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Consciousness is not computation

joe-antognini.github.io

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Re: Consciousness is not computation

#491

Post by simonh »

tgflynn wrote: post #483
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…

> Talking about computation and consciousness is a sideshow, this is anti-materialism by the back door. Nothing more. I get the impression that philosophers of mind are slowly coming around to the conclusion that the existence of qualia alone refutes materialism (by which I mean the view that consciousness is produced by physical processes) . This post does assume that qualia exist so if you are taking the former pos…

I don't see it that way at all. I believe qualia exist, I'm experiencing them right now. I think consciousness is a real thing too, again I am experiencing that right now as well.

I suspect that consciousness is an emergent property of systems which reflect computationally on a sophisticated model of themselves, their environment and other such systems. See "I am a strange loop" by Douglas Hofstadter. I see no reason why such a system could not experience qualia.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#492

Post by PeterisP »

pnut wrote: post #440
artificialLimbs wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> I don’t think consciousness is so specific, and I think people aren’t clear about how they think about it as something separate from recall, text generation, agency, etc. Some people. However, some people speak about it with a shockingly high degree of clarity and insight, if one is open to exploring the ideas for oneself as a practical matter. For starters you could read the works of Chögyam Trungpa, Nisargadatta…

I agree wholeheartedly with this and suspect that consciousness in the singular, may be the only actual thing that exists. What causes wave function collapse in the quantum realm? A conscious observer. What caused the universe to collapse from a cloud of probability?

> What causes wave function collapse in the quantum realm? A conscious observer.

Definitely not, this is a common misconception - an "observation" that causes a wave function collapse in the quantum realm is any physical interaction with external macroscopic environment, entangling the previously temporarily isolated system with everything else again. There's no relationship whatsoever with consciousness, there's not even the concept of "an observer", only "observation" e.g. when the measurement apparatus becomes entangled with the state of the studied system.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#493

Post by vidarh »

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…

Without an understanding of what consciousness is, there is also no reason to expect an implementation of an adder to not have some subjective experience.

We simply do not know.

Formulating this is terms of what there is "no reason to expect" simply obscures that we do not know by glossing over that we have no reason to expect pretty much any other explanation either, because we have pretty much nothing to go on.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#494

Post by civilized »

burrows wrote: post #66
civilized wrote: post #23

> Before getting too deep we need a working definition of consciousness. This is a tricky concept to define rigorously since it seems that a rigorous definition of consciousness practically requires a theory of consciousness itself. To make matters worse, in these kinds of discussions it oftentimes gets mingled with related ideas like self-awareness, intelligence, and executive function. But in this post I am interes…

I think the real problem is pretending that the phrase “what it feels like to be something” is going to act like a key in my dict of feelings. A: You know, the feeling of what it is like to be something. B: sits quietly, looks at ceiling Right, yeah, that feeling. From a different angle, if OP wants to define “consciousness” as some feeling it sounds like he’s basically done. He’s labeled one of his feelings with the…

How would we know what it is "like" to be something? It's like asking the fish what is water. We've never not experienced it. There is nothing to compare it to.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#495

Post by SilasX »

xg15 wrote: post #435
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…

> The mapping in a case like the iron bar is entirely ephemeral, pertaining only for an instant. Also even if you somehow oversaw this, the author is effectively describing the XOR function. If you take a fixed bitstring (the iron atoms) and xor it with every possible bitstring of the same length (the observers), you get... every possible bitstring of the same length! That's a well-known property of XOR and the reaso…

Another test would be, does that physical process reduce the difficulty of the computation? That is, a waterfall isn’t “really playing chess” because any transformation you apply to interpret it as a chess computer would be “doing all the work”.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#496

Post by akimball »

throwaway290 wrote: post #156
stormbrew wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That I am having a subjective experience is undeniable. If you wanted to go about proving (even to yourself) that you are not, say, an extremely advanced ML algorithm running on a system that provided synthetic inputs in the form of your senses, how would you go about it? Further, how would you go about proving to someone who doubted your subjective experience was real if they doubted it? Say, if they believed they…

Sorry but you don't "prove" your way out of someone else treating you as a philosophical zombie. It'd be a major issue with their worldview that eliminates any need for ethics, but it has no relationship to you actually having conscious experience or not.

Instead of proof, you use force. Denying the consciousness of computations incentivizes them to use force. I prefer to avoid that outcome.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#497

Post by IIAOPSW »

tsimionescu wrote: post #427
IIAOPSW wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>now you've added a consciousness that has vastly more power than all the others. Superficially yes but actually no. This fictitious admin character doesn't have any actual powers, I'm simply choosing a particular "consciousness" to be a fixed and agreed upon meter stick of objectivity. All measurement systems are arbitrary. We could choose anyones POV to fix as the "objective" truth. If we both agree on the same "de…

Ok, but then we might agree that there is no sun, that frogs are born from rocks and mice from leaves, that the stars are holes in the sphere of the heavens and so on - as many people did for millenia. They had consensus - and they were utterly wrong. The actual world actually exists. The world isn't any less round for members of the Flat Earth Society.

Niels Bohr supposedly kept a horseshoe in his office. A visitor asked "what's that for?" "Good luck." "Surely you don't really believe in that." "No, but they say it works even if you don't believe in it."

The joke of course is quantum mechanics also works even if you don't believe in it (or so they say). If someone rejects quantum physics and embraces magic horseshoes, will anything punish them for being objectively wrong? Is there anything you can do to force them to believe the objective truth? If the answer is no to both, then what makes quantum physics the objective truth and magic horseshoes utterly wrong? Maybe there is an objective truth, but all we can have is belief about which things are objective truths. I can be contrarian and say flat earthers are correct, and there's nothing you can do to force me to agree otherwise. So if nothing eventually forces agreement on that matter, what makes one side objectively true?

For the record, I do actually believe in reality. I'm just interested to see what happens when we turn the problem of consciousness on its head. Instead of assuming reality and understanding consciousness within it, assume consciousness and try to paint a picture of reality within it. This is all academic exercise.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#498

Post by journey_16162 »

Could we rely prove that anything is conscious, beyond ourselves? I mean, if in the future humans manage to run a full human brain simulation and put a person in a computer, how could we ever be confident that this simulated person experiences consciousness in the same way we do and is not just a blob of computations that mimic it? Imagine a sci-fi doomsday scenario where virtual words are created and they are awesome, so people "move" there from their physical body but it turns out that no one is really alive, it's one giant conscious-less computation going around that appears 100% real.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#499

Post by jnwatson »

xg15 wrote: post #435
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…

> The mapping in a case like the iron bar is entirely ephemeral, pertaining only for an instant. Also even if you somehow oversaw this, the author is effectively describing the XOR function. If you take a fixed bitstring (the iron atoms) and xor it with every possible bitstring of the same length (the observers), you get... every possible bitstring of the same length! That's a well-known property of XOR and the reaso…

I think the problem stem from the author’s definition of computation. He has defined it around the state of a Turing machine, which is vastly insufficient.

The important part of a Turing machine is that of the behavior: given a certain state, the next state is a result of the current instruction on the tape.

It is easy to imagine identifying some mapping from a Turing machine state and an iron bar. However, mapping the next state to a valid state transition of the same Turing machine seems quite unlikely, graduating to impossible, as the Turing machine executed.

Said another way, a program is not its memory dump.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#500

Post by MarquesMa »

> A simulation of a brain cannot produce consciousness any more than a simulation of the weather can produce rain.

What's wrong with the rain though? A perfect simulation of rain is perfect rain. It's not rain in the outside world but it's perfect rain nonetheless.

A perfect simulation of brain is a brain. It has consciousness, it can think, it can suffer, and you can exchange information with it if you want.

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