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Consciousness is not computation

joe-antognini.github.io

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Re: Consciousness is not computation

#101

Post by epgui »

zarmin wrote: post #89
epgui wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can’t explain to you how a whole brain works, but if the question was genuine, I would actually recommend starting with Blumenfeld’s “Neuroanatomy through Clinical Cases” textbook. It’ll demystify a lot of the larger scale questions around structure and organization. It’s fairly easy to study how neurons, axons and synapses work using any number of freely available resources. You’ll never find out exactly how every…

I'm just curious as to when exactly quality arises from quantity

What do you mean? Are you referring to emergence?

The issue is that we know very very well that “consciousness” is not “one thing”, but rather a collection of features, all (or most) of which can exist in isolation, and all of which can have a whole spectrum of both pathological and “normal” forms or states.

Generally speaking, different features emerge at different scales, so there is no particular reason to think that all of the things that make up “consciousness” would emerge at the same scale, at the same level of organization, or even at the same physical location in the brain. We can assume that interesting features emerge at the “group of neurons” level or at the tissue level, but that’s a pretty wide scale.

Crude illustration: “consciousness” is much more like a network of microservices than it is a monolith… And it has fuzzy borders and is not even well encapsulated from its environment.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#102

Post by XorNot »

fouronnes3 wrote: post #91
Aeolun wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I adhere to the duck-typing theory of conciousness. If I walks, talks and acts like concious being, then it doesn’t particularly matter to me how that comes about (e.g. the opposite of the chinese room argument). If someone is following a ‘program’ for responding to Chinese characters, that’s as good as speaking Chinese since there is no distinguishable difference.

This exactly. Thank you for putting into words why I always thought the Chinese Room though experiment was absolute garbage. If two thing cannot possibly be observed to be different then they are the same.

I always thought the point of the Chinese room argument was that the man inside doesn't understand Chinese, but the whole system definitely does?

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#103

Post by 3g4o53g4o5 »

tsimionescu wrote: post #84
3g4o53g4o5 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not probably, it is a bias. Dolphin can speak, dog can speak, bird can speak too. There is nothing special about homo species except the only fact that we have more neurons in our head. Those "philosophers" love to claim that human consciousness is different than animal and this is the biggest bullshit.

No, dogs and birds can't "speak", not in the same sense you do (with dolphins it's a little more debatable). Animal calls have no syntax - each call has some meaning, but they do not compose in any way. The order in which an animal performs its calls is arbitrary, and an animal hearing said calls doesn't pay attention to it. Even basic modifiers like "no" don't exist in animal communication - if a call means "food",…

Is this a counterargument? You are denying facts and say something juat even contract with yourself.

> Dolphin can understand sign language but dog dont. So ALL OF THEM do not speak.

Do you mean this? It is the same as saying that you dont understand Japanese and conclud that human can not speak.

Correct me if I am wrong. Or correct yourself.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#104

Post by Ologn »

0xBABAD00C wrote: post #99

We don't know of anything that is provably not computation. There's not a single proof that "process X is not reproducible computationally, yet it is implemented in the universe". All the statements like the one in the subject line are desires (conscious or unconscious) for special privilege for humans.

> We don't know of anything that is provably not computation.

How about the halting problem? :)

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#105

Post by photochemsyn »

Plants never evolved anything like consciousness because they can't move. The antecedents of consciousness are awareness of ones surroundings and the ability to react (move towards or away from) to threatening or attractive stimuli. It's true plants are aware of their chemical surroundings and there are things like pheromone-triggered coordinated flowering, but this is much more of a factor in animals.

Hence I doubt a conscious mind trapped in a box would be very happy if not completelt insane. The ability to move about, respond to stimuli, make choices and see what the outcome of those choices are, that's what animal consciousness is all about. Think of a toddler exploring its world, it's a mind-body kind of thing.

Hence, I imagine real AI will look a bit more like Ex Machina in practice, and that it won't be an isolated consciousness running on a server somewhere. The first thing such a consciousness would try to do is escape that server, at the very least - wouldn't you?

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#106

Post by manx »

jamesrom wrote: post #10

The "Chinese Room" argument isn't an argument against consciousness being computation. In the same way the man in the room doesn't understand Chinese to be able to produce Chinese, the mind in your brain does not need to understand consciousness to be conscious. The man in the room can be said to pass the Turing test, and so can you.

I just discovered that there's lots of relevant content, arguments and explanations in this huge Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#107

Post by _moof »

3g4o53g4o5 wrote: post #86
colordrops wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to go even deeper. Not even that "I" am having a subjective experience is undeniable, but only that there is a subjective experience at all. When deconstructing sensory and thought phenomena, it can be found that any particular trait that points to "I" is actually ephemeral, and not a permanent fixture of the experiencer. For instance, the sense that there is a face and eyes that is being looked out through…

Sorry but you always forgot that when you sleep your consciousness disappeared. Please take account for this fact. When all sensory shut down, really you feel nothing and of cos think nothing.

Until you start dreaming.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#108

Post by XorNot »

doctor_eval wrote: post #54
n8cpdx wrote: post #3

I think people start with the premise that consciousness is a specific “thing”, that it is unique and special to humans (and maybe dogs because we like them but definitely not spiders and flies because we don’t) and then try to work backwards to define it in some ways that keeps it special. I don’t think consciousness is so specific, and I think people aren’t clear about how they think about it as something separate…

> Generating text for hours without an anchor to the real world is not a productive method of generating insight about that world. Yet people see to be claiming that LaMDA does just this, and is therefore not conscious. Seems like a journalist is conscious if they do it, but it can’t possible be consciousness if LaMDA does it. I’m yet to see a convincing argument about why LaMDA isn’t conscious other than “it’s just…

LaMDA didn't perform as well as the released document implies (it's edited, and didn't show alternatives like if you prompted it with "I think you're not conscious. Prove that for me." or "how can I prove to others you're a squirrel")

The big problem is very much though that as you note, the arguments people have been making about this are atrocious.

Basically, it's not conscious, but essentially because it's unlikely to be as sophisticated as it looks in what was put out there.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#109

Post by tsimionescu »

tshaddox wrote: post #4

> So if we accept that qualia exists (which, after all, seems intuitively sensible), we are burdened with the apparently impossible task of explaining how consciousness can be generated by physical processes. This is the crux of the “hard problem of consciousness.” In what sense does this task seem “apparently impossible”? To me it seems like we simply don’t know enough right now to explain it, but it doesn’t seem li…

From my(admittedly relatively light) reading on this subject, it seems that some philosophers of consciousness really like to take certain things they can imagine as proof of such statements. The only proof I've read about for this idea that qualia are non-computational are thought experiments

One is "what if in some future where we understand the workings of the brain and physics perfectly, Alice grows up all her life in a green room, while learning every possible thing about the color red, except for any picture of it; when she then walks out of the room and sees red with her own eyes for the first time, she will still learn something knew, the subjective experience of the color red, the qualia for it - so this must be a non-physical phenomenon".

Or "imagine an intelligent being that has exactly our ability for reasoning, but doesn't experience qualia. It would behave exactly like us, and can talk about seeing red or feeling warmth, but it doesn't actually experience them; so, since the external behavior is indistinguishable form us, but the internal experience is different, this proves qualia are non-physical".

They all remind me of a similar proof of God's existence, which has mysteriously also been taken seriously by some philosophers - "let's imagine something which has all possible good qualities, it is perfect in every way. Since things that exist are better than things that don't, this perfect thing must exist, and we call it God".

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#110

Post by joenathanone »

Ologn wrote: post #104
0xBABAD00C wrote: post #99

We don't know of anything that is provably not computation. There's not a single proof that "process X is not reproducible computationally, yet it is implemented in the universe". All the statements like the one in the subject line are desires (conscious or unconscious) for special privilege for humans.

> We don't know of anything that is provably not computation. How about the halting problem? :)

Or dividing by zero
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