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Consciousness is not computation

joe-antognini.github.io

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Re: Consciousness is not computation

#171

Post by doctor_eval »

melenaboija wrote: post #69
doctor_eval wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I guess that a unigram language model trained with few words should be considered conscious in some way too.

But this is kinda my point. You're not explaining to me why LaMDA is not conscious, you're just asserting that consciousness is not just a form of complex pattern recognition.

Perhaps consciousness is simply pattern recognition at scale. If not - why not?

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#172

Post by nl »

> it is a common article of faith that computers will one day gain consciousness.

Is this actually a common belief?

I believe that human level AI (or above) is achievable.

I'm not at all sure about consciousness. I don't believe it is sufficiently definable for it to be achievable (which is actually a a problem with general intelligence too really).

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#173

Post by tsimionescu »

epgui wrote: post #129
tsimionescu wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm saying that perhaps with the exception of dolphins and mayyyyybe chimps, there is a measurable, observable, quantifiable way in which animal communication is fundamentally different from human language. So, perhaps you can say that dolphins speak, and maybe chimps speak, and then we can even contemplate that bonobos speak (since they are very similar to chimps, but haven't been studied as much). But dogs definite…

{{citation needed}} for most of this.

Here is an article that discusses the topic quite broadly [0]. The most relevant section is part 4.

I will freely admit that it actually refutes some of my claims - that's are actual example of simple syntax identified in several species.

Still, I believe it matches my broader point: there are a fundamental, measurable differences between human language and animal calls, with the latter at best showing only very basic structure, if any.

[0] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2019.006...

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#174

Post by epgui »

tsimionescu wrote: post #173
epgui wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

{{citation needed}} for most of this.

Here is an article that discusses the topic quite broadly [0]. The most relevant section is part 4. I will freely admit that it actually refutes some of my claims - that's are actual example of simple syntax identified in several species. Still, I believe it matches my broader point: there are a fundamental, measurable differences between human language and animal calls, with the latter at best showing only very basi…

I will readily agree that levels of sophistication of languages vary, and that human languages are almost certainly the most complex / sophisticated that we know of.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#175

Post by whittingtonaaon »

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.

Consciousness can end temporarily, perhaps permanently. This in no way suggests that it’s an illusion.

The claim that consciousness is an illusion has always seemed like nonsense to me; for, if consciousness is an illusion, who experiences that illusion? Answer: the conscious mind.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#176

Post by stocknoob »

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.

> If two thing cannot possibly be observed to be different then they are the same.

I think that suffers the same flaw as logical positivism: if my axioms can't find a difference, there isn't one, no way my assumptions are wrong. (Namely, my axiom is that external observations capture the entirety of reality, there is nothing subjective.)

If two people laugh at a joke, one faking and one actually finding it funny, what is the externally observable difference? Assume the faker has been trained in all manner of knowledge about what would make the joke funny, they just don't find it so.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_argument

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#177

Post by stormbrew »

crdrost wrote: post #127
stormbrew wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That I am having a subjective experience is undeniable. If you wanted to go about proving (even to yourself) that you are not, say, an extremely advanced ML algorithm running on a system that provided synthetic inputs in the form of your senses, how would you go about it? Further, how would you go about proving to someone who doubted your subjective experience was real if they doubted it? Say, if they believed they…

> If you wanted to go about proving (even to yourself) that you are not, say, an extremely advanced ML algorithm running on a system that provided synthetic inputs in the form of your senses, how would you go about it? Well, since an extremely advanced ML algorithm wouldn't want to go about proving to itself that it is not what it is, that would be prima facie evidence against, no? I mean it's always possible that yo…

> Well, since an extremely advanced ML algorithm wouldn't want to go about proving to itself that it is not what it is, that would be prima facie evidence against, no?

This seems like begging the question. Who says an extremely advanced ML algorithm can't 'want' to do this? What even is wanting?

> I mean in practice we don't find this too hard right now if the other person is reasonable—a 15-minute conversation usually suffices —but I imagine from your ptior question you're dreaming of, say, a future with robots that routinely pass the Turing test?

I'm not. These are absolutely situations that can happen now, with people. I am thinking more when it comes to mental and some physical impairments, so "a 15 minute conversation" is assuming a lot about the capabilities and clarity of everyone involved.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#178

Post by mypastself »

Aeolun wrote: post #82
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…

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.

I apply the same reasoning as you to consciousness for entities such as animals, whose biology is reasonably close to our own. I don’t think the same can be applied to software.

Cargo cults that developed in the Southwest Pacific after WWII reportedly attempted to emulate rituals performed by U.S. military personnel such as landing signals, believing they’ll bring back the aircraft that had been giving them gifts.

Similarly, believing that a program will possess consciousness if we provide it with some of its external manifestations seems backwards.

Of course, the problem is that we don’t know what consciousness is. Until we do, I’ll keep assuming we don’t have the proficiency to create it under such different conditions just yet.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#179

Post by nl »

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? :)

The existence of uncomputable problems does not mean the things we know are not from computation.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#180

Post by aaaaaaaaaaab »

>Continuing this, we can imagine an enormous crowd of observers staring at this iron bar, each using a unique encoding of atomic states to bits. With a sufficiently large number of observers, the encodings of all possible Turing machines of the given size are represented.

Yes, but only momentarily. It does not follow that there’s an encoding where the iron bar evolves as if running a given Turing machine.

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