Consciousness is not computation

In the case of the hot iron bar, obviously there is no deterministic process that takes us from one state to the next. We just happen to get lucky and see that it randomly fluctuates from one state to the next state correctly.

The trouble is that formal computation theory does not take into consideration the physical process by which the computer moves from one state to the next. That's what makes it so general. We can make computers out of transistors or vacuum tubes or Legos equally well and can be assured that whatever we make our computer out of the computational complexity of bubble sort is O(n^2).

Requiring specific physical processes for computation would invalidate computation theory in a very fundamental kind of way.

My rebuttal to the poorly considered Chinese Room thought experiment:

I'm going to use this Wikipedia text as the backdrop:

> Searle then supposes that he is in a closed room and has a book with an English version of the computer program, along with sufficient papers, pencils, erasers, and filing cabinets. Searle could receive Chinese characters through a slot in the door, process them according to the program's instructions, and produce Chinese characters as output, without understanding any of the content of the Chinese writing. If the computer had passed the Turing test this way, it follows, says Searle, that he would do so as well, simply by running the program manually.

> Searle asserts that there is no essential difference between the roles of the computer and himself in the experiment. Each simply follows a program, step-by-step, producing behavior that is then interpreted by the user as demonstrating intelligent conversation. However, Searle himself would not be able to understand the conversation. ("I don't speak a word of Chinese," he points out.)

The reason he would not be able to follow the conversation is that he's being the CPU, and not the computer program. The computer program (according to the Strong AI hypothesis) understands the conversation, evidence for it being that it can converse with Chinese speakers and convince them that they are conversing with a human being.

The content of the papers stuffed into the filing cabinets to keep track of the program state contains (somehow) the representation and behavior of understanding, not John Searle, the pencil-and-paper-pushing executor of the program (who doesn't even hold the content of those papers in his own mind, let alone failing to understand any of it.)

Searle misunderstands computers and software; his argument amounts to the assertion that it is the CPU which must necessarily be the seat of the computer's intellect, and since we know that CPU to be a very simple machine with no understanding of the data flowing through it, there is no intellect, QED.

Fact is that, in the thought experiment, the Chinese Room as a whole appears to be intelligent; it can converse with a Chinese speaker and pass the Turing test. That's what is intelligent: the room, and not the clerk sitting inside it who pushes the pencil.

It's like insisting that individual neurons must be intelligent (conscious, sentient, ...).

By Searles' argument, a computer doesn't actually know how to browse the web because an Intel chip doesn't understand what is TCP/IP or HTML.

I can't believe this twaddle was ever taken seriously, but that's philosophy for you.

If you want a good reason why kids should learn to code, there it is: so they have a fighting chance at not being duped by stuff like this.

The book as a whole gives you the tools to understand how emergence happens in the brain. I can point you to the resource, but I can’t do the learning for you.

It’s also possible you’re less interested in the brain per se, and more interested in “emergence” in the abstract. If that’s the case, there is no shortage of good books and resources you can turn to.

Look up “emergence science” and “complexity science” and go from there: it’s not an easy topic, it’s very cross-disciplinary, and to really understand it requires a fair amount of maths (imo).

As always, so much is written about consciousness without attempting to define it, or state clearly what its function might be. There's usually a pattern. After a lot of preamble, the non-definition of "what it feels like" is offered. This itself is an indication that our understanding of consciousness is so poor that we cannot articulate the question itself.

Why are some experiences conscious and some experiences not? Why is spotting a ball conscious, but the precise arm movements that take it there unconscious? (Can you tell what your elbow or your back muscles did as your arm maneuvered towards the ball?)

We finally understand consciousness.

Not just at a metaphorical level (Daniel Dennett has done a wonderful job of that), but at a mechanistic how-is-it-put together. Rather that focus on who has solved it, I'll talk about that it is (That info is at the end)

What is the function of consciousness? Among others, It is the "hierarchical, simultaneous, and rapid resolution of uncertainty." Our world, of large macro-scale beings, is fundamentally ambiguous.

The dominant "bayesian" and "information" metaphors for understanding brain functions do not take time and fundamental ambiguity inherent to the world into account. Meaning is not given to us on a plate. It must be manufactured by the brain. Information is constructed from sensory data. How? And what does it mean?

Here is an example: Listen to this audio. What do you hear?

https://soundcloud.com/sai-gaddam-454459762/what-do-you-hear

Firstly, note that whatever you hear is a conscious percept. It is your brain orchestrating its daily unceasing miracle of resolving uncertainty and helping you consciously perceive.

Are you hearing "The scent of the two-cent stamp sent me back"? If not, you will now (and why is that?)

There are three homonyms (SCENT, CENT, and SENT -- which all sound the same) in this audio sequence that unfolds over time that are seemingly instantly resolved into three entirely different meanings. How?

That is one example of fundamental ambiguity. Computation is everything that the brain does to the sensory data it takes in. The auditory sequence in this case. Consciousness is what you consciously perceive. The three different meanings, somehow resolved all at once. And if you think about it, there's some time-travel involved here. SCENT and CENT can only be resolved in meaning towards the end of the sentence. Consciousness is what allows us to do this resolution into something stable and take action, and be entirely oblivious to all the many possibilities that this could have been. And we do this thousands of times everyday as go about perceiving and acting on what is filtered through this conscious perception.

This example also helps us focus on one crucial aspect of consciousness that every major theory or discussion out there ignores. There is a timeline to consciousness. What "it feels like" undulates over time.

Any theory but of consciousness must be able to explain the phenomenological timeline. But since our understanding is so poor, every major theory ignores this entirely. See https://www.nature.com/articles/s41583-022-00587-4 for a great review of all the major theories. The authors lament how all the major theories are imprecise, and that they should offer "computational models to bring mechanistic specificity" and be able to account for "temporality" among other things.

And that brings me to the final part.

We already have a wonderfully precise, mechanistic, and stunningly coherent "computational" framework for consciousness. Stephen Grossberg, often hailed as a pioneer in computational neuroscience and brain modeling, has explained consciousness by attempting to model every other facet of perception, which most take for granted as the "easy stuff". His work is of great importance for AI too which, for all the wonderful seemingly-magical stuff deeplearning has generated, is largely a one-trick pony riding error-backpropagation way too hard. His 65-year body of work, however, is largely unknown. The sentiment is captured by this tweet from an academic:

https://twitter.com/KordingLab/status/1533904082393387008

That is unfortunate. Grossberg’s work is important, and most importantly, offers the only coherent mechanistically precise, computational framework that also happens to explain consciousness.

We expanded on why his work is important in this response in an academic journal: https://cpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/sites.ucsc.edu/dist/0/158/file...

That response was a review of our recent book, Journey of the Mind, which apart from unpacking thinking, attempts to make Grossberg's work accessible. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58085266-journey-of-the-...

And finally, you can go directly to the source. Stephen Grossberg's book (Conscious Mind, Resonant Brain) has all his 65 years worth of work collated into one coherent whole. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/conscious-mind-reson...

I've written about it here: https://saigaddam.medium.com/the-greatest-neuroscientist-you...

You can but it shifts the burden to the decoder. Since an iron bar over some time period has a finite number of states, there exists a decoder that maps state changes in the iron bar to your Fortnite gameplay.

I think a more fair criticism is that you likely cannot choose the decoder without an oracle (ie the causal relationship would be hard to preserve). I think OPs claim is that consciousness, unlike Fortnite, doesn’t depend on being causally related to some external inputs (thus you don’t need oracle to choose the decoder).