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Consciousness is not computation

joe-antognini.github.io

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Re: Consciousness is not computation

#461

Post by psyc »

layer8 wrote: post #439
trts wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My personal experience is that consciousness, like free will, is a useful illusion It is probably just a difference in semantics but for me, it seems like consciousness is the only thing that is assuredly not an illusion. That I am having a subjective experience is undeniable. The objects of my consciousness all might be (and probably are) something else than they appear to be (as is often the experience with diffe…

“I’m having a subjective experience” is an interesting statement. It seems that you’re expressing that you’re experiencing having a subjective experience. Could that (first) experience be non-subjective? Is what makes the (latter) experience subjective just that it is an immediate input to your own thoughts? I personally believe that what a real explanation of subjective experience will come down to is some kind of r…

This idea is often repeated (even in this thread). It sounds good, but I still haven't the slightest iota of an idea how you get from recursive strange-loopy self reflection to the experienced sensory field (sometimes "qualia"). I don't see how this idea, or anything else, gets you one tiny fraction of the way to consciousness, unless you take it as an axiom (i.e. "when you point such a network at itself in such a way, voila! you get realtime first-person subjective qualia-tastic experience"). And why should we?

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#462

Post by hoseja »

kertoip_1 wrote: post #433
hoseja wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

But does it really matter? If we can just replace, one-by-one all neurons in brain with artificial ones and that would not affect consciousness of the user, then we've just proved it's possible to have a thinking machine

What if you replace all the neurons and the person is suddenly stuck with no short-term memory and aphasia? Clearly your replacement neurons are defective. At which point are they not? Is that point distinguishable from normal neurons?

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#463

Post by simonh »

porkbrain wrote: post #442

> Supporters of the Strong AI Hypothesis insisted that consciousness was a property of certain algorithms – a result of information being processed in certain ways, regardless of what machine, or organ, was used to perform the task. A computer model which manipulated data about itself and its ‘surroundings’ in essentially the same way as an organic brain would have to possess essentially the same mental states. ‘Simu…

I posted this elsewhere here earlier, but when I imagine standing in the rain nothing gets wet. So is my imagination of the rain more like a rainstorm, or more like a simulation of one?

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#464

Post by denton-scratch »

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #437
eru wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are conscious, and so is the combination of iron bar and crazy complex mapping. In the latter case, the crazy complex mapping does all the work and in some sense _is_ conscious.

The iron bar is obviously not a Turing machine and doesn't run programs, that argument is total bonkers, the author assumes it's correct, but it's not correct. With the same success you can look at a turned off computer, assign interpretations to its atoms and thus imagine it runs linux, but it's just a fantasy.

I find the iron bar argument singularly unconvincing; but whether or not it simulates some Turing Machine is neither here nor there, because the Turing Machine model is orthogonal to consciousness.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#465

Post by denton-scratch »

l33tman wrote: post #344
eru wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scott Aaronson (if memory serves right) had an interesting take on this. He framed his thought in terms of the Turing test, but the argument would apply equally well to the mapped iron bar: In theory, we could pass any Turing test of finite duration (eg an hour or less) and run in a chat room with finite bandwidth with a giant lookup table. Just look up the entire past of the conversation to see what answer should be…

Today you don't even need to do any look-up table, most short GPT-3-generated dialogues seem perfectly fine from a Turing-test perspective. That form of the Turing test stopped being useful long ago.. Still, the Turing test was never meant as a measure of "consciousness", right?

The Turing test was supposed to be a test for intelligence, not consciousness.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#466

Post by bnralt »

doctor_eval wrote: post #444
bnralt wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If this is true then there is no reason that these abstractions couldn’t be learned, in which case you could take away the language, and perhaps the machine would continue to have thoughts; it would just be unable to communicate them. Of course, in this case you would probably conclude that it’s not conscious because it can’t communicate. If this were true - that it had a general human level abstraction, and not on…

> If this were true - that it had a general human level abstraction, and not only the ability to mimic human speech - we would be able to attach LaMDA to some other outlet and see it do things we consider conscious I think you've inadvertently shifted the goalposts. The question is, "is LaMDA conscious?". I don't think anyone proposes that LaMDA has a "general human level abstraction". Expecting it to do non-language…

> I think you've inadvertently shifted the goalposts. The question is, "is LaMDA conscious?". I don't think anyone proposes that LaMDA has a "general human level abstraction". Expecting it to do non-language, "human" things in order to prove that it's conscious is not necessarily a reasonable test.

As I said in my first post, I'm taking "consciousness" to mean "the ability to form certain kind of mental abstractions, particularly those involving ourselves." As such it's a type of domain agnostic intelligence, so you would expect it to be able to do _something_ other than hyper-optimize for one particular type of output.

People can use different definitions of "consciousness" if they want, but many of the other ones I've found ("internal feeling") seem vague and not particularly useful (and don't make it clear why LaMDA would be different from any other program).

> There are plenty of things a human can't do that other "simpler animal minds" can do

There are many things that humans don't have the hardware to do (though it seems like some people do have the ability to echolocate[1]). But given the hardware, humans are definitely able to make mental models of these things (people are able to use sonar, for instance).

> On the other hand, human children learn language through mimicry, which suggests that mimicry may indeed be a path to consciousness.

Children don't learn consciousness through mimicry, they learn language through mimicry. As I said before, Helen Keller wasn't unconscious before she was able to communicate. Simple mimicry in one specific domain doesn't show us that any of the underlying complex abstractions that happens in human and many animal minds are taking place.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_echolocation

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#467

Post by sitkack »

> purely physical processes

Everything in the universe is a "purely physical process". Everything in the universe is an arrangement of matter and energy. Biological systems are extremely mechanistic, even if highly complex. These arguments that consciousness can only arise in a biological brain all seem to hinge on us being special in some undetermined way. Biological life is wonderful, but how does it specifically have a monopoly on something?

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#469

Post by simonh »

Gwarzo wrote: post #25
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.

This is a little bit of an emotional take I think. The burden of proof is on the claim that you can get there through computation, not otherwise. We do not understand the fundamental reality of consciousness, this does not mean that consciousness is magic. The assertion that you cannot get there from computation implies there is a currently non understood yet essential piece of physics(I assume, but I do not know) wh…

All the arguments Ive seen against computational consciousness seem to me to reduce down to arguments against materialism. I expounded on this more in a root comment, and subsequent discussions so I won't repeat.

Right now in physics and the materials sciences materialism is thoroughly uncontroversial. There is no evidence for any kind of dualism, it only rears it's nebulous and poorly defined head when we talk about consciousness, and there is zero experimental evidence for it. Therefore no, I think the burden of proof is on the dualist / non-computational consciousness side.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#470

Post by akimball »

simonh wrote: post #403
hsn915 wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The inability you describe is a pragmatic one, and may cease to pertain as abilities improve
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