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Consciousness is not computation

joe-antognini.github.io

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Re: Consciousness is not computation

#361

Post by V-2 »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #336
V-2 wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 becaus…

> consciousness is not a binary thing (either on or off) doesn't mean it can't exist at all. It can be a spectrum. I would categorize consciousness as binary. What you are talking is intelligence in general that rat are more intelligent than butterflies.

> What you are talking is intelligence in general that rat are more intelligent than butterflies.

Not necessarily. One human can be more intelligent than another just the same (even if the gap is orders of magnitude smaller, naturally). It doesn't seem obvious to me at all than it implies being more conscious.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#362

Post by kijin »

tshaddox wrote: post #27
kijin wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every chain of reasoning needs to bootstrap with one or more statements that are entirely self-evident, such that they don't need to be justified by reference to other statements. Otherwise you run into an infinite loop. "I'm a conscious entity" is about as close to Descartes' "I think, therefore I am" as modern philosophers are willing to go.

I disagree with any sort of “justified belief” epistemology, so of course I disagree with you completely. If knowledge were “justified true belief” or anything like that, then it would indeed be the case that any knowledge would require either an infinite chain of justifications or a privileged self-justified fact that cannot be examined or criticized using reason. If, on the other hand, the pursuit of knowledge cons…

I'm not a big fan of JTB epistemology, either, but you can't help regressing to some sort of common ground in order to make conjectures and refute them.

In order for someone to make a conjecture that A does B, and for someone else to point out that A actually doesn't do B, both parties need to agree on the meanings of A and B, as well as what it means for A to do B, usually by appealing to C, an independent common ground. You climb down as many levels of abstractions as needed until you reach C, because otherwise you're just talking past each other.

Even in a coherentist system, the network of existing beliefs forms the common ground against which questionable beliefs are tested, and some beliefs are held firmer than others. Those beliefs are treated as already justified for the purpose of the current investigation. Few people who talk about consciousness would ever consider denying that they are conscious.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#363

Post by vbezhenar »

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…

The same reasoning could be applied to many people. You wouldn't deny their consciousness on that ground.

The issue with general AI is like issue with chess. People are not happy when robot can win some games. People can only accept that robot really plays chess, when robot defeated best of the best.

General AI is the same. Looking like some guy is not enough. You need to reason better than smartest human on the planet, only then people will admit that general AI is there. That's a high bar.

You can definitely talk someone to agree that he's not conscious using some logic tricks. Not everyone, for sure, but someone who may be doesn't really care that much about that concept.

You also can tune AI so it'll not agree that he's unconscious no matter what.

What I'm trying to deliver is that there's no easy border which can divide conscious from unconscious. The only border was Turing test and robots passed it. Now you can test whether that particular robot talks like a very smart person, etc. But you can't distinguish bot from some random not-so-smart person.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#364

Post by simonh »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #336
V-2 wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 becaus…

> consciousness is not a binary thing (either on or off) doesn't mean it can't exist at all. It can be a spectrum. I would categorize consciousness as binary. What you are talking is intelligence in general that rat are more intelligent than butterflies.

My experience of consciousness certainly isn't binary. I slip in and out of consciousness when I'm waking up in bed on a weekend all the time. The first person experience is of a very nuanced continuously sliding scale of awareness and cognitive coherence.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#365

Post by hsn915 »

vbezhenar wrote: post #244
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…

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?

> Do you discriminate on meat factor?

Yes.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#366

Post by tsimionescu »

3g4o53g4o5 wrote: post #337
thom wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the argument is more that the electron and photon are subjective interpretations of the observable consequence of some computation, not that they are computing things in and of themselves.

Thanks this is exactly what I am trying to say. We dont know exactly how the universe is doing or how the photons do to themselves, but by doing experiments, scientists figured out the law of computiation of this vague "universe computer" a.k.a laws of physics. And since scientist's discovery do not violate the actually behavior of the physical world, there established a isomorphism. And the very same law is used in…

To my mind, I think that if you want to say that the universe is a computer, then you can't say it's doing linear algebra, even though the behavior of particles is described by linear algebra.

If you want to model the universe as a computer, than its basic operations are the interactions described in the Standard Model, and the symbols it works on are particles&fields that exist. But the universe computer is not resolving a linear algebra equation to decide what happens when an electron emits a photon. Instead, the electron emitting a photon with some energy etc. is one of the elementary operations of the universe computer.

Coming back to the CPU example, a basic operation in a CPU is setting a bit to 1. That operation is not divisible into any other more elementary operations from the point of view of modeling the physical CPU as a computer. Of course, there are other physical phenomena going down to the SM that are the realization of this basic operation, but those are not part of the modeling: the CPU computer, as a model, works by flipping bits.

Similarly, for QM, the universe computer works by doing one of the possible interactions from the standard model. As far as we know, there is no layer of detail underneath this, even if the interactions of the standard model are indeed linear algebra.

One important way in which saying "the universe is computing linear algebra" is wrong is that, as far as we know, the universe is instantly calculating the solutions of the linear equations - the electron doesn't go into an "emitting" state, then emit a photon with the appropriate values some time later after the computation is finished.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#367

Post by hsn915 »

tsimionescu wrote: post #247
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…

> 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. This is not true. Computing is a system where the physical hardware (the computer) is following rules that are explicitly encoded in itself - you can analyze the system and discover where and how the program it is following is encoded (as we did with D…

> This is not true. Computing is a system where the physical hardware (the computer) is following rules that are explicitly encoded in itself - you can analyze the system and discover where and how the program it is following is encoded (as we did with DNA).

1) No. The rules are just physics. Electric signals going through physical material.

2) Why is this event relevant? I can say the same about water pipes in a sweage system . The way the water moves through pipes is encoded in the design and connections of the pipes. You can inspect it to figure out how it behaves.

I've yet to see a model of consciousness that does not imply that the sewage system is conscious.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#368

Post by sandgiant »

simonh wrote: post #205

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 ach…

I agree, this seems analogous to the argument that simulation of the weather can't produce rain. In some sense, that argument is true by prior definition. It's like saying that the Universe can't simulate itself.

But consciousness is not rain. We don't really know what consciousness is, so I don't see a compelling reason to exclude computation as being sufficient to produce it.

We need philosophers to tell us that consciousness is before we start saying what it's not.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#369

Post by hoseja »

hgomersall wrote: post #323
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.

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?

This may be a little deceptive depending on how you define "a properly connected real-time neuron simulator". Can it form new connections? Can it grow? Does it metabolize? Can it die? Etc...

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#370

Post by hoseja »

aneil wrote: post #312
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.

But the argument shows it's absurd to think the room is conscious. What if the person in the room takes a coffee break or goes on vacation? What connects the next computational step they do to the previous one and the next... which then somehow gives rise to a fragment of qualia. That seems like an impossibly complex and unlikely scientific theory.

The conscious system is so high above the guy shuffling rulebooks and slips of paper it has no concept of him. A billion years might pass for the Room to experience a second. Just as we have basically no concept of the baroque quantum-molecular-cellular machinery of our brains. There are very roughly 10^15~18 light-sensitive molecules in your eye so you can see. With our best computers it's very hard to precisely simulate a single one of them. Just ponder the insane scale.
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