Consciousness is not computation

This is just yet another disappointing take on "I feel like there's something mystical about consciousness, that I can't actually define or describe in any meaningful way, but it's definitely impossible for it to be anything computers can do!"

This is the same kind of nonsense that leads people to search for some kind of magical "quantum" thing in the brain that makes the special mystical consciousness effect, because of some vague intuition that it can't come from the normal high-level behaviour of neurons.

The obvious position that should require significant evidence to contradict is that whatever consciousness is, it's a mundane physical effect that can obviously be implemented with a computer. Nobody has yet made any kind of falsifiable predictions about mystical non-computational souls or whatever, and I'm going to continue dismissing this bullshit as pseudo-scientific nutjobbery until there's actually something testable or falsafiable.

Name one specific concrete measurable effect that you believe consciousness can exhibit and computation can't, otherwise this is pointless masturbation.

> Before getting too deep we need a working definition of consciousness. This is a tricky concept to define rigorously since it seems that a rigorous definition of consciousness practically requires a theory of consciousness itself. To make matters worse, in these kinds of discussions it oftentimes gets mingled with related ideas like self-awareness, intelligence, and executive function. But in this post I am interested only in consciousness as a sort of perception or sentience — an awareness of being, or, more loosely, “what it feels like to be something.”

I'm not sure this definition succeeds in distinguishing consciousness from some mixture of perception and self-awareness, both of which machines running programs can have.

Maybe defining consciousness is difficult because we don't really understand what we mean by it, and our attempts to make claims about it are more flimsy and baseless than we like to believe.

The "what it is like to be a bat" stuff doesn't illuminate the matter at all. It just elevates the figure of speech "what it is like" to an illusion of philosophical rigor.

This is a little bit of an emotional take I think.

The burden of proof is on the claim that you can get there through computation, not otherwise.

We do not understand the fundamental reality of consciousness, this does not mean that consciousness is magic. The assertion that you cannot get there from computation implies there is a currently non understood yet essential piece of physics(I assume, but I do not know) which doesn't fall under "computation". A laymans initial thoughts point this towards the quantum realm.

I disagree with any sort of “justified belief” epistemology, so of course I disagree with you completely. If knowledge were “justified true belief” or anything like that, then it would indeed be the case that any knowledge would require either an infinite chain of justifications or a privileged self-justified fact that cannot be examined or criticized using reason.

If, on the other hand, the pursuit of knowledge consists of something like using creativity and reason to solve problems by making new conjectures and criticizing them, then no infinite regress or un-criticizable is required. According to ideas like this, the goal is to solve problems rather than to “justify my beliefs” or “increase my confidence” or “guarantee that I’m not incorrect.”

My problem with this is that we don’t even know the extent of “things” that can be computed, maybe consciousness is a type of computation that has yet to be discovered at which point I can very easily see the headline “consciousness is obviously computation”.