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Consciousness is not computation

joe-antognini.github.io

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Re: Consciousness is not computation

#631

Post by epgui »

notahacker wrote: post #415
epgui wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I suspect we agree more than we disagree. I suspect the same, but I think there is tremendous value in taking a cosmic step back and seeing everything through the lens of information. It's the most reductionist neutral approach to the universe I can conceive us at this point in my life. > By contrast, if I construct a collection of chemicals that matches the positions of those of a real bacterium, I have created a…

Seeing things through the lens of information seems more like dualism than the arguments for the distinct nature of human "consciousness". (Which doesn't mean it can't be correct, of course, but simply that people often tend to depict the debate as being the other way round). What is a "soul" if not the idea that consciousness exists as an abstraction independent from the material it runs on? The purely materialist a…

I'm not sure this adds anything useful to the conversation, but I don't believe the word "soul" maps very well to any real thing: we may as well be talking about the "quingel", the "probble", the "finglam" or the "subvick".

There's no neuroanatomic basis for a "soul", but there is at least some extremely fuzzy mapping from neuroanatomy to the concept of "consciousness". It's a bad mapping, but it means more than nothing at all.

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And I reject the idea that taking the perspective of information is taking a dualist perspective. I am advocating for the opposite: taking "information" seriously as some sort of low-level quantum substrate of the universe. It's a purely materialist view, where the material is literal information.

An extreme version of this, which I find quite intellectually useful, is the mathematical universe. [1]

Note that in your examples of information, you are pointing to higher-level information, which emerges in complex systems. It's not an incompatible view!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothes...

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#632

Post by xg15 »

csee wrote: post #537
xg15 wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 re…

This might work as long as your computer doesn't have any IO. If your computer operates your garage door, I wish you good luck opening the door through the power of imagination.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#633

Post by geysersam »

Is it always possible to find a mapping under which the iron bar seems to run the program consciousness.exe? That is not obvious.

Let's say the Turing machine has states T, and the iron bar has states B. The program consciousness.exe is a dynamical system on T, called t: T->T, and the iron bar is a dynamical system on B, called b: B->B. Both of those functions/dynamical systems are given, because we observe them.

What the triviality argument says is that for a large class of "obviously non-concious b" there exists a (bijective) mapping F: T -> B such that t = F^-1 o b o F no matter what t is.

Is this true?

Consider the cardinality of the set of functions/programs on T. It is |T|^|T|. What is the cardinality of the set of bijective mappings between T and B? It is min(|T|!, |B|!). Much smaller! Therefore it is not at all obvious that Alice, Bob or Claire or any of their friends will find such a mapping, even if the methodically try all of them.

This seems to me an issue with the presented argument.

Although personally I still think consciousness is a physical phenomenon we just have not mapped out yet. Like magnetism or radioactivity before they were properly explained.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#634

Post by bccdee »

tgflynn wrote: post #602
bccdee wrote: post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What if you take something more concrete than "redness", like pain ? Let's say you stub your toe or burn your finger. In that moment is there any room for doubt that pain exists ?

Of course there is. We may feel strongly that an illusion is real, but that doesn't make it any less an illusion. The computer from my example would react very strongly to pain, and certainly it would believe that pain has a unique and distinct quality to it making it different from any other sensation, but that doesn't mean that that quality exists in some special metaphysical way. It is just a mind examining the abstractions which make up its own senses and going, "wow, these are indeed abstract."

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#635

Post by russdill »

zarmin wrote: post #624
russdill wrote: post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've spelled out quite well that there are things about our internal subjective experience we don't understand to a discomforting degree. But we understand really well the substrate from which those experiences arise. Imagine it this way. Imagine that mathematicians are trying to solve some problem, they don't even know if the problem is computable or not. Some genius comes around with a computer that given the nec…

To be clear, I am talking about phenomenal consciousness — which is simply the ability to subjectively experience the world and ourselves. This is distinct from metaconsciousness. Bernardo Kastrup on phenomenal consciousness: >Our phenomenal consciousness is eminently qualitative, not quantitative. There is something it feels like to see the colour red, which is not captured by merely noting the frequency of red ligh…

I attempted to sidestep all of that by not discussing consciousness, the brain, or neurons in my follow-up at all. But instead, some hypothetical mathematical problem. I don't know, let's say the existence of a polygon of N sides that can tile an infinite plane as a completely made up problem. Someone generates a computer program that for any given N, can generate some complex shape polygon that can tile the infinite plane. Probably a bad example, but whatever.

Even though you don't understand the program, don't know how it works, etc, you know that the solution to the problem is one that's computable, because you can see that a solution can be provided by something that is limited by computability. You might be totally incredulous that the problem could be solved by computation alone, but all you need is a single counter example.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#636

Post by russdill »

zarmin wrote: post #628
epgui wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consciousness isn't really the output, it's the category of all possible not-too-pathological running states of the program. The output is whatever the organism does to or in its environment (production of speech, movement, decisions, etc).

Okay, but how do we get to the subjective experience of the experiencer? I don't see how what you've said accounts for conscious inner life.

No one has a good answer to that. But it's not necessary to answer that to conclude that whatever task a human can perform can be replicated by a sufficiently complex algorithm.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#637

Post by TheMightyLlama »

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…

I agree. I would also add that to make it easier to understand: the mind is running on a substrate, the weather is not.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#638

Post by simonh »

tarsinge wrote: post #622
simonh wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just a restating of the Chinese room argument. Like Searle you're bamboozling yourself with scale. If I was put in a magnetic field of some kind that slowed down my physical and neurological processes by 1000x would I be any less conscious? Would I be any less a human being? It would seem so to people observing me for sure, but would it change my essential nature?

And as Searle responded to that argument you are bamboozling yourself with speed. There is nothing that prove that accelerating the computation to a given speed that will make the consciousness emerge.

Of course not, that seems equally absurd, I don't understand why you are ascribing that position to me.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#639

Post by simonh »

tgflynn wrote: post #621
simonh wrote: post #619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, so a computer with a water sprinkler attachment. Sorry, I'm not trying to be flippant, the point is any such system would be more than just a CPU, it would need interfaces with the outside world. It could have whatever peripheral systems you like. It could have quantum computational elements, even ones correlating to ones in the brain. I've just no idea what non-computational elements it might have that couldn't…

> I've just no idea what non-computational elements it might have that couldn't be substituted by computational ones or just peripheral components. Neither does anyone else but the point is that once you accept that such "non-computational elements" might be or must be required you are no longer talking about computation alone being sufficient to produce consciousness.

Agreed, that seems clear, but I see no reason to accept that such elements are necessary, and I have yet to hear any clear explanation of what such elements might actually be.

As far as I can tell it would have to be some physical process that affects the behaviour of a computational system, but isn't computational and it's effects on other systems cannot be simulated by computation. Does any such a phenomenon exist in all of physics? Not that I'm aware.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#640

Post by zarmin »

russdill wrote: post #635
zarmin wrote: post #624

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be clear, I am talking about phenomenal consciousness — which is simply the ability to subjectively experience the world and ourselves. This is distinct from metaconsciousness. Bernardo Kastrup on phenomenal consciousness: >Our phenomenal consciousness is eminently qualitative, not quantitative. There is something it feels like to see the colour red, which is not captured by merely noting the frequency of red ligh…

I attempted to sidestep all of that by not discussing consciousness, the brain, or neurons in my follow-up at all. But instead, some hypothetical mathematical problem. I don't know, let's say the existence of a polygon of N sides that can tile an infinite plane as a completely made up problem. Someone generates a computer program that for any given N, can generate some complex shape polygon that can tile the infinite…

But framing it as a problem (or program) is begging the question; I'm arguing that it is not a computation.
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