Consciousness is not computation • Hacker News Board

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#551

Post by simonh » Mon, Jun 20, 2022, 4:01 PM UTC

csee wrote: post #545

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…

"To achieve a persistent mapping for a significant time you'd probably need an iron bar something like size of the observable universe" But the observable universe exists. So why can't the observable universe appropriately substitute for the iron bar in his argument? "As for doubting the field of rocks can be conscious" Just to be clear, you don't doubt that a sufficiently large field of rocks is conscious as long as…

On the first issue, that's the Boltzmann's Brain proposition, and well, yes. Given infinite monkeys, you'll get Shakespear. I don't see what that has to do with whether consciousness is computational or not. It certainly doesn't refute it.

>Just to be clear, you don't doubt that a sufficiently large field of rocks is conscious as long as it is performing the same computation as a brain?

No I don't, for the same reason that if you slowed down my metabolism by a trillion times, I would still be conscious. I wouldn't seem conscious to you, but that's a problem with your perception, not with my nature. I'd just be conscious very slowly. It wouldn't fundamentally change the nature of who or what I am. For rocks interacting according to rules, substitute atoms. Is a rock any more or less inanimate than an atom? This is all just materialism 101.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#552

Post by whoisjuan » Mon, Jun 20, 2022, 4:06 PM UTC

antognini wrote: post #196

whoisjuan wrote: post #92

The author suggests that split brain surgery causes “two consciousness” but this is simply not true. Split brain patients seem to have two separate executive functions but they still describe their subjective experience as a single observer.

(Author here.) Admittedly the experience of individuals with split brain is a bit out of my wheelhouse so I would love to be corrected on this. But it would seem to me that what you describe is not inconsistent with there being two separate consciousnesses present? If there are truly two consciousnesses present in a split brain, I would still expect that each one would describe itself as a single observer.

I think this is a little bit more complicated than that.

Split brain patients are fully aware of events where their executive function clashes. For instance, they can see how one limb operates out of sync with the other one. So how do they establish this awareness? Who is watching? Who is the one that verbalizes that fully conscious experience?

Certainly one could argue that this could be the result of an observer in the right or left brain verbalizing their subjective experience, but that creates several problems.

The biggest one is that for this to be the case there needs to be a commanding observer at any point in time and this would mean that one brain needs to communicate to the other when would it becomes the observer. That would require some unifying substrate that allows this cooperation to happen beyond the physical connection of both brains. This assumes a full separation of the left and right brain. There are also some theories (Gazzaniga experiment) that suggest that the left brain might be in this case the conscious operator simply because the left interpreter is capable of overwriting the right brain by default. But this experiment fails to explain the meta-observer experience that allows the subjects to effectively participate in the experiment and explain their experience with both right and left stimuli. The experiment correctly shows the existence of separate logic centers but can't explain why the subject is still experiencing his cognitive interpretation of reality as a single observer.

This is the fallacy of consciousness theorization. We don't have any good definition of consciousness because it can only be defined subjectively and uni-personally.

Empirically and logically we know that is implausible to have two simultaneously operating and fully aware consciousness. We know this because this duality doesn’t work at all with any rational interpretation of ourselves. We are one and only one. We are never two simultaneous people and there’s no thought or physical experiment that would allow us to test or imagine that.

Some people might have mental diseases that completely alter their consciousness and sense of identity but their experience is still a single observer experience.

Split brain patients are in fact the best example we have of consciousness being discrete and somewhat separable from brain function. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the brain isn’t the one producing the conscious experience but it certainly shows that the brain mechanisms that could produce consciousness are very different from the ones that enable other neurological functions.

The idea that a patient with two physically separated brains can have a relatively normal life (even when executive function clashes happen, one brain is still capable to overwrite the other) shows that there’s some unknown hypervisor function that enables their conscious experience.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#553

Post by simonh » Mon, Jun 20, 2022, 4:15 PM UTC

tgflynn wrote: post #518

simonh wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So fundamentally I agree with the arguments presented in this post, but I find the presentation confusing and somewhat lacking in rigor. In particular I was confused by his description of the iron bar as a computer because he didn't actually explain how it computed anything. I think that to map a physical system to an abstract Turing Machine you need more than a way to represent bits. You also have to define how to d…

>In particular I was confused by his description of the iron bar as a computer because he didn't actually explain how it computed anything.

It's not computing anything. What he's saying is that, by random chance, some pattern of flipping states in the medium might coincidentally correspond to a computer executing a program. Therefore if consciousness is a program, such a pattern could be considered conscious. This is just the Bolzmann's Brain proposition, cf wikipedia. It doesn't prove or refute anything.

>If qualia were reducible to a symbolic representation then there should be some linguistic utterance which would cause you to experience the sensation of the pain of burning your finger on the stove.

Why do you assume that verbal signals can induce any possible change in symbolic state in a brain? I see no reason to assume or accept that. I can't induce any possible arbitrary change in the internal state of a Switch running MarioKart by mashing on it's control buttons either. There are simply limits to the way it processes it's inputs. Same with humans.

If the pain of burning a finger is reducible to symbolic representation by states in a brain, and if we could induce such states artificially such as by using electrodes, then in principle that would produce a sensation indistinguishable from burning your finger. Yes, I believe this is so.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#554

Post by enragedcacti » Mon, Jun 20, 2022, 4:17 PM UTC

pdonis wrote: post #132

The key error in the argument is here: "[T]he only reason we call a box with a CPU in it a “computer” is because we happen to have a simple mapping between the voltage levels across different parts of the CPU to a set of bits we have defined, and when these voltages interact they do so according to the rules of a set of logical operations which we have also defined. But there is no meaning to the physical system apar…

There are documented cases of people in comas/full paralysis who later wake up and remember being conscious throughout the coma. If they never woke up to tell anyone about it (or died before they had the chance to wake up) would they not have been conscious? We can of course observe that there is brain activity to some degree but I'm not sure that we would consider that output in a meaningful way anymore than something like side-channel analysis of a CPU.

Further, who determines what inputs/outputs qualify as semantic? That would either require an outside observer (breaking the model of "I think therefore I am") or require the system itself to determine semantic value at which point there's no need for I/O to make the determination.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#555

Post by hnthrway » Mon, Jun 20, 2022, 4:17 PM UTC

vbezhenar wrote: post #248

whittingtonaaon wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consciousness can end temporarily, perhaps permanently. This in no way suggests that it’s an illusion. The claim that consciousness is an illusion has always seemed like nonsense to me; for, if consciousness is an illusion, who experiences that illusion? Answer: the conscious mind.

Consciousness is a trick for human neural network to simplify some calculations about the world. It was developed as an evolutionary trait and proved useful to survive. That's my opinion. It's not an illusion, it definitely exists as an particular configuration of neurons.

Why put the cart before the horse

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#556

Post by l33tman » Mon, Jun 20, 2022, 4:26 PM UTC

He solves it himself in the article: "So the proposition that consciousness is computation leads quite inevitably to an extreme panpsychism. Even if we could stomach a traditional conception of panpsychism that posits that all things are conscious in some primitive way, this goes far beyond that. We are forced to conclude that all things aren’t just vaguely conscious, but they contain all consciousnesses, including our own!"

Yes, so why can't panpsychism be correct? It's far more intuitive than postulating some magical qualia substance that permeates the universe (or however that's supposed to work).

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#557

Post by tgflynn » Mon, Jun 20, 2022, 4:28 PM UTC

simonh wrote: post #553

tgflynn wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So fundamentally I agree with the arguments presented in this post, but I find the presentation confusing and somewhat lacking in rigor. In particular I was confused by his description of the iron bar as a computer because he didn't actually explain how it computed anything. I think that to map a physical system to an abstract Turing Machine you need more than a way to represent bits. You also have to define how to d…

>In particular I was confused by his description of the iron bar as a computer because he didn't actually explain how it computed anything. It's not computing anything. What he's saying is that, by random chance, some pattern of flipping states in the medium might coincidentally correspond to a computer executing a program. Therefore if consciousness is a program, such a pattern could be considered conscious. This is…

> Why do you assume that verbal signals can induce any possible change in symbolic state in a brain?

OK let's backup.

What would it mean to say that "qualia are reducible to a symbolic representation" if they cannot be expressed by language ?

It seems to me that language includes all possible symbolic representations. Can you give an example of a symbolic representation that is not expressible by language ?

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#558

Post by simonh » Mon, Jun 20, 2022, 4:30 PM UTC

akimball wrote: post #475

simonh wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This line of reasoning reduces to the philosophical zombie argument. It's true I can't prove to you that I have a first person experience of the world, but it doesn't therefore follow that anything that makes that claim does have such an experience. For myself I'm satisfied that, when questioned thoroughly, these models fail so completely and utterly and their output is so ludicrously nonsensical that I don't see how…

People frequently output ludicrous nonsense. Does this disqualify their consciousness?

No it doesn't. So what？We have this exact problem to deal with when people suffer brain damage. To what extent are they conscious, or still people? Yet we do come to medical conclusions on that question. There's always a degree of uncertainty, but you still have to make the call based on the information you have. The information I have indicates to me with a very high probability, in my estimation, that these things are not conscious.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#559

Post by celeritascelery » Mon, Jun 20, 2022, 4:30 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…

> The man isn't the program. The man is just executing the program.

That is the whole point. The external observers don’t know if there is a machine in the room. They just see Chinese characters coming under the door. How do they tell if the man knows Chinese or not? Or if he is just emulating a machine that does?

Likewise if we see a computer that is producing “consciousness looking” responses, how do you know if it is the computer that is conscious or just the people who created the content for the training data? Since the computer is modeling them.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#560

Post by csee » Mon, Jun 20, 2022, 4:31 PM UTC

simonh wrote: post #551

csee wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"To achieve a persistent mapping for a significant time you'd probably need an iron bar something like size of the observable universe" But the observable universe exists. So why can't the observable universe appropriately substitute for the iron bar in his argument? "As for doubting the field of rocks can be conscious" Just to be clear, you don't doubt that a sufficiently large field of rocks is conscious as long as…

On the first issue, that's the Boltzmann's Brain proposition, and well, yes. Given infinite monkeys, you'll get Shakespear. I don't see what that has to do with whether consciousness is computational or not. It certainly doesn't refute it. >Just to be clear, you don't doubt that a sufficiently large field of rocks is conscious as long as it is performing the same computation as a brain? No I don't, for the same reaso…

What about the arguments outlined in the article? You first dismissed the arguments because an iron bar couldn't have enough physical states. But we both accept that there are physical objects which do have enough physical states, even if we have to use the entire observable universe as the object that the mapping draws from (and that's not related to the Boltzmann Brain). So the arguments in the article seems to be either ignored or misunderstood.

Also, materialism =!= substrate independence and invariance to speed of computation. Consciousness can have a materialist explanation yet also be substrate dependent to an extent.