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Consciousness is not computation

joe-antognini.github.io

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Re: Consciousness is not computation

#201

Post by GWBullshit »

jfoster wrote: post #147
somenameforme wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Neuralink is going to be so interesting if it can allow two brains to communicate more directly than words.

You think so but just remember it takes "your body" to process the energy required for your brain; now, if you became completely sedentary, you MAY be able to get away with your brain having access to "two brains worth of stuff" ...

But what Neuralink wants to do eventually is "enhance" your brain with computers hooked up to Ai.

Do you have ANY idea how quickly your brain would burn through physical precursors to the thinking process while trying to handle all that?

I mean, "in theory" if a computer would do something like solve a complex equation and give you the answer right away while you were trying to do something like, say, pay your taxes – fine.

But how would that be controlled? What if the computer wanted to "share a whole bunch of interesting stuff it's processing" ... how would that be controlled and how would your brain be protected from that so it doesn't burn out trying to keep up with everything?

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#203

Post by Grumpy34 »

> This means that one of these observers will, by chance, happen to observe that the states of the atoms correspond exactly to the bits of a Turing machine computing

I did not understand this argument. Yes, through careful labeling you can map the states of the atoms of the iron rod to the state of a Turing machine. But that mapping will only be correct for one instance. The very next moment the atoms' magnetic moment will flip randomly and the mapping will be lost. So an iron rod cannot be thought of as a computer.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#204

Post by oezi »

mypastself wrote: post #178
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.

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. Si…

Isn't consciousness just the ability to observe some part of the brain's processes and use it as another kind of sensory input to thinking?

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#205

Post by simonh »

I find this argument completely unconvincing. The mapping in a case like the iron bar 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. To achieve a persistent mapping for a significant time you'd probably need an iron bar something like size of the observable universe, at which point we're in Boltzmann's Brain territory.

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

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

This is making the unstated prior 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?

As for doubting the field of rocks can be conscious, that’s redundant, you might as well say a 3D field of atoms cannot be conscious, such as a brain for example. Talking about computation and consciousness is a sideshow, this is anti-materialism by the back door. Nothing more.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#206

Post by zwaps »

fouronnes3 wrote: post #138
XorNot wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes. The "system" understands Chinese in the same way a native speaker does. It's two different implementations (room system and native speaker) of the same computation ("understanding Chinese"). There is no externally observable difference between actually understanding Chinese and a perfect simulation of a system that understands Chinese. The fact that the person inside doesn't speak Chinese as a result is irreleva…

The point of the experiment is to think about the individual in the room. You can not say it's irrelevant, because it's the entire point.

The system's response is trivial: Sure, if the room+person combination leads always to a coherent response in Chinese, then the entire system understands Chinese. I'd go even further: If the person in the room does not understand Chinese, but the system does, then there is some entity that understands Chinese - either a person or an advanced AI, feeding the inputs. Then, from the systems perspective, the person in the room is largely irrelevant.

But this is not the argument: Despite no discernible difference from the outside, the person in the room may either understand Chinese, or they may not. And so there is a distinction - from the perspective of the individual in the room, that does not depend on the outside observation.

That's all there is to it. It shows that meaning and understanding are not the same as syntactic computation (an important point, to be sure), but it does not show that one can exist with or without the other. By extension, it does not otherwise disprove consciousness as being this or that.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#207

Post by 2-718-281-828 »

epgui wrote: post #18

The idea that you cannot get to consciousness from computation requires accepting on faith alone that consciousness is magic. It’s fundamentally a religious-like bias. It’s not magic, I’m afraid.

Any sufficiently advanced technology feels like magic and it seems to me that consciousness is about as advanced as it gets.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#208

Post by koide »

fouronnes3 wrote: post #185
stocknoob wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, wha…

The fake laugh can be observed to be different by the person faking it.

Exactly. And the person following the Chinese program also knows they don't speak Chinese and that they aren't understanding anything.

I don't really find the Chinese Room argument very compelling because there are too many "it's obvious that X can't really understand" in it.

Also, you can't derive from it that there can't be computed consciousness in some other form.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#210

Post by kohlerm »

This article starts with the wrong assumption that programs/computers need to be deterministic. They are clearly not. Monte Carlo tree search is no t really deterministic, nor is the training if large neural networks. To me conscious has more to do with whether the system is able to reflect on is self. In that sense very simple systems (with not much intelligence ( could be conscious
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