Consciousness is not computation • Hacker News Board

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#591

Post by simonh » Mon, Jun 20, 2022, 6:03 PM UTC

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…

It depends on whether consciousness is a computational process. If it is then meat or metal really doesn’t matter. We know this because mathematicians have proved that any sufficiently capable computer can perform any computation.

So the lead to gold analogy doesn’t hold. It would be as if scientists had proved that any element can be transformed into any other element. Well, if that was true, then yes it follows that lead could be turned into gold, in a universe where that had been proved.

So is consciousness actually a computation? Of course that’s a matter of opinion. All I’m saying is, I think so yes, I think I have coherent reasons for believing so, and none of the counter arguments persuade me otherwise so far. I can’t prove it to you though, we’re just talking.

What I can say is, this or that argument seems to me to have this or that flaw, or lead to this or that consequence or conclusion that I find unlikely or absurd. Dualism is such a conclusion I find absurd, and I think most of the actual arguments against computational consciousness seem to at least reduce to attempted refutations of materialism, or out and out dualism.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#592

Post by Dylan16807 » Mon, Jun 20, 2022, 6:11 PM UTC

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #445

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…

Isn't thinking a search in the lookup table of brain states? 1e23 dimensional table.

They get the same result but they're not the same.

Your brain can hold 1 brain state. But it gets the same results as a universe-dwarfing lookup table.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#593

Post by fedeb95 » Mon, Jun 20, 2022, 6:12 PM UTC

I think I got the author point and agreeing with those premises I could even share the conclusion. However it seems to me that the argument only works in concluding something about existing consciousnesses, it doesn't say anything about "a" consciousness (one that doesn't already exist) and even less about a "possible" consciousness. The conclusion is really dependent on which definition of consciousness we adopt, and even more about life: for it is obvious (to me) that being conscious implies being alive. So first we must understand when an hardware capable of computation can become alive. My answer is: when it reproduces itself. Our consciousness hardware is not the brain, it is the world, and life plus consciousness reproduces on the "hardware" called world. So if a computer hardware can support other programs reproducing themselves and by natural selection generate a self-aware program (whichever this definition may be) you can have a conscious program. On one thing I agree: computation itself isn't sufficient to get consciousness.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#594

Post by simonh » Mon, Jun 20, 2022, 6:17 PM UTC

tgflynn wrote: post #584

simonh wrote: post #567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect, just a theory, that qualia are the result of a process that occurs in the brain. So they're not a static symbolic state, they're a feature of the evolution of a dynamic process. We are aware of our own thoughts through processing a mental model of ourselves, this mental model of ourselves includes introspection on our experiences, while we are having those experiences. That's qualia. A static symbolic stat…

> I suspect, just a theory, that qualia are the result of a process that occurs in the brain. Well, that's just materialism. Do you or do you not accept that it is possible for a materialist to hold the view that qualia are not produced solely by computation but that some non-abstract physical process is required ? Because that is the position that the OP is taking and your original comment appeared to dispute it.

I don’t know what “some non-abstract physical process” means, so I can’t really give you an answer.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#595

Post by HarHarVeryFunny » Mon, Jun 20, 2022, 6:30 PM UTC

vidarh wrote: post #493

hsn915 wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

I don't think we need to understand what consciousness is, but rather define what it is that we want to talk about. The english word "consciousness" is a sloppy catch-all for a bunch of experiential phenomena including things like self-awareness (only marginally more specific!), qualia, etc.

However, even without a rigorous definition (make up 10 new words if current ones don't cover it), it seems the core of what most people mean when they say "consciousness" has an introspective aspect to it - what something "feels like", which requires some perceptive/analytic machinery to be put to use. You can feel anything without using a "feeler".

So, with that said, it seems pretty clear than things like thermostats and adder circuits are not conscious in the slightest since they neither have the feedback paths nor feedback-directed perceptual and analytical machinery that would be required. OTOH it's perhaps not so absurd to consider that something with an architecture like GPT-3 might be a "tiny bit conscious" since it DOES have some of those necessary architectural/functional abilities.

Of course many people will ridicule any such suggestion due to their own emotional investment. If people don't feel comfortable with the idea of a machine being conscious under any circumstance, then they are necessarily going to refute it in the case of today's simplistic "AI" architectures.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#596

Post by bccdee » Mon, Jun 20, 2022, 6:33 PM UTC

tgflynn wrote: post #590

bccdee wrote: post #588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should it? If I can't help but believe that I am experiencing actual qualia regardless of whether I am or not, then the fact that I believe I am experiencing qualia doesn't prove anything.

It isn't about belief and it certainly isn't about behavior (ie. what you say). It is about the actual experience of being. If that means nothing to you, I don't think there's anything I can say that would change your mind. In this domain all language can do is evoke recognition for someone who already experiences what is being evoked but doesn't recognize it. Only you can take the final step to realizing that yes co…

But if you must feel that you experience a unique and ineffable "redness" when you perceive red regardless of whether that redness exists or not, how can you take that feeling as evidence that this ineffable redness exists? I don't think that's a valid justification—I think this suggests we have to be agnostic as to whether qualia truly exist or not if we're judging purely by our own senses.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#597

Post by IshKebab » Mon, Jun 20, 2022, 6:39 PM UTC

epgui wrote: post #269

IshKebab wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Biological life is not a computational phenomenon. There's no reason very advanced computers couldn't make simulated life. OpenWorm is an example. By the way I find it hilarious how confident you (and other philosophers) are about your conclusions despite them basically being thought experiments with zero evidence. Imagine if scientists did that! Actually I guess string theory is an example of that.

I would argue (and this is really just a semantic point) that it's more productive or instructive to think of biology as being literally a computational phenomenon. The substrate is different, the instruction sets are different, the rules are different... But ultimately it's just computing and iterating on a mind-bogglingly massive amount of information, on a time scale that is difficult for us to wrap our heads arou…

Yeah I agree. That comes into play in Permutation City which someone mentioned elsewhere in this thread.

Anyway OP is pretty clearly wrong, or at best proposing something very wild with no evidence.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#598

Post by tsimionescu » Mon, Jun 20, 2022, 6:41 PM UTC

IIAOPSW wrote: post #478

tsimionescu wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Phrasing is irrelevant. My senses are not little people talking to me about what they perceive, they are sensing organs connected to the brain. Saying that they "lie" is just a twist of the phrase so that I avoid something more unwieldy, like "my sense organs perceive the world incorrectly because of some defect". > Starting with just the existence of the arguers and their arguments, can they argue for the existence…

>No, you can't argue the world into being from these axioms. They could probably invent logic and mathematics, but nothing of the natural sciences can be discovered without the senses. It seems contradictory to admit they could invent math and logic, but then reject that they could go one step further and rig that understanding of math into and understanding of physics. I'll admit without some corpus of data to under…

> It seems contradictory to admit they could invent math and logic, but then reject that they could go one step further and rig that understanding of math into and understanding of physics. I'll admit without some corpus of data to understand the motivation for constructing physics is tenuous. But the question was about the principle of if they could and if you're granting me math I don't see any obstacle left.

The problem with math is that math can describe any possible universe, and there is no way to choose until you confront it with the real world. Nothing in math prevents the world from having 1 dimension of time and 1 of space, for example. Nothing in math prevents the electron from being much larger than the proton, or the existence of solitary quarks or anything else.

So I would grant you that the world of talking agents could describe our physical world through math, but they could also imagine any other physical world, and they would have no way to choose one.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#599

Post by layer8 » Mon, Jun 20, 2022, 6:45 PM UTC

psyc wrote: post #461

layer8 wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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 wa…

See my other comment in this thread. Basically, I hold that “how some experience feels like” (qualia) is just another perceptual input into our thought process, and that there’s really nothing particularly mysterious about it. If you accept that qualia is representable in the brain, then it shouldn’t be surprising that it informs the cognitive process. It’s almost a tautology. If you disagree that this could explain your inner experience, you’d have to elaborate on what precisely is not being explained.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#600

Post by uwagar » Mon, Jun 20, 2022, 6:46 PM UTC

mypastself wrote: post #178

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.

I apply the same reasoning as you to consciousness for entities such as animals, whose biology is reasonably close to our own. I don’t think the same can be applied to software. Cargo cults that developed in the Southwest Pacific after WWII reportedly attempted to emulate rituals performed by U.S. military personnel such as landing signals, believing they’ll bring back the aircraft that had been giving them gifts. Si…

it occured to me once that those cargo cults could be parodying the US military personnel's deep addiction to things like guns, bombs and aircraft instead of being fully plugged/merged into nature.