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Consciousness is not computation

joe-antognini.github.io

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Re: Consciousness is not computation

#321

Post by 3g4o53g4o5 »

tsimionescu wrote: post #116
3g4o53g4o5 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this a counterargument? You are denying facts and say something juat even contract with yourself. > Dolphin can understand sign language but dog dont. So ALL OF THEM do not speak. Do you mean this? It is the same as saying that you dont understand Japanese and conclud that human can not speak. Correct me if I am wrong. Or correct yourself.

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…

Well since there is full of false assumptions, I just give you a name.

@toshitaka_szk in twitter. A Japanese dude can translate languages of birds and successfully did some experiences on it. And he is kind of famous.

And needless to say Hunger the dog[1]. Did this clear your humancentric brain?

[1] https://nypost.com/2021/05/01/this-speech-therapist-taught-h...

> 0 animals can be taught, as far as we've tried - more complex structure

Also this applies to limited intelligence human infant and mathematic immature dudes. So by your logic, those underintelligence human do not have consciousness. QED.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#322

Post by squabble »

mathgenius wrote: post #288
squabble wrote: post #37

Maybe I'm the only one who is real, and everyone else are just robots. I'm not sure I'll ever be able to know for sure.

How can we even be sure we are the same person as yesterday? Or even five minutes ago.. It's all pretty weird.

I think what I was getting at is that it may be impossible to tell from the outside if something is conscious or not. If I can't even prove to myself that another person is conscious, I might have a hard time proving that a computer is conscious.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#323

Post by hgomersall »

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.

There's an interesting thought experiment that goes the other way. What if we replace a single neuron in a conscious person's brain by a properly connected real-time neuron simulator? Would that affect the person's consciousness? What about two neurons? Etc etc. At what point, if ever, would a progressively more simulated brain no longer be the original consciousness?

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#324

Post by eru »

simonh wrote: post #314
vbezhenar wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know that? Lamda AI claims itself as conscious being. How can you distinguish between two entities which can communicate? Do you discriminate on meat factor?

You can also get it to agree that it is not conscious. I can write a one line program that claims to be conscious right now. Lamda and GTP-3 are amazing achievements, but they're still just chat bots that look good when they're being lobbed softball questions. If you ask something that maps to the input texts they're trained on you get credible looking responses, but critical or adversarial questioning very easily ex…

Turing's original paper is worth a read here. He already pre-empted a lot of the objections back then. You are right that Turing's original test is much harder than just passing a few shallow softball questions.

See https://academic.oup.com/mind/article/LIX/236/433/986238 for the original paper.

However, I do count responding well to softball questions as important markers of our progress. Ten years ago, no one was able to pass even this mark.

(And from a commercial point of view, good enough 'understanding' and responses might be good enough for many tasks.

For example, I am a native German speaker, but I found that Google Translate often already does a better job of translating English to German than I could do, unless I spent unreasonable amounts of time on the task.

At the moment the most efficient way for me to produce a translation is to let Google Translate do the work, and then proof-read to spot cases were the machine didn't have enough context to resolve an ambiguity the right way.)

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#325

Post by _zywo »

cmdli wrote: post #243
Dylan16807 wrote: post #153

> But! If a single observer can correctly determine that the bar of iron is conscious, we must conclude that the bar of iron is conscious for everybody, because consciousness is observer independent. If true, honest-to-God consciousness is just a matter of running consciousness.exe, we have indeed found someone who has correctly observed that the bar of iron is running consciousness.exe and we must conclude that the…

You don't need to know all that much in order to achieve consciousness. Lets say that you have a program that you assume to be conscious. You run it for 1 second, and exactly record all its internal states and outputs. Now, you can find an interpretation of the iron bar that shows that the iron bar casually and deterministically went through those exact same states for a full 1 second. What is the difference between…

The conscious part of that system is the interpretation, not the bar itself. You have skipped directly over the observer, who is actually performing the conscious computation.

Think about how you would actually write a program to achieve this. The iron bar is just a bunch of atoms with random bit states that flip at random intervals - we'll model it as a contiguous 1D array of bits. You have a 1 second consciousness mapping, which is most likely rather large in size. Our interpretation process maps the random bits in the bar to a time instant of the conscious process by interpreting some bits in the bar as themselves, and the other bits in the bar as the reverse of themselves. In other words, our interpretation of which atom-bits are telling the truth and which are lying is itself a 1D array of bits that satisfies the following property:

BAR bitxor INTERPRETATION = CONSCIOUS_INSTANT

As time progresses, BAR and CONSCIOUS_INSTANT continuously change, therefore necessitating INTERPRETATION to change as well to keep the above formula consistent. In fact, by the rules of XOR, we can compute exactly what INTERPRETATION is at any given moment:

INTERPRETATION = CONSCIOUS_INSTANT bitxor BAR

But wait! This means that to dynamically know INTERPRETATION, you _must_ know all of the information associated with both CONSCIOUS_INSTANT and BAR. But if you know all the information associated with CONSCIOUS_INSTANT, haven't you already simulated a conscious process...? So there is in fact a consciousness here, but not in the {BAR} system: it is in the {BAR,INTERPRETATION,CONSCIOUS_INSTANT} system.

(Note: If you squint at this for long enough, it starts sounding a lot like a motivation for Death of the Author.)

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#326

Post by whittingtonaaon »

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.

I know Searle replied to this, but don’t remember what he said, except it seemed a little ridiculous to talk about sentient rooms. I think it’s much more plausible to just claim that the people who wrote the instructions know Chinese.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#327

Post by V-2 »

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…

> and maybe dogs because we like them but definitely not spiders and flies because we don’t

This is not an intellectualy honest way to put it. Dogs are obviously and objectively more psychologically complex creatures than flies. "Liking" them has nothing to do with it. People generally like butterflies more than rats, yet hardly anyone would deny that rats are more conscious than butterflies nevertheless.

Just because consciousness is not a binary thing (either on or off) doesn't mean it can't exist at all. It can be a spectrum.

> My personal experience is that consciousness, like free will, is a useful illusion. Poking at the edges of consciousness (mostly with drugs) leads to all sorts of contradictions and challenges to what people usually think of as consciousness.

I could use the same argument to state that mountains are an illusion.

And then it's also kind of true. After all, you can't clearly define what constitutes a mountain (what's the minimum height? And what's the reference point, who says it must be the sea level? etc.), or show me precisely where a mountain starts and where it ends, without having to use some criteria of purely arbitrary nature, under which what you consider a mountain I may not, and there's no way to objectively prove who's right.

But mountains aren't illusionary in the sense that a world without mountains as we know them (however imprecisely) wouldn't be identical to ours. So they are something.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#329

Post by doctor_eval »

tarsinge wrote: post #287
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…

> 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.

How do you know that the journalist has a subjective experience? How do you know your own subjective experience isn’t just your “bicameral mind” talking to itself? How do you know LaMDA doesn’t have a subjective experience? It’s just assumptions; nobody really knows what’s going on inside that neural network.

The only way we can tell that someone else is conscious is because they tell us. So just saying “the output proves nothing” is incredibly weak, because the output is all we’ve got.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#330

Post by yreg »

mathgenius wrote: post #288
squabble wrote: post #37

Maybe I'm the only one who is real, and everyone else are just robots. I'm not sure I'll ever be able to know for sure.

How can we even be sure we are the same person as yesterday? Or even five minutes ago.. It's all pretty weird.

Some philosophers think that every time you lose your train of thought (e.g. zoning out while driving or falling asleep) your consciousness disappears and a new consciosness forms later when you "snap back" (or wake up). This new consciousness shares only memories and personality with the previous one, but it is otherwise a new entity, similar to the teleporter thought experiment.

Conveniently, this makes death less scary.

Further reading: Zen and the Art of Consciousness by Susan Blackmore

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