Consciousness is not computation • Hacker News Board

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#671

Post by jb_s » Tue, Jun 21, 2022, 2:37 AM UTC

sdenton4 wrote: post #273

n8cpdx wrote: post #3

I think people start with the premise that consciousness is a specific “thing”, that it is unique and special to humans (and maybe dogs because we like them but definitely not spiders and flies because we don’t) and then try to work backwards to define it in some ways that keeps it special. I don’t think consciousness is so specific, and I think people aren’t clear about how they think about it as something separate…

I've recently been enjoying thinking of GPT-3 utterances as creating short-lived consciousnesses for the length of an interaction. There's no consciousness during training (just filling in the blanks...) but when we interact with it in a generative fashion, there is - depending on your prompt - a somewhat coherent 'I' that is invoked, and maintained over the course of the conversation. Seeing as I have no strong clai…

It's going to be even weirder once Google et al gives AI more and more agency to interact with people and objects the real world.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#672

Post by jb_s » Tue, Jun 21, 2022, 2:39 AM UTC

zwaps wrote: post #206

fouronnes3 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. The "system" understands Chinese in the same way a native speaker does. It's two different implementations (room system and native speaker) of the same computation ("understanding Chinese"). There is no externally observable difference between actually understanding Chinese and a perfect simulation of a system that understands Chinese. The fact that the person inside doesn't speak Chinese as a result is irreleva…

The point of the experiment is to think about the individual in the room. You can not say it's irrelevant, because it's the entire point. The system's response is trivial: Sure, if the room+person combination leads always to a coherent response in Chinese, then the entire system understands Chinese. I'd go even further: If the person in the room does not understand Chinese, but the system does, then there is some ent…

You might as well conclude that my fingers typing this post aren't conscious. It's a weird argument.

The analogy might be more valid if arguing its not possible for a third party to actually determine whether an entity/system is conscious (irrespective of whether the entity is conscious or not)

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#673

Post by jb_s » Tue, Jun 21, 2022, 2:44 AM UTC

doctor_eval wrote: post #171

melenaboija wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess that a unigram language model trained with few words should be considered conscious in some way too.

But this is kinda my point. You're not explaining to me why LaMDA is not conscious, you're just asserting that consciousness is not just a form of complex pattern recognition. Perhaps consciousness is simply pattern recognition at scale. If not - why not?

Perhaps the main problem in the collective discussion is regarding consciousness as discrete and not a spectrum from minimal (slime molds?) to ultimate consciousness (ability to simulate/understand/create the entire universe?)

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#674

Post by 3g4o53g4o5 » Tue, Jun 21, 2022, 3:19 AM UTC

denton-scratch wrote: post #605

olaulaja wrote: post #577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Hmmm. You seem to be talking about progressive removal of parts of the brain, until consciousness is no longer manifested. But that experiment is founded on the assumption that the root of consciousness is the brain; and that consequently, consciousness can be subdivided, like the brain, until there's very little left. But I contend that that begs the question: it assumes that the root of consciousness is material, a…

So you are talking about magic.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#675

Post by csee » Tue, Jun 21, 2022, 3:50 AM UTC

JoshTriplett wrote: post #2

This seems...very confused. This seems to be attempting to "prove" that if you regard consciousness as "containing the bits of a specific program", you could also see that program in random data by interpreting that random data by effectively applying a one-time pad to it (from which you can indeed produce any possible interpretation of data), which it treats as a proof by contradiction. And leaving that aside, while…

You make a good point about discarding the source of random noise that the one-time pad is being applied to, and just focusing on the thing that's generating that one-time pad.

But I still don't know where to draw the line and how to justify it.

If that source of random noise mapped to a Turing machine running consciousness.exe for a short period of time by sheer chance without a one-time pad being applied to it by an external observer, would that classify? If we observed that this mapping held true by sheer chance as we observed additional bits in this random noise source, what about then? Does it make a difference that it's a random noise source that happens to be corresponding to a Turing machine for a period of time, and not an "actual" computer? And if that matters, what about the point that actual computers aren't perfectly deterministic, either?

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#676

Post by artificialLimbs » Tue, Jun 21, 2022, 3:59 AM UTC

epgui wrote: post #304

artificialLimbs wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> it seems reasonable to assume that one day, we could arrange atoms in a specific way to produce consciousness from an atom-based computer system. There is no evidence for this. It does not seem reasonable to me at all. Internal dialog is not consciousness. Many of the people who discuss consciousness at length do not need or simply do not engage in any internal dialog at all. We will never 'build' consciousness. I…

> There is no evidence for this. It's a little unreasonable to expect a speculative statement about what might happen in the future to have evidence at the present time. > We will never 'build' consciousness. It is not possible. Consciousness comes from a source outside of our realm of experience as a gift. It does not come from the micro or small things (though it is entwined with them and everything), but from the…

You cannot have a measure of consciousness in the same way that you cannot have a measure of anger. You can only possibly see its effects, and maybe not even that. But you can experience it.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#677

Post by artificialLimbs » Tue, Jun 21, 2022, 4:06 AM UTC

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #421

artificialLimbs wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> it seems reasonable to assume that one day, we could arrange atoms in a specific way to produce consciousness from an atom-based computer system. There is no evidence for this. It does not seem reasonable to me at all. Internal dialog is not consciousness. Many of the people who discuss consciousness at length do not need or simply do not engage in any internal dialog at all. We will never 'build' consciousness. I…

This implies that consciousness is some sort of “magic”, not obeying the laws of the physical universe as we know them . I’m not willing to completely discount this idea. However, it seems likely that both mammals and birds all have this magic. It’s pretty wide spread. Why assume that humans can never figure it how it works, and replicate it?

As far as most people are concerned, it may as well be magic. It certainly doesn’t lend itself to understanding in the general sense. We must explore wholeheartedly and with integrity to even begin at comprehending the possibilities of connecting with it.

Even rocks and dead sticks have it. Some of us know how it works. I don’t claim to know, but I know more about it now than I did, let us say, some years ago. So it is like learning most any other complex thing, it is done over time. It can’t be replicated because it cannot be contained, and it is too expansive to be emulated or cloned with any sufficiency to have any substantial meaning.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#678

Post by bccdee » Tue, Jun 21, 2022, 4:24 AM UTC

tgflynn wrote: post #669

bccdee wrote: post #666

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? If we're logically guaranteed to hold belief X independently of whether X is true or not, it's irrational to say "yeah but I KNOW X is true. I can just tell." You would believe that no matter what; how can you trust that belief?

How would you know that you hold belief X if you have no subjective experience ? To have the knowledge that you believe X you must experience the thought "X is true" and that is a subjective experience.

Sure, if you define subjective experience as "all sensory information." I'm not denying that we have sensory input; I'm denying that its abstractions are any more than illusory constructs of the mind. The computer in my example knew things and had thoughts, despite not having access to actual qualia.

Do you disagree that the computer in my hypothetical example would have the intuitions it does about its own senses? Given that it does, how can you trust your own intuitions about your sensory qualia, no matter how strong?

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#679

Post by meroes » Tue, Jun 21, 2022, 4:25 AM UTC

simonh wrote: post #574

meroes wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It may be woo, but how I understand his approach is a rejection of dualism and the Cartesian theater. To commit to physicalism but lean very hard onto what can be asked of it. One must do some kind of move to escape the Cartesian theater. There are those who say consciousness is too hard, and those who say we can take a stab at it. In the latter camp I think he’s more on the right track than anyone major figure I know of.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#680

Post by eru » Tue, Jun 21, 2022, 4:44 AM UTC

Dylan16807 wrote: post #592

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Of course, the reduction only works one way. The universe-dwarfing lookup table could do things that are much more impressive than what your brain does.