Consciousness is not computation

What would be really interesting instead would be to admit that there's lots of knowledge and questions that are not encompassed by any particular discipline but instead lay at the interfaces between domains, that mondels like those oh philosophy no longer address well (and religion no longer provides useful psychological tools for), and re-image a new kind of philosophy build from the ground up on the idea of computation, and in this new discipline re-define +/- break apart fuzzy concepts like consciousness so that we finally have something to talk and think about!

I suspect the same, but I think there is tremendous value in taking a cosmic step back and seeing everything through the lens of information. It's the most reductionist neutral approach to the universe I can conceive us at this point in my life.

> By contrast, if I construct a collection of chemicals that matches the positions of those of a real bacterium, I have created a new bacterium. However, if I simulate the activity of those chemicals on a computer, I have not created a bacterium. I have just created a simulation of a bacterium. I haven't created a living thing.

I agree, but I think the context matters: you may not have created a bacteria, but that's because you've emulated a bacteria in a totally different environment. The bacteria makes no sense as a computational engine if you separate it from its environment, which is chemical in nature: this chemical environment must also be emulated inside the computer. So if we're going to take the idea of life as a computation seriously and to the extreme, we need to conceive of it as it exists within its environment and in the context within which it evolved. Otherwise what you've created, grossly speaking, is a function that is never called, which of course is much less interesting.

Similarly for the brain, it must also be embodied, and you must also simulate its afferent inputs, and you must also give it an environment with which to interact and within which to exhibit features of agency. If you emulate the embodied brain with its environment, I contend that it doesn't matter what the substrate is: the brain you will have created will "feel" just as real to itself. It will perceive itself as being "conscious" just as well as you and I.

Note that for this to make any sense in a relatable way to a human, it's not enough to just throw large numbers of neurons together, as I understand is common practice in AI work even today: a long-learned lesson in both neuro and biochem is that function follows structure, so you must emulate the gross organizational structure of the human brain in order to observe the same sorts of features that make up human-flavoured consciousness.

If you compute consciousness, there will be zero distinction between how the computation feels real to itself, and how you and I feel to ourselves. That "magic" feeling we get where we have the impression that we're "someone", with a personal identity, that we're real, that we're alive, that we're aware, that we can make our own decisions... All of that stuff, your emulated consciousness will also experience. It won't be just bits turning on and off from its point of view: it will feel alive.

Similarly, "free will" may simply be an illusion caused by the failure of that perfect prediction of what to do/what will happen, thus leaving us with a pleasant stochasticity that we end up favoring as freedom :)

Clearly it's unlikely this is a hard cut off. Adding one more byte of RAM, expanding the CPU from 64 to 128-bit words, or adding another dimension to a neural network isn't going to do it.

But if consciousness emergent, how do you measure the amount of consciousness?

Because the experience is subjective, you can't just assume that behaviours that appear conscious are proof that consciousness exists.

You could - presumably - build a Turing bot, but it would still be an automaton.

So you're left with people making very definitive statements about something which everyone experiences, but no one can measure or even define.

The brain is always in control. When you are awake, when you are sleeping, when you are under general anesthesia, when you are sleepwalking, when you are blackout drunk, and so on.

It's a trivial statement, which doesn't say anything about why some of these states aren't like the others. And there's a strange coincidence: when the brain creates that "illusion of control", your body behaves differently than when it doesn't.