his remarkable discoveries has been able to give a clear answer.
In essence, Eccles argued that who we are—our mind, our selfhood, consciousness, and awareness—is not the brain but is intricately linked to the brain, and in turn modulates the brain. The key is that while brain processes affect our mind and consciousness, they don’t produce them. (233-234)
Dr. Parnia turns to an analogy that will already be familiar to many Latter-day Saints because of its use by Elder Boyd K. Packer, then a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, in a talk that he gave during the April 1973 General Conference of the Church. (See “Behold Your Little Ones.”) Here is Dr. Parnia’s version:
We can use an analogy of a hand in a glove to explain this better. When we place our hand in a glove, the two become intricately linked together. Yet they are inherently two different substrates. Imagine yourself wearing a glove. Of course, the shapes of your hand and glove look alike, and they intimately follow every movement together. If, one day, the glove is too tight, it will impact your hand, as it will create a sense of discomfort. At the same time, the movement of your hand also impacts and modulates the movements of the glove. These two modulate and interact with each other. In fact, the two are so intricately tethered to each other that to an outsider, they may appear the same. Yet they are not. How the “hand” and “glove” separate is a key idea in understanding the experience of lucid hyperconsciousness in the grey zone. (234)
In the next quotation, a lengthy one, Dr. Parnia refers to the English mathematician, mathematical physicist, and philosopher of science Sir Roger Penrose (b. 1931). Sir Roger Nobel Laureate in Physics. is Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford, an emeritus fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, an honorary fellow of both St John’s College, Cambridge, and University College London, and a Nobel Laureate in Physics. Stuart Hameroff (b. 1947) is an American anesthesiologist and professor at the University of Arizona who is known for his studies of consciousness:
Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose have grouped the limitations of the conventional or “physicalist” (reductionist) theories in four broad categories. The first and most obvious limitation is that they do not provide a plausible mechanism to account for the development of consciousness or thoughts from brain cell activity. The theories propose potential intermediary pathways but still do not answer the fundamental question of how brain cell activity might create thoughts and consciousness or human experience. Remember the man who was missing 90 percent of his brain but still had normal consciousness? Brain cells, like any other cell, can manufacture protein-based substances. They can even be linked with electricity, but the nature and substance of thought seems inherently different from electricity or a chemical or any protein-based substance in the brain, as Eccles highlighted. Second, another limitation relates to how activities distributed all over the brain—through the actions of billions of individual brain cells at any one time—can eventually bind into a single unitary sense of self that leads to the notion of “I” and our selfhood. This was also highlighted by Eccles. Remember, we see ourselves as one person, not billions and billions of tiny selves, each linked to one of our billions of brain cells. I see myself as one person, not a fractured amalgamation of infinite tiny selves. Probably you do, too. Third, how do chemical or electrical events that are continuously taking place in different parts of the brain—such as the release of various hormones—but are not part of our “consciousness” suddenly become conscious, other than to say that it somehow does occur at a critical point? Fourth, and perhaps most important of all, we know that a fundamental part of our lives involves the notion of free will and our choices. We are judged in society based upon our intentions, actions, and choices. Yet the brain-based views cannot account for this reality. If correct, they would mean that our lives are completely determined by our genes and environment, and hence there would be no place for personal accountability. (235)
This limitation of all the brain-based theories has led some to suggest consciousness may in fact be an irreducible scientific entity in its own right, similar to many of the concepts in physics, such as mass and gravity, which are also irreducible entities. Other discoveries, such as the discovery of electromagnetic phenomena in the nineteenth century or quantum mechanics in the twentieth century, were also inexplicable in terms of previously known principles. (237)
I hope that you’ve found these ideas as intriguing as I have.
Posted from Quincy, Illinois
Even given a crash course on electrical engineering, logic gate design, and an assembly language reference manual, I think DCP would be hard pressed to map out the sequence of events happening in a microsecond when he loads his blog into the computer.
In fact, if DCP did not already have it on good authority that this CPU is capable of such a thing, I think he would concede that it's impossible to tell if the process is entirely physical or not. It seems a bit fanciful that this lump of what is essentially melted sand would be able to perform such complex computations so quickly. It even happens without so much as a hint of what it going on inside it. There is no sound, discernable temperature change, or visible vibration in the CPU. It sits motionless performing its magic.
A simpler explanation is that the CPU has some magical external force doing all the computation. Some giant abacus in the sky, which is capable of doing this vast amount of work. Notedly, when some devices are taken offline, the Internet continues to function. Large portions of the internet can be disconnected, and still DCP's blog loads. This seems to be an indication that there must be some magic ethereal portion of the Internet that is non-physical.
To push the analogy even further, we now have AI agents which are capable of passing the so-called "Turing Test." A human being can now have trouble determining if the text messages they're receiving from an unknown source are produced from silicon, or produced from human meat matter.
All of this to say that whenever DCP's book on the hard problem of consciousness is released, his God of the Gaps argument is sure to be laughably outdated.
Now DCP could retort "well a team of thousands of engineers and millions of man hours could reverse engineer the CPU with just a volt meter." Possibly. But that is essentially what science is now working on - doing the best they can to map out the brain with the tools available. The pessimist may call it an unsolvable problem, but I think the optimist position is much more exciting and worth waiting to see the results rather than labeling it a miracle from the God of the Gaps. I'm grateful that science isn't staring at roadblocks and sneering like DCP is.