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Consciousness is not computation

joe-antognini.github.io

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Re: Consciousness is not computation

#191

Post by romeovs »

Obligatory "Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity" by Scott Aaronson[1], one of the best reads I've ever had from a paper. It debunks the kind of arguments this blog article makes quite deftly.

For instance the argument about the hot iron reminds me of section 6 in the paper "Computationalism and Waterfalls". For someone to ascribe consciousness to a piece of hot iron (or a waterfall, or any other random or psuedorandom process), we need to create a mapping of its states onto consciousness, or in this case, as a proxy, the program called consiousness.exe. Aaronson argues if the mapping we create is too complex, it might be doing all of the work of being consious, not the original underlying piece of hot iron. The article does not go into amount this detail, but it seems like the process of creating this mapping is: make enough mappings at random until one works. It would probably take waaay more mappings than atoms in the universe to try before we hit on one that works (something that's also discussed in Aaronsons' paper in section 4), so I'm not sure if the argument is even relevant.

Give the paper a read, it's one of my favourite pieces of text of all time and Aaronson is better at writing down his ideas than I am.

[1 (pdf)]: https://eccc.weizmann.ac.il/report/2011/108/revision/2/downl...

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#192

Post by nl »

alexalx666 wrote: post #68

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_theories_of_co... "If true, the theory has major implications for efforts to design consciousness into artificial intelligence machines;[30] current microprocessor technology is designed to transmit information linearly along electrical channels, and more general electromagnetic effects are seen as a nuisance and damped out; if this theory is right, however, this is direc…

I don't have any particular informed opinion on Electromagnetic theories of consciousness.

But that "Implications for artificial intelligence" is completely wrong. It's perfectly possibly to simulate something like what the claimed model of consciousness is using a perfectly normal computer. It may take additional compute to do it, but field simulations are perfectly achievable.

It seems like this bit on Wikipedia was extracted from a paper by one of the chief proponents of this theory. The fact they think that about computers is pretty worrying and makes me question how well thought out this theory is.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#193

Post by antognini »

dqpb wrote: post #168
antognini wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

I'm not requiring specific physical processes, I'm asking for any physical process in a hot iron bar that executes any model of computation that is capable of running an arbitrary program. But you're saying there is not one, we just get lucky one time. That's not computation.

The physical process is simply that the atoms in the bar of iron start in one Turing machine state, obey the laws of physics, and end up in another Turing machine state. But this is also true of any other physical computer.

It sounds like your objection is that this is not a computer because it's not reproducible --- we just got lucky that the physical states mapped onto the appropriate Turing machine states one time. But then how deterministic does the physical system need to be to be considered a computer? It can't be 100% because no real-world physical computer is 100% deterministic. Is it a computer if the mapping is correct 50% of the time? 90%? 1%? I can't see any principled reason to choose any particular value.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#194

Post by madeofmeat »

mr_toad wrote: post #114
madeofmeat wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Consciousness is an illusion" I take the word "illusion" to mean, some type of experience which misleads one about reality. And "consciousness" to mean, the experience of having experiences. So I parse this claim as something like, "People both do not have conscious experiences, and also do continuously have a particular type of conscious experience: a misleading experience which leads them to believe they have cons…

The illusion is of conscious volition; that consciousness is an atomic unit in charge of your actions. The brain is in control. Whether the conscious ‘mind’ has any control at all is debatable.

Sure, the view that volition is an illusion is not self-contradictory. And I get that this is a very useful view, because it lets us set aside "conscious inner experiences" and just analyze the mind as a deterministic machine with inputs and outputs. This lets us expect to eventually understand the mind/brain fully using only the physics and computing tools we already have.

Now it leaves conscious experience itself as an unexplained phenomenon, but maybe that will never become important.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#195

Post by anothernewdude »

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…

My personal experience is that free will is axiomatic. It comes before everything else. What am I? What ever is making these decisions. If weren't, then I wouldn't be the person asking, I'd just be a puppet, therefore my identity would be that of whatever is the hand, and so on until you find whatever is making the decision.

Because if the meat puppet didn't make the decision to write this, then you're not conversing with the meat puppet, you're still conversing with the puppeteer.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#196

Post by antognini »

whoisjuan wrote: post #92

The author suggests that split brain surgery causes “two consciousness” but this is simply not true. Split brain patients seem to have two separate executive functions but they still describe their subjective experience as a single observer.

(Author here.)

Admittedly the experience of individuals with split brain is a bit out of my wheelhouse so I would love to be corrected on this. But it would seem to me that what you describe is not inconsistent with there being two separate consciousnesses present? If there are truly two consciousnesses present in a split brain, I would still expect that each one would describe itself as a single observer.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#197

Post by stormbrew »

somenameforme wrote: post #140
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…

He left two words off: "That I am having a subjective experience is undeniable [to myself]." You cannot prove, even to yourself, that you are not a brain in a vat. All you can prove is that you are experiencing something. And what little that is cannot even be proven to anybody else - no matter what you do. Consciousness is quite a personal affair.

Arguably, nothing you want to convince yourself of is deniable to yourself. An unprovable subjective certainty is a little like a tree falling in the woods.

The thing that I'm trying to get at is, if you can't even truly prove to yourself that your own consciousness does not arise from computation (the "chinese room" thought experiment tries to do this but imo it just begs the question), any attempt to prove it to others is hard to take seriously. There's just always so many assumptions layered in before we get to the argument.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#198

Post by abeppu »

I think this is pretty sloppy, at least in this statement of it.

Whether one or more observers can establish with confidence whether a system is running a particular computation is not the same thing as whether the system is running that computation. The whole section about finding a mapping between physical states and 'consciousness.exe' is exactly equally as valid for 'javac' or any other program -- but we do not conclude from this that this means that actually no physical system can run javac.

The author effectively makes a bait-and-switch between consciousness and the ability of external observers to identify consciousness by searching for a mapping from physical states to computation. From this view, I think we end up exactly where we were after Descartes: we can only firmly establish our own consciousness, even if consciousness is firmly computational.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#199

Post by stormbrew »

epgui wrote: post #94
stormbrew wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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" This conflates "computation" with "physics". I think even the OP doesn't do that, since it allows for the possibility that non-computational physical processes could lead to consciousness, even derived from computation…

Just for clarity, I consider to be “computation” any physical process which involves information.

Right, I meant the article's idea of computation, not yours. Should have said TFA instead of OP.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#200

Post by simonh »

romeovs wrote: post #191

Obligatory "Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity" by Scott Aaronson[1], one of the best reads I've ever had from a paper. It debunks the kind of arguments this blog article makes quite deftly. For instance the argument about the hot iron reminds me of section 6 in the paper "Computationalism and Waterfalls". For someone to ascribe consciousness to a piece of hot iron (or a waterfall, or any oth…

I find this argument completely unconvincing. The mapping in a case like that is entirely ephemeral, pertaining only for an instant. For this argument to be valid you’d have to be able to persistently map the iron bar, or waterfall, to all ongoing transformations of states in the running program, using one single consistent mapping. Otherwise all you have is a snapshot of state, not an ongoing process.

This argument is in the article as well and I’ve seen it from Searl too:

“A simulation of a brain cannot produce consciousness any more than a simulation of the weather can produce rain.”

This is making the assumption that consciousness is not a computation. If it is a computation then conciousness is not like weather itself, it’s like the simulation. Me imagining having a shower doesn’t make anything wet either. So is my imagination more like the weather, or more like the simulation of it?

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