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Consciousness is not computation

joe-antognini.github.io

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Re: Consciousness is not computation

#401

Post by FeepingCreature »

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…

A simulation of weather can absolutely produce a simulation of rain. Then the only question is, is consciousness like data or like matter? As opposed to matter, data can easily traverse levels of simulation.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#403

Post by simonh »

hsn915 wrote: post #372
kazinator wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's no reason to expect an adder circuit to be aware that it's adding numbers There is no reason to expect a neuron to be aware that it's propagating part of the evolution of an epiphany.

I suppose your argument is, consciousness on the system level does not require individual parts to be conscious. So let me expand a bit of why I used the adder circuit as an example. There's nothing about addition that can say "this is addition" in an objective sense. We are dealing with binary encoding of numbers. There's nearly an infinite number of ways to encode information. The design of any circuit deals with p…

>You can come study the behavior of any arbitrary system, given certain inputs and outputs, and assign any meaning you want to its states. You can retro-fit any intepretation of state to the system.

All you are saying here is that no external interpretation of a system can experience the consciousness of a system, if it is conscious. Yes, that is correct. No matter how thoroughly I scan and analyse your brain state I can't use that to demonstrate your internal experience, so why would we expect that to be true of any other form of consciousness?

I'm going out of sequence with your comment here but:

>But you have to understand, a system inspecting its own state is not any different from a system inspecting any other arbitrary state. For the state of the system will be encoded in some way that was chosen arbitrarily. There's nothing essential about any encoding of any state that can possibly give raise to a phenomenon like consciousness.

I don't see how you can possibly demonstrate that, you're just essentially saying materialism is wrong 'because'. From my perspective in a sense yes, you're right, it's all just information processing of a particular kind. There's no magic. If you're looking for a special genie in an AI, or a human brain, that makes it conscious I don't think you'll find one. It's all just stuff. But then, I'm a materialist so I don't see that as being a problem.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#404

Post by mcculley »

The author has an underlying misunderstanding as an axiom.

> “The second important property of consciousness that any theory needs to explain is that consciousness is a single, cohesive experience. My consciousness is of my entire self. It is not of half of myself, nor is it some superposition of you and me. Somehow, whatever is going on in my brain to produce my consciousness contains all the neurons of my brain, not just a subset of them. There are not multiple consciousnesses in my brain, it’s just me in there.”

The self is an illusion. A sufficiently complex system built out of transistors can also be fooled into thinking it has a self.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#405

Post by V-2 »

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.

"The idea that you cannot make tea from water alone requires accepting on faith that brewing tea is magic."

No, not necessarily. It just means that water/computation is not the only ingredient you need.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#406

Post by seanwilson »

hsn915 wrote: post #234
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…

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…

> 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.

What about an AI that creates models of what humans are thinking to predict their behaviour, and is able to turn this upon itself (i.e. theory of mind)? Is there a story somewhere following this idea as a justification for why humans might have consciousness?

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#407

Post by ozy »

> But in this world, consciousness is, at root, a physical phenomenon, not a purely computational phenomenon.

That is entirely unknown. If it were a purely computational phenomenon, it would explain a lot, and nothing in this article argues against it. Except, perhaps, the iron bar mapping. But it seems to miss that a computer program basically defines a causal network. And recognizing and comparing causal networks is much more objective then the thought experiment acknowledges.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#408

Post by red75prime »

walleeee wrote: post #390
red75prime wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any physical system with a component that you can throw away to make the system a more reliable computer is not a feasible implementation of an abstract computation. If you replace the iron bar with a quartz generator, reliability will increase by ten to the power of, say, quadrillion.

we threw away vacuum tubes and replaced them with semiconductors this made computers more reliable were the vacuum tube monstrosities not computers?

They were somewhat useful implementations of abstract computations, unlike "error in the first femtosecond" iron bar computer.

And vacuum tubes also played a crucial role in the process of computation, besides introduction of noise.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#409

Post by lazyatom »

> By this I mean that the existence of my consciousness does not depend on other observers perceiving me to be conscious.

The author doesn't recognise that they are an observer of their own consciousness; I would go further and say that consciousness _requires_ the conscious _thing_ to be an observer of themselves.

So, for me, the whole axiom "consciousness does not require an observer" is reversed.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#410

Post by injidup »

wrzuteczka wrote: post #292
injidup wrote: post #24

Word salad! What really is the point of Philosophers? Imagine a philosopher getting away with saying "According to Descartes a solar panel will never achieve over 95% efficiency because rocks in the desert" The sentence rightly doesn't make sense but because consciousness is a fuzzy concept people get away with making hard statements that sound truthy while in essence spitting out nonsense that is no different to GPT…

It's not word salad, this is the logical conclusion of the Church-Turing thesis. If you think it's false, you should present some arguments against it.

And now you are adding johurt dressing to the salad.

Computers are just fancy ways to locally reduce entropy. They do not exist outside the laws of the universe. Computation is not something special. It's happens! Everything is "computation". To say then that consciousness is not computation suggests there are speciaö physical laws of the universe not accessible to observation or measurement but somehow explainable by philopshers and priests.

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