Consciousness is not computation

>If you say that there is a property X of computation that occurs independently of how the computation is actually carried out... That's all the word "abstract" means in this context.

Ok, that makes sense, sure.

>...because hopefully we agree that mathematics only studies abstract properties...

I can't agree, performing a calculation isn't an abstract concept, it's a physical process. It does map to abstract concepts though.

>Beyond that I argue that computation itself is entirely abstract and though I don't seem to be able to get you to admit that, I think most people, certainly most computer scientists would admit it readily.

That is not the case. The fact that computation is fundamentally a physical process is a core principle of several branches of physics and computer science:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computation https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspa.2014.018...

Computers aren't abstract, they're real objects doing things in the real world. If the thing they are physically doing is not computation, what is it?

>So what we're left with is a claim that an abstract process can produce something that is not abstract and such claims are just not plausible. That would be exactly like a computer simulation of the weather producing actual water.

Abstractions cannot affect the real world, sure, so if computation is purely abstract how come your computer can display my message on your physical screen right now? How is that happening, if not by computation?

You're really tangling yourself up in knots with this view of abstraction. You can map what happens in a computer against abstract concepts and abstract objects yes. You can also map operations in several different physical systems against the same abstract objects. That's what it means when we say computation is implementation independent. But it still needs to be implemented to actually happen.

Previously you said this:

>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...

So it's not a physical process, but you can instantiate it. And it's purely abstract so can't affect the physical world. Yet here we are using computers.

I'm lost, frankly.

>The Boltzmann Brain says that our conscious experience at the current moment is a chance quantum event.

I just meant that the proposition that an iron bar might be viewed as containing a consciousness, is similar to the idea in the BB proposition that consciousnesses might arise spontaneously in random matter in space. Well they might, but that doesn't prove or refute anything about consciousness.

The bit about Boltzmann's Brains possibly outnumbering real evolved brains is a separate philosophical question I didn't mean to address, and I apologise for the confusion.

An intelligence doesn't need to experience qualia in order to have an internal thought process. Picture a thought process the way it might look if we could inspect our own minds: A prolonged monologue of ideas being continually appended to with new information and conjectures. "It's hot in here. This is an interesting article, but I disagree because . What should I do tomorrow? Maybe I should get a haircut," etc. Obviously such a log wouldn't be written entirely in English, but it would have a language of its own, after a fashion.

When I talk about "an intelligence," I mean a thing with an internal thought process which can reflect upon its own thought process in a non-trivial way. This excludes large language models like LaMDA which don't really have semantic thoughts, but it would certainly be possible for a true computer intelligence along these lines to exist which nonetheless didn't experience "actual qualia" (assuming qualia are real, existing things).

A stream of consciousness thought process has input---it can sense temperature, it can observe its own hair, it can read articles---and for the purposes of our model, we can suppose that this input is appended to its internal log similarly to how new thoughts are. This sensory input is abstract: A thought process may sense heat---i.e. sensory information about the external temperature may be entered into the thought process---but the thought process can't go on to make any real observations about that sensation. A thought process can't interpret sensory input as anything beyond simply "a distinct input of this or that type with a relative magnitude of whatever," because that input is abstract and irreducible. Further thoughts in the thought process will describe these sensory inputs as vivid, unique, and ineffable when they reflect upon them, but those properties only exist as a product of the relationship between the thought process and its input. The ineffable qualities of these senses as described by their thought process is not a real thing, but only an interpretation.

So when I hear the argument, "I can reflect on the way my senses feed into my thoughts, and by their apparent ineffable and transcendental nature, I can say they're self-evidently real things that exist outside of my own beliefs about them," I'm pretty skeptical. A computer intelligence with an internal thought process like I described above would reach those same conclusions simply by virtue of the relationship between its sensory input and its thoughts. We're not unbiased observers; our perspective as an intelligence breaks down when we try to reason about the nature of the abstract and atomic inputs which our thought process is based upon. Because of the way senses feed into thoughts, an intelligence can't help but find them ineffable and transcendental; therefore, when I find my own sensory information to be ineffable and transcendental, I can't take that at face value as anything more than an illusion of perspective.

> 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.

A computerized thought process can look at its own thoughts too, but there's no reason to suppose that it (and you) can't draw mistaken conclusions about them. For instance, the mistaken conclusion that the distinctness of one input or another must be a real existing quality and not just a logical axiom essential to the functioning of that thought process.

> Regular meat-and-bone people lose consciousness all the time, and regain it later. No big deal.

So what? There are lots of REAL physical processes that are disrupted in a human being when they lose consciousness.

The point of the Chinese Room is to show that information processing alone is insufficient for consciousness. For example is information processing happening when the person pauses for a minute - or not? For a second, for a millisecond? What about when the pen comes off the paper? What about when he's sharpening his pencil? How exactly does the consciousness=information processing idea work for these situations? It's a nonsense idea that doesn't hold up to careful inspection.

And it's exactly akin to saying we get nuclear power by simulating a nuclear power plant in a computer.

On the other hand, if we believe that consciousness is like an ordinary physical property of the universe, either emergent or fundamental, then it should be related to other physical properties, just as electromagnetism is to mass and energy.

> Whatever index card system or similar the operating procedure in the room prescribes for keeping track of state?

You're missing the point. A bit is just some electrons. It could be a scribble in a notebook. But consciousness integrates several pieces of information into a coherent experience. The bits in an index card system could as well be some scratchings of graphite in a notebook. How would consciousness arise from graphite in a notebook?

> We don't have any 'scientific theory' of qualia. We don't even know if they exist,

I differ on this. The only thing I know for certain the universe contains is qualia. You, the idea there is a "me", atoms, bits, axons and electric potentials are merely ideas, which "I" apprehend as qualia.

> or how they would manifest in the physical world.

Correct, that is the question. But the Chinese room thought experiment shows it's not merely by information processing. I mean, atoms in a room are processing information - they are computing the next state of all of the atoms in the room. Are they conscious? How about a subset of those atoms? Are those conscious in a different way?

The point is that the consciousness-is-computation idea is just too weak to even be a physical theory.