Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Consciousness is not computation

joe-antognini.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

571–580 of 767 posts

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#571

Post by [deleted] »

antognini wrote: post #119
Imnimo wrote: post #70

The argument presented that a hot bar of iron would qualify as conscious if consciousness is computation also concludes that a hot bar of iron qualifies as a computer. Do you believe that a hot bar of iron is a computer? If your answer is no, then it seems like the argument presented here should be not be at all convincing.

(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…

[deleted]

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#572

Post by criddell »

hoseja wrote: post #462
kertoip_1 wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Is a person with no short-term memory and aphasia still conscious?

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#574

Post by simonh »

meroes wrote: post #536
simonh wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Sort of. He thinks there's something special about biology, but doesn't seem to be able to explain what that might be and how this is different from dualism, so it's hard for me to take it seriously.

To my mind both dualism and biological naturalism are both positing some special woo needed for consciousness without saying what that woo is, or what it's like, or how it works, or anything about it at all.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#575

Post by skohan »

Schroedingersat wrote: post #568
skohan wrote: post #414

I am of the mind that consciousness is an emergent property of the various interconnected information processing systems of the brain. There's just too much evidence: for instance, changing the physiology of the brain through drugs or trauma has predictable changes on consciousness. From that perspective, I think it's pretty clear that consciousness is some kind of computation rooted in the physical world. However to…

I think there are precisely two options. Consciousness is a pure information process, and therefore computable. Or consciousness is not an information process. We only know of one thing that is not an information process, and that is entropy. Given that entropy is precisely the creation of new information, and that this is a big part of most people's conception of free will, it seems reasonable to conclude that consc…

It's an interesting thought. I can imagine that consciousness is something like the experience of the possibility space expanding through entropy, and free will is collapsing that possibility space into a single interpretation of the reality of the moment and a single course of action.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#576

Post by kazinator »

celeritascelery wrote: post #569
simonh wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The reductionist argument seems to be “the brain is just a meat computer and is conscious, therefore a complex enough silicon computer will be conscious as well”. I find this very similar to alchemy in the 15th century. The idea was “gold is heavy, malleable, lustery metal, and so is lead. We have observed substances can be converted others. Therefore with the right chemical process we can convert lead to gold”. The…

That's not necessarily a reductionist argument if it respects that the consciousness has a drama of its own that is not related to the low-level parts of the substrate; i.e. that the consciousness is irreducible. The mere hypothesis that something can be ported to silicon doesn't reduce it; it respects the complexity of the abstraction itself.

Also, "the meat computer has consciousness" independently requires proof. Every meat computer thinks it has consciousness, and we just take their word for it, based on our own experience as a meat computer.

If the thing making the same claim is not a meat computer, then we don't believe it in the same way: "I know meat computers are conscious because I am one; you say you are conscious but you are not a meat computer, therefore I don't believe you".

In the same way, we could deny that an extraterrestrial life form is conscious, if it's not made of anything resembling meat.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#577

Post by olaulaja »

denton-scratch wrote: post #459
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The argument seems to be that beyond a certain level of complexity you'll somehow automatically get consciousness. Clearly it's unlikely this is a hard cut off. Adding one more byte of RAM, expanding the CPU from 64 to 128-bit words, or adding another dimension to a neural network isn't going to do it. But if consciousness emergent, how do you measure the amount of consciousness? Because the experience is subjective,…

> how do you measure the amount of consciousness? You seem to have assumed that consciousness is a measurable "stuff". My way of seeing it is that consciousness is either present or absent. Thoughts, beliefs and concepts are like ripples on the surface of consciousness, but are not themselves consciousness. So you can have consciousness without thoughts.

If consciousness is binary like you state, we can hypothetically remove parts of it until we reach some arbitrarily small part after the removal of which the remainder is no longer conscious. This seems like a very weak argument to me, implying the opposite conclusion that consciousness must be on a sliding scale.

(measuring the level of consciousness is left as an exercise to the reader)

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#578

Post by pieter_mj »

Mageek wrote: post #573

The Chinese room argument is claimed to show how consciousness cannot be based on computation. I totally disagree - it merely shows that as an external observer we cannot verify consciousness.

Both can be right. The possible unverifiability and non-computational base of consciousness does not exclude its explainability either.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#579

Post by dilap »

regentbowerbird wrote: post #397
Aeolun wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I adhere to the duck-typing theory of conciousness. If I walks, talks and acts like concious being, then it doesn’t particularly matter to me how that comes about (e.g. the opposite of the chinese room argument). If someone is following a ‘program’ for responding to Chinese characters, that’s as good as speaking Chinese since there is no distinguishable difference.

This is called functionalism. There was a joke about it on existential comics some time ago: https://existentialcomics.com/comic/357

I think that comic misses the point though. It mistakes "a thing that is in some superficial respects the same" for "a thing is in every externally observable respect the same".

So far as we know, consciousness does not exist as a physical thing. The behavior of a human is completely derivable, in principle, from natural law.

There is no physical test or manifestation of awareness.

So arguments about what can or can not be conscious have the same flavor as arguments aswhether there is or is not a God. It's unproveable!

Yet unlike God, most people do not deny the existence of consciousness, because of direct personal experience.

Consciousness is the "unproveable yet true" statement in the theoretical system that is the physical universe. Probably it haunts any physical system complex enough to host it.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#580

Post by Freebytes »

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…

Another flaw is that it assumes that the hardware component, .e.g. rocks, somehow represents the consciousness instead of the 'software'. For example, our brain is required for our own consciousness, but that is merely the hardware. And we see the hardware of the brain existing without consciousness when people fall into a coma. The example with the rocks is simply the hardware. Furthermore, the number of rocks needed to produce consciousness in this manner would likely cause them to coalesce into a planet under the influence of gravity from which life and consciousness itself might arise! After all, Earth is a collection of rocks that gave rise to consciousness.
Post reply on HN