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Consciousness is not computation

joe-antognini.github.io

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Re: Consciousness is not computation

#281

Post by RivieraKid »

@antognini, have you seen this computation argument elsewhere? I came up with basically the same thing when I used to think about consciousness but this is the first time I've read about it from a 3rd party. I also believe that it's very plausible that quantum mechanics plays a role, despite the hate this idea is getting.

Some other realizations I made:

First, physiscs-first understanding of reality is incorrect - consciousness is in a way the only thing that is real and physics is just a description of the patterns we perceive through our consciousness.

Second, my consciousness and other people's consciousness are fundamentally different concepts and need to be defined differently.

Third, the physical brain affects consciousness, obviously, and there's an argument for this happening the other way too, which would mean that laws of physics are broken in the brain. The argument is that if this wasn't true, my brain wouldn't have realized all this.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#282

Post by simonh »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #257
hsn915 wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Computation does not have anything essential to it that makes it different from other "atoms jumping around" other than it produces outputs that we find interesting. There's no reason to expect an adder circuit to be aware that it's adding numbers. There's no reason to expect an implementation of AlphaGo to know that it's playing Go. This should be extendable without limitation. There's no reason to expect that a cer…

The argument seems to be that beyond a certain level of complexity you'll somehow automatically get consciousness. 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,…

>beyond a certain level of complexity you'll somehow automatically get consciousness

Right, that's the argument, but I don't believe this at all. Consciousness is a computation therefore all computations are conscious. That doesn't follow. In any other philosophical or scientific discourse that sort of naive conceptual inversion would be laughed out of the room. Horses are animals therefore animals are all horses. It's absurd.

Personally I think consciousness arises out of reflection on an internal model of one's own thought processes and behaviour. See Douglas Hofstadter's "I am a strange loop". I see no reason why a system like that wouldn't be tractable to computation.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#283

Post by mathgenius »

RivieraKid wrote: post #281

@antognini, have you seen this computation argument elsewhere? I came up with basically the same thing when I used to think about consciousness but this is the first time I've read about it from a 3rd party. I also believe that it's very plausible that quantum mechanics plays a role, despite the hate this idea is getting. Some other realizations I made: First, physiscs-first understanding of reality is incorrect - co…

Checkout Greg Egan, "Permutation city". He basically takes this idea and runs with it, to great effect. I'm not sure if it's a reductio ad absurdum, or what, but it's very cool.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#284

Post by simonh »

eru wrote: post #270
whittingtonaaon wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is whether there was ever a good reason to suggest that mind is computational, and I think philosophy (i.e. Searle) have shown that there wasn’t. A brain CAN compute (albeit very slowly), but that’s the end of the similarities. The reason it’s not morally wrong, say, to recycle an old computer is that computers are not at all like human minds.

Alas, if you refer to Searle's Chinese Room, that hasn't shown anything, if you just bite the bullet and accept that the Room is conscious.

Exactly, replace the 'room' with a volume the size of a large planet. Have each symbol represent an atom in a brain. If you like, replace the person manipulating the symbols with a vast army manipulating the symbols according to the laws of physics and chemistry. The Chinese room argument simply reduces to an argument against materialism.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#285

Post by epgui »

ttctciyf wrote: post #231
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.

Proving a negative is not always possible, but the irreducible randomness in quantum measurement or "wave function collapse" is essentially defined as uncomputable. You can of course simulate quantum randomness using an RNG or some such but the essential inherent unpredictability can't be simulated like that. To be clear, I'm not trying to argue that quantum randomness is a component of consciousness! Regards conscio…

>"wave function collapse" is essentially defined as uncomputable.

Maybe uncomputable using a macbook pro or classical computer, yes (I accept this for the sake of argument)... But that doesn't make it "not a computation" fundamentally.

In other words, it's not super clear and obvious that quantum mechanics is not fundamentally computational. We are trying to build quantum computers which take advantage of some interesting quantum effects, after all. I suspect that if/when we get those quantum computers to do useful things, we will still describe what they are doing as "performing computations", even if Bell's theorem rules out hidden variables with the locality assumption.

> inherent unpredictability

Note also that the presence of randomness does not necessarily preclude something from being computational in nature.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#286

Post by [deleted] »

simonh wrote: post #284
eru wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alas, if you refer to Searle's Chinese Room, that hasn't shown anything, if you just bite the bullet and accept that the Room is conscious.

Exactly, replace the 'room' with a volume the size of a large planet. Have each symbol represent an atom in a brain. If you like, replace the person manipulating the symbols with a vast army manipulating the symbols according to the laws of physics and chemistry. The Chinese room argument simply reduces to an argument against materialism.

[deleted]

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#287

Post by tarsinge »

doctor_eval wrote: post #54
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…

> 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…

> Seems like a journalist is conscious if they do it, but it can’t possible be consciousness if LaMDA does it.

That the output is the same proves nothing. The journalist has a subjective experience of themselves doing it, they "see" their thoughts. Like an AI can paint with red by using values without the experience of seeing the red.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#289

Post by epgui »

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? :)

I would submit that a computation that never completes is probably still a computation.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#290

Post by Tor3 »

kazinator wrote: post #130
_moof wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until you start dreaming.

It's when you're anaesthesized for surgery that your consciousness goes away. No dreams, nothing. You don't exist during those hours. You cannot account for them later; they are deleted.

When I woke up after surgery I felt that 1.5 hours had passed. But in actuality it was something around 4 hours since I went under. It turned out that 1.5 hours before I woke up I had been brought out of anesthesia and after that I simply slept. I didn't have any dreams at all, but at least my internal clock had started working. A clock presumably doesn't need consciousness, but there's definitely a qualitative difference between anesthesia and sleep. And as I sometimes suddenly wake up with a solution to some problem, with no recallable dream preceding it, my personal subjective opinion is that there's some level of consciousness going on even in sleep. That anesthesia experience was so very different from anything I had experienced before, with no recall whatsoever of the time that had passed.
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