People can not be reduced to lookup tables even in theory. No one even knows how a single cell does what it does let alone an entire organism like a person.
I'm not making an abstract claim about neural networks because all numerical algorithms like neural networks can be reduced to a lookup table given a large enough hard drive. This is not practical because the space required would exceed the number of atoms in the known universe but the argument is sound. The same isn't true for people unless a person is idealized and abstracted into a sequence of numbers. I'm not saying no one is allowed to think of people as some sequence of numbers but this is clearly an abstraction of what it means to be a person and in the case of the neural network there is no abstraction, it really is a numerical function which can be expanded into a large table which represents its graph.
I'm not making an abstract claim about neural networks because all numerical algorithms like neural networks can be reduced to a lookup table given a large enough hard drive. This is not practical because the space required would exceed the number of atoms in the known universe but the argument is sound. The same isn't true for people unless a person is idealized and abstracted into a sequence of numbers. I'm not saying no one is allowed to think of people as some sequence of numbers but this is clearly an abstraction of what it means to be a person and in the case of the neural network there is no abstraction, it really is a numerical function which can be expanded into a large table which represents its graph.