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Consciousness is not computation

joe-antognini.github.io

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Re: Consciousness is not computation

#641

Post by Tycho »

swid wrote: post #527
Tycho wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My personal experience is that consciousness, like free will, is a useful illusion. I always find this such a strange statement. Free will doesn’t exist but it’s a useful illusion… like… in that case… useful to who??

Useful to animals who evolved it. I have no more control over my individual neurons than an adder circuit has over itself. And this extends, layer by layer, all the way to the external actions I take. I don’t really control my inner dialog. I don’t really control what I say or do. There is a biochemical process which makes it all happen and I exert no power over.

But what is useful about this “illusion.” In a purely deterministic world, any sense of illusion is completely irrelevant. You might as well say “pebbles on the beach don’t really have a sense of community, it’s just a useful illusion that they share.” It’s just as arbitrary.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#642

Post by celeritascelery »

jwalton wrote: post #610
celeritascelery wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> How do they tell if the man knows Chinese or not? Or if he is just emulating a machine that does? But this is exactly the wrong question; assume for a moment a computer program can be concious. Does the man know Chinese, or is he emulating a concious computer program that knows Chinese? Either way there would be a conciousness involved, so nothing about this situation disproves that a program can be concious - ther…

We are actually in more agreement then you realize. But I think you misunderstand the Chinese room argument. It does not say anything about if computers are or could be conscious. All it says is that you cannot determine that from a “black box” view. We can’t determine if the computer is really conscious, or just really good at mimicking the consciousness of someone else (ie the people providing the training data). Just like you can’t determine if the man in the room really knows Chinese or if he is just good at mimicking a machine that does. The man really could know Chinese, and a computer really could be conscious, but you can’t determine this as an outside observer.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#643

Post by vidarh »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #595
vidarh wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I feel you're falling in exactly the same trap as the article of assuming that the "feeling" is a property of the analytical machinery of our brains rather than gaining it's perceived complexity as an effect of being combined with that while being separate.

It seems wildly presumptuous to assume that lack of ability to communicate some level of awareness necessarily implies the awareness itself is lacking.

It could be, but we don't know, because we don't know what lies at the core of the subjective experience.

We don't even have a way of assessing what has and does not have consciousness.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#644

Post by pmayrgundter »

skohan wrote: post #504
V-2 wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's just too much evidence: for instance, changing the physiology of the brain through drugs or trauma has predictable changes on consciousness You can demonstrate that humans react (and quite predictably) to weather - when it rains, they take their umbrellas out, when there's a hurricane, they seek for shelter, and so on. It's not evidence that human behaviour is an emergent property of weather and nothing els…

You're right that there's no proof that consciousness can be explained by biological function alone. But my belief is that the preponderance of the evidence makes it the most likely explanation by far. > You can demonstrate that humans react (and quite predictably) to weather - when it rains, they take their umbrellas out, when there's a hurricane, they seek for shelter, and so on. It's not evidence that human behavi…

I did a search of comments for "thalamus" and found yours. Could you elaborate?

This is my own contention as well. See down the page here for th section on consciousness, the thalamus, what I've found anatomically and speculation on how it works

https://sites.google.com/site/pablomayrgundter/mind

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#645

Post by feet »

simonh wrote: post #639
tgflynn wrote: post #621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

A wire on its own is not computational, neither is an amino acid but they do make up computational systems. It seems like a bit of an arbitrary distinction

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#646

Post by tgflynn »

simonh wrote: post #639
tgflynn wrote: post #621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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.

I mean no physical process is strictly computational. Computations operate on abstract representations of physical things, not on those things themselves. We're back to why weather simulations don't rain on you and why simulations of nuclear explosions don't leave craters in Los Alamos.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#647

Post by russdill »

zarmin wrote: post #640
russdill wrote: post #635

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which necessitates that somehow, there's some law of physics important to operation in the brain who's effects aren't computable. Yes?

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#648

Post by JieJie »

jonathanstrange wrote: post #348
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,…

> The argument seems to be that beyond a certain level of complexity you'll somehow automatically get consciousness. I agree with much of what you say but not with this statement. That would be a silly argument since it's very easy to imagine algorithms of arbitrary complexity that are trivially not conscious. A better argument for computationalism states that (1) consciousness could be an emergent property of certai…

It seems to me that we over-value our own sense of consciousness to the point of mythologizing. Blake Lemoine suggests that LaMDA's consciousness is more akin to that of an Octopus' hive mind than our familiar human-style self-analytical ego.

The linked article, and many others I've read that are making similar arguments, seems to be saying that consciousness is so complicated, it must be more than mere computation, it must be something really very special, because I experience having consciousness as something really very special. Ipso facto.

They seem to be making the case for the soul, unwilling to call it a soul because that would be magical thinking.

I'm of the belief that determining the possibility of computational intelligences is linked to the question of autonomy and free will. From what we know about the physical universe being most probably deterministic, we seem to overstate our capacity for free will, even as we appear to ourselves to be autonomous. Somewhere in there, it seems to me, is where a workable definition lies, but it would require us to come to terms with our own consciousness and how computational our own existence actually is.

I do think we are hobbling ourselves by the desire to make this an either/or. It seems there are likely big differences between human consciousness and octopus consciousness and we have no way, currently, of quantifying them. Still, we make very grave decisions based on our belief that one is somehow inherently more valuable than the other.

Love your detailed analysis.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#649

Post by hsn915 »

simiones wrote: post #443
hsn915 wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How do you then account for the fact that, say, an industrial robot can construct a car? Clearly the encoding is not entirely arbitrary then, at least when we are seeking to actually embody the computer in the real world. Also, the behavior of such an embodied computer is independent of any observer. The industrial robot creates the same metal whether some human interprets that as a car or some alien sees it as a wor…

The same way I account for the fact that people can use different languages to communicate and cooperate to build things, including cars.

Language is arbitrary in the same way, because it is basically just a way of encoding information. There's nothing essential about words that give them their meanings.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#650

Post by notahacker »

dilap wrote: post #579
regentbowerbird wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It mistakes "a thing that is in some superficial respects the same" for "a thing is in every externally observable respect the same

So does all this talk about computers being "the same" if they can, given access to sufficient human-generated inputs, produce similar strings of Chinese characters to those a conscious Chinese person might do.

If you're not stuck behind a WeChat prompts it's trivially externally observable that a big silicon box which outputs Chinese characters and an agglomeration of cells which walks, eats, makes funny faces and reproduces are dissimilar in most respects (the machine might generate a subset of human outputs which is consistently convincingly human-like, but it's trivially shown that it runs different operations on different hardware at a different speed, requires different inputs to function effectively, and it's highly probable it doesn't devote clock cycles to dreaming about the physical and hormonal release of mating with other computers.

Something which in every observable respect is the same as me isn't a computer, it's me (or perhaps a clone or twin). A computer which can produce text outputs indistinguishable from mine is a very impressive trick indeed, but trust me, my sister will spot the difference straight away when she tries to give it an EEG scan!

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