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Consciousness is not computation

joe-antognini.github.io

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Re: Consciousness is not computation

#681

Post by zarmin »

epgui wrote: post #663
zarmin wrote: post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You also haven't really made any good-faith effort to read the neuroanatomy textbook I tried to suggest to you in another thread.

I did look for it yesterday but wasn't able to find a free version. Neglected to mention it because I was unable to comment (that restriction seems to have been lifted). I am genuinely interested in reading it.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#682

Post by antognini »

iainmerrick wrote: post #376
antognini wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The physical process is simply that the atoms in the bar of iron start in one Turing machine state, obey the laws of physics, and end up in another Turing machine state. But this is also true of any other physical computer. It sounds like your objection is that this is not a computer because it's not reproducible --- we just got lucky that the physical states mapped onto the appropriate Turing machine states one time…

The physical process is simply that the atoms in the bar of iron start in one Turing machine state, obey the laws of physics, and end up in another Turing machine state. I don't see how this addresses the key point -- those aren't random distinct states; there's an explicit description of how one state transitions to the next. That's part of the definition of the Turing machine! If you could describe a mapping from t…

> there's an explicit description of how one state transitions to the next. That's part of the definition of the Turing machine!

A Turing machine does indeed describe which states the machine transitions between (by its definition). So, it might say that if it reads a "1" and is in state "A", transition to state "B".

However, crucially, a Turing machine does not specify the physical mechanism by which this state transition occurs. You just have to enumerate the rules for state transitions. The definition of a Turing machine says nothing about whether or not these states are voltages, the locations of rocks, or the magnetic moments of iron atoms. Nor does it say whether the transition is being implemented by a CPU or a human being manipulating rocks.

So the only rigorous way you can make a connection to a physical computer is to just identify a mapping from physical states to Turing machine states, and observe whether or not it performs all the state transitions correctly. If it reads a "1" and is in state "A", did it go to state "B"? If it did, it is behaving as a Turing machine. If it did not, it is not behaving as a Turing machine.

> At that point you could certainly argue that the computation is really happening in the mapping itself.

The mapping is fixed, so I don't see how it can do any computation. Others have objected to the fact that the mapping in the iron bar is obviously extremely complicated, but this strikes me as ultimately being an objection that this doesn't "feel" like computing.

But as a counterexample, you can do computations under homomorphic encryption. Suppose you have encrypted a computer program that sorts a list using homomorphic encryption. You hand it to me to run on my CPU. When I observe the voltages of the CPU, they will appear completely random to me. Only if I have the key can I provide the correct (complicated) mapping from physical states to Turing machine states and interpret what is going on on the CPU. But if we reject "complicated" mappings as not being "real" computations, then you're forced to say that computation under homomorphic encryption isn't "really" computation --- even though you've handed me a program to sort a list, it ran on my machine, and it handed you back a sorted list.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#683

Post by ajuc »

There's no definition and no consensus if it's even real. But we declare autoratively that this thing we can't define can't be computational.

About as productive as declaring universe is made of water :)

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#684

Post by strogonoff »

Sophistifunk wrote: post #655
strogonoff wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The act of saying “consciousness doesn’t have any effect on the material universe” denies the premise of what’s being said. Behold, your consciousness has just had direct effect on material universe (just as deciding to obtain the device on which it was typed, and before that someone’s idea to make that device, had). I remember myself being unshakeably of the same opinion: consciousness is obviously something of no r…

That's not consciousness. Consciousness is the space in which your brain tells a story pretending that "you" are in charge a lot more often than you are.

Ah, but it also is that place that tells you that external world exists. You prefer to trust it in one but not the other, don’t you?

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#685

Post by zwaps »

jb_s wrote: post #672
zwaps wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

The argument about a third party is trivial in my opinion. Someone responds correctly in Chinese, and the onus just falls on that element of the system to be conscious or not. It's another argument and I don't even see how this experiment is particularly enlightening in that case. I think in that case, people just confuse it with the Turing test.

Instead, the core matter is about form versus meaning - something that is indeed not observable from the outside, and yet is a distinction to the person inside the Chinese room.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#686

Post by iainmerrick »

antognini wrote: post #682
iainmerrick wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The physical process is simply that the atoms in the bar of iron start in one Turing machine state, obey the laws of physics, and end up in another Turing machine state. I don't see how this addresses the key point -- those aren't random distinct states; there's an explicit description of how one state transitions to the next. That's part of the definition of the Turing machine! If you could describe a mapping from t…

> there's an explicit description of how one state transitions to the next. That's part of the definition of the Turing machine! A Turing machine does indeed describe which states the machine transitions between (by its definition). So, it might say that if it reads a "1" and is in state "A", transition to state "B". However, crucially, a Turing machine does not specify the physical mechanism by which this state tran…

I think you’re skipping over one or two crucial steps there; let me try to put my finger on it.

The key feature of a universal Turing machine is that it can perform any computation, if fed the right program.

In your thought experiment where you’re mapping the internal state of an iron bar, to claim it’s a valid mapping to a Turing machine, it must be possible to feed in any program, after the mapping has been defined. Otherwise it’s not a universal machine.

You are mapping a well-defined structure into essentially a block of random numbers -- a one-time pad. You can only perform “any” computation that way if you map the full execution trace of the machine onto the random block. But that way, the computation occurs before the mapping is defined. That’s what I meant by “the computation is really happening in the mapping itself”.

The homomorphic encryption scheme is different, because while it looks random, it’s generated by a well-defined and reversible process. So I can use a mapping of bounded complexity to inject any program, and in principle to step through its execution.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#687

Post by simonh »

tgflynn wrote: post #646
simonh wrote: post #639

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Computation is a physical process though. To occur, it has to be performed in the physical world by a mechanism. I'm going to nitpick your terminology a bit I'm afraid. I don't see how an abstract representation can be operated on, surely to operate on a representation it has to be a physical representation, such as a physical state representing 0 or 1?

I suppose the representation might be of an abstract object, data, but you can't actually operate on anything that's only abstract. It has to have a real representation.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#688

Post by Paedor »

Wow, it's uncanny how well this post mirrored my own thoughts, down to the phrase "consciousness is observer independent". I ended up rejecting the conclusion though, for the roughly same reason Maxwell's demon doesn't actually reduce entropy. Normally I wouldn't expose people to my armchair philosophy, but here goes:

1. Consciousness, if present, should depend on dynamics. E.g. frozen snapshots of a conscious being probably shouldn't be conscious themselves.

2. (Building on 1) Because a full definition of consciousness requires dynamics, a measurement of consciousness can't just give one "conscious" snapshot. It needs to dynamically continue to measure consciousness, which is much stricter than Joe's original requirement.

3. If measurements of an iron bar are dynamically changing in order to find consciousness in random spins in the iron bar, then picking the correct measurements actually requires immense computation. In fact, it would require simulating a conscious being, while also simulating the dynamics of the iron bar. I'd argue the consciousness you're measuring is then real, but not a property of the iron bar at all.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#689

Post by GoblinSlayer »

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…

>Dualists reject physicalism and often incorrectly assume that computationalism presumes physicalism. Ironically, however, computationalism would also be the best theory of how the mind works if dualism was true.

I'm not a dualist, but I think dualists wouldn't believe in computationalism. Computationalism relies on emergence: mind supervenes on computation, but emergence is basically physicalism, dualists would think emergence is impossible due to eliminativism and you would need mind irreducible to computation, thus anticomputationalism.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#690

Post by rep_movsd »

A mapping of atomic states onto consciouness.exe would usually have more bits than consciousness.exe itself.

This argument is similar to the one where you can have a specialized trivial program to generate any sequence of data - for example "PI compression" - since PI has all possible sequences, you can compress any data by just specifying where that sequence starts in PI

The trouble is that the index will probably have more bits than the sequence you want to compress (given that you could somehow find it)

You have 2 choices 1) Consciousness is software, Turing computable, and you are a physicalist/materialist 2) Consciousness is subjective, outside the realm of all objective measurement, and you believe that the universe has more than matter/energy - dualism

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