Consciousness is not computation

The animal world presents varying degree of consciousness from worms to humans. That's apparently evidence that consciousness is a spectrum.

The point is exactly that we don't know which of the infinite possibilities consciousness is.

If we (like I do) assume a materialistic world rather than a dualistic one, then we can make the assumption that a complex structure is needed for reasoning and sensing. Even if we postulates that this is true, then if you limit your definition of consciousness to the combination of a subjective experience and that, then indeed we are talking about different things.

(Ironically, the authors argument pushes things towards a dualistic interpretation, because in a purely materialistic universe there appears to be no other possibility than computation to produce a complex consciousness, irrespective of what adds a subjective experience to it - e.g. any unknown physics allowing consciousness would in a materialistic world just be another form of computation -, but a dualistic interpretation would undercut his entire argument - with a dualistic conception of the world, none of the arguments he use would prevent a possibility of some out-of-universe "spark of consciousness" imbuing anything and everything irrespective of in-universe logic)

But we have no evidence to suggest whether the subjective experience - I used that term for a reason - part of that, which is the very core of what would distinguish consciousness from "dumb" computation requires complex structure or not.

Part of the problem is that a whole lot of complex structure is required before we can interrogate something about whether or not it is conscious, and even then we struggle to find ways of telling whether it is "just" mimicking consciousness, because we have no measurement to apply to tell us whether something is conscious or not, just whether it appears to be.

I have aphantasia. I don't see things in my minds eye. I went decades before I realised this is unusual. People who hear about it get confused about how I can e.g. remember what something looks like, but I can sketch out in detail what things looks like (I used to draw - not great, but better than average), and I can "visualise" complex relationships that I can't visualise - I know how they link together even though I can't see it. To me, that experience makes me perhaps more willing than average to accept that reasoning and the subjective experience of reasoning might be surprisingly separate, and to at least be open to the possibility that the reverse could be true as well - that entities that lack the complexity required to reason might still have a flicker of subjective experience.

To be clear, I don't believe that is the case - I simply don't know. But I also don't deny the possibility, because we don't know. We have no data to point in either direction, and so when someones argument requires ruling it out in order to support their argument, that argument is on shaky ground.

How is it neasured

You seem to be having a lot of trouble grasping the concept of abstraction, which is absolutely fundamental to what we are talking about. Mathematics, logic and computer science study abstractions, they do not study physical things. The mathematical fact that 1 + 1 = 2 is true regardless of whether we are counting apples or oranges. On the other hand 5 + 5 = 30 pounds is mathematically a non-sensical statement, even though there are physical objects for which it is true (ie. objects which happen to weigh 3 pounds).

Computation is not a physical process any more than addition is a physical process. It is true that to actually perform either a physical instantiation is necessary but in the same way that the results of addition do not depend on what we are adding the results of computation do not depend on what kind of physical process we use to perform the computation.

This was the whole point of my earlier water based computer example. Would it be correct, on the basis of that example, to say that the program "makes you wet" or that some computations make you wet ? No, such a statement would be as non-sensical as the statement that 5 + 5 = 30 pounds.

Now the key thing is that when people make claims about computers being conscious those claims are usually based on what some program does (ie. what its inputs and outputs are), in other words a computational property of the program that would be the same regardless of what kind of computer it was executed on. The guy who claimed that LaMDA was conscious wasn't basing his claim on something specific about the kind of hardware it was running on, he was basing it on the program's inputs and outputs, which are indeed a computational property and therefore abstract.

Part of the problem is that people tend to use words very loosely. In particular they often use words that anthropomorphize computers and when they use such words its hard to tell whether they intend for them to be taken literally or are just using them as a figure of speech.

Your example starts of by telling us that the computer is known not to have qualia, which I understand to mean that it does not have subjective conscious experiences. First I don't think its ever possible to know, even in principle, whether something other than one's own self has or does not have subjective experiences, but I'll ignore that objection for the moment.

A few lines later you say:

> We, and the computer, just know that we're seeing red.

Now much hinges on what is meant here by the verb "know". If you are using the word in a loose metaphorical sense then I could accept that. For example you could say that a computer "knows" that the word "red" means an RGB value of (255,0,0) because in its memory there is a hash table that maps some strings to RGB values. So behaviorally you can ask the computer what "red" means and it will tell you "(255,0,0)". But there is nothing in such a description that implies that the process of generating that output is associated with any kind of subjective experience on the part of the computer.

On the other hand when you "know" some simple fact the process of reporting that fact is always associated with some subjective experiences, specifically the experience of thinking. How do I know that ? Well technically I don't. All I really know is that whenever I know something and am asked to report on it the process is always accompanied by a subjective experience of thought. I am simply making the conventional assumption here that the same is true for all other humans and that you are a member of that group. Of course that assumption might be false. For all I know I could be having this conversation with LaMDA.

To get back to the questions you asked here:

> Do you disagree that the computer in my hypothetical example would have the intuitions it does about its own senses?

Yes, because you said it didn't have conscious experiences and for me the word "intuition" is strongly linked to certain conscious experiences.

> how can you trust your own intuitions about your sensory qualia, no matter how strong?

Because I have them. I am not a black box to myself, I get to look inside and when I do I find that there are conscious experiences there. That's just not something I can, even in principle, be mistaken about. However once I start making assumptions about the nature of those experiences, such as that there is some external physical world that is ultimately responsible for them, I am already on very shaky ground.