Consciousness is not computation • Hacker News Board

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#531

Post by jwalton » Mon, Jun 20, 2022, 2:52 PM UTC

> Imagine a native English speaker who knows no Chinese locked in a room full of boxes of Chinese symbols (a data base) together with a book of instructions for manipulating the symbols (the program). Imagine that people outside the room send in other Chinese symbols which, unknown to the person in the room, are questions in Chinese (the input). And imagine that by following the instructions in the program the man in the room is able to pass out Chinese symbols which are correct answers to the questions (the output). The program enables the person in the room to pass the Turing Test for understanding Chinese but he does not understand a word of Chinese.

This strikes me as somewhat of a circular argument.

If you actually tried this experiment with current computers, you would completely fail to convince anyone outside the room there was a Chinese speaker in the room. You would definitely not pass the Turing Test. After a few sentences, it's pretty easy to figure out that a computer program isn't a human, even with today's best artificial intelligence. AI programs generally don't even "remember" what the previous question you asked was, yet alone hold opinions or beliefs.

If some future comptuer were able to convince someone that there was a Chinese speaker in the room, then I would argue that there would in fact be a Chinese speaker in the room - the computer program itself.

> The point of the argument is this: if the man in the room does not understand Chinese on the basis of implementing the appropriate program for understanding Chinese then neither does any other digital computer solely on that basis because no computer, qua computer, has anything the man does not have.

The man isn't the program. The man is just executing the program. It's the program that has (or doesn't have) conciousness, not the man. This is like saying a brain is made of axons, and an axon can't possibly be concious because it just transmits an action potential, therefore people can't possibly be concious.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#532

Post by kazinator » Mon, Jun 20, 2022, 2:53 PM UTC

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…

This reminds me of counter-arguments to Gödel's incompleteness: that the self-referential formula that you find is tied to a particular choice of Gödel numbering, and that is suspicious somehow.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#533

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jun 20, 2022, 2:57 PM UTC

jwalton wrote: post #531

> Imagine a native English speaker who knows no Chinese locked in a room full of boxes of Chinese symbols (a data base) together with a book of instructions for manipulating the symbols (the program). Imagine that people outside the room send in other Chinese symbols which, unknown to the person in the room, are questions in Chinese (the input). And imagine that by following the instructions in the program the man in…

[deleted]

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#534

Post by TheCoreh » Mon, Jun 20, 2022, 2:58 PM UTC

The iron bar example is a long way of saying that since the encoding of internal states is arbitrary, you can't rely on internal states to verify consciousness, since you could always construct an encoding that would produce a conscious internal state.

This seems like a valid point until you consider the entropy implications of "describing" such an arbitrary encoding. Yes, you can create a cherry-picked algorithm that “compresses” a specific 10TB file to a single bit, but this algorithm itself must contain the 10TB of information. (Or some lower bound of entropy contained in the 10TB file) I think the same applies here: It's not the iron bar that becomes conscious by being scanned with the specific encoding, it's the encoding itself that would already be conscious, and coming up with such an encoding at random would be essentially the same as a Boltzmann Brain popping into existence.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#535

Post by tarsinge » Mon, Jun 20, 2022, 2:58 PM UTC

doctor_eval wrote: post #329

tarsinge wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 p…

I attribute a subjective experience to the journalist on the basis of similarity with me. No need for "the output", I would do that with someone who can't talk or write too. From where my own subjective experience come from and how can I prove it to you is irrelevant to the fact that I have it so I'm fine with being the bootstrap of the circular reasoning to give it to the rest of humanity.

With that said I maintain that the output proves nothing, it's not because it's all we have that it's not useless. Also it's the only thing we have only with the hypothesis that consciousness is a side-effect of computation (the point of the article), but it could anything, like a property of matter, or electromagnetic fields, etc...

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#536

Post by meroes » Mon, Jun 20, 2022, 3:03 PM UTC

simonh wrote: post #284

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.

Exactly, replace the 'room' with a volume the size of a large planet. Have each symbol represent an atom in a brain. If you like, replace the person manipulating the symbols with a vast army manipulating the symbols according to the laws of physics and chemistry. The Chinese room argument simply reduces to an argument against materialism.

Searle is a physcalist though

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#537

Post by csee » Mon, Jun 20, 2022, 3:03 PM UTC

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…

Are they observer independent? From the article:

  "Of course it is simplest to build a computer where the high voltage states correspond to 1s and the low voltages states 0s or vice versa. But there is no requirement that we build our computers that way. We could build a perfectly valid computer where the high voltage states of even valued registers correspond to 1s and where they correspond to 0s in the odd valued registers, or a computer where the mapping flips on every 13th clock cycle. The system only “computes” because of the way we have encoded information."

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#538

Post by jwalton » Mon, Jun 20, 2022, 3:05 PM UTC

ivalm wrote: post #169

dqpb wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A hot bar of iron can "compute" the next state of a hot bar of iron. It cannot compute the next state of any arbitrary program. Can I play Fortnite with nothing more that a hot bar of iron? No, I cannot! Not unless it's compiled to WebAssembly.

You can but it shifts the burden to the decoder. Since an iron bar over some time period has a finite number of states, there exists a decoder that maps state changes in the iron bar to your Fortnite gameplay. I think a more fair criticism is that you likely cannot choose the decoder without an oracle (ie the causal relationship would be hard to preserve). I think OPs claim is that consciousness, unlike Fortnite, doe…

> Since an iron bar over some time period has a finite number of states

Citation needed.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#539

Post by 3g4o53g4o5 » Mon, Jun 20, 2022, 3:07 PM UTC

Imnimo wrote: post #133

antognini wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Author here.) > Do you believe that a hot bar of iron is a computer? This is the crux of it. The main objection to the triviality argument is that we've just used far too broad a definition of a "computer." If we're thinking that a hot iron bar is a computer, then this should suggest to us that it's the definition that's wrong. You are correct in saying that if the definition we use is wrong, the whole triviality ar…

Is empty space also a computer, because while we might naively interpret it as "all zeros", with the proper location and time-dependent mapping, it can be seen to be running Doom?

Well, there is still random quantum behavior in a complete vacuum a.k.a. empty space according to quantum field theory's findings. So yes, empty space is a computer as long as you notice that physics law is doing math all the time.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#540

Post by meroes » Mon, Jun 20, 2022, 3:09 PM UTC

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.

No, what happens is consciousness instantiated the whole setup: natural language, Chinese language, syntax, the room, computation, dictionaries, lookups, etc.

The whole thing is a giant computation. Yet computations are as mundane (lifeless) as an abacus or pen and paper. It is just wrong to thing the abacus is conscious. Same for the room.