Consciousness is not computation

I don't think there is a shortcoming in your knowledge. Your metaphysics intuition is correctly tuned: simulations cannot feel.

>We create a physics simulation of a human brain. Can the brain write a novel? Answer questions about what it's like to perceive the color red? This is just a yes or no question.

GPT-3 can do both of these things. Is it conscious? If you need a direct answer, it is yes. But when we reword your second question as "can a simulated brain experience the color red?" the answer becomes more clear; the simulation can identify a wavelength and know it is called "red". But the experiential part is akin to explaining color to a blind person.

A simulated brain could identify molecular patterns of cocoa and sugar, but can it know what it is like to taste chocolate? Think about what it means to taste chocolate. Is it purely quantitative, like the balance of ingredients, or is there something else going on that is qualitative? Something abstract, something with meaning, something more close to the metal? We can probably agree that it feels like there is. What we are describing is subjectivity — your private conscious inner life. I suggest it is this that is fundamental and cannot be simulated. This is the layer where experience "happens". From this layer emerges meta-consciousness.

Here is an article by Bernardo Kastrup on meta-consciousness: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5590537/

Why then would evolution produce beings with internal conscious experience?

This would also mean that our internal conscious experience has no effect on what decisions we make, on whether we cry, smile, what memories we form, etc.

Well, I'm arguing it's the other way around. But to address what I think is the spirit of your question: if reality is only mind, if consciousness is truly fundamental, then why can't you read my thoughts? Why do we feel like individuals? Why do we have obviously separate private conscious inner lives?

When you are asleep and dreaming, your "alter" generally does not know they are dreaming. Your dream self has dissociated from your waking self, but it is only after you wake up that you realize you were dreaming (if you even remember). Another example of this phenomenon is Dissociative Identity Disorder, where one mind splits into many alters, each unaware the others exist. I'm glossing over a significant amount in order to get to my point, but here are a couple links that go into great detail:

- https://www.google.com/books/edition/_/JCdbmFCHYB0C?hl=en&gb... (chapter 5)

- https://www.mdpi.com/2409-9287/2/2/10/htm#sec4-philosophies-... (search for "Yet, we know empirically that living people have separate, private experiences (Fact 6)")

My point is, our private conscious inner lives are dissociations, alters, from a "mind-at-large" fundamental consciousness. And the boundaries of these dissociations, the "containers" of individual private conscious inner life, (again glossing over so much, like panpsychism's combination problem) are metabolizing organisms. Metabolizing organisms are what alters _look like_ from the outside. Kastrup:

"Since we only have intrinsic access to ourselves, we are the only structures known to have dissociated streams of inner experiences. We also have good empirical reasons to conclude that normal metabolism is essential for the maintenance of this dissociation, for when it slows down or stops the dissociation seems to reduce or end. These observations alone suggest strongly that metabolizing life is the structure corresponding to alters of [fundamental consciousness]

But there is more: insofar as it resembles our own, the extrinsic behavior of all metabolizing organisms is also suggestive of their having dissociated streams of inner experiences analogous to ours in some sense" (from the mdpi link)

>This would also mean that our internal conscious experience has no effect on what decisions we make, on whether we cry, smile, what memories we form, etc.

Don't your thoughts and feelings influence your behavior?

You can't have any subjective experience of something unless that something exists in the first place, so interrogating about "how does it feel" seems rather secondary, as well as not being proof of anything. If LaMBDA says it's conscious, is that all the proof you want?

Let's also note that IF we knew, for sure, that the bag of subjective phenomena we're calling "consciousness" is nothing more than an emergent experience based on a sensory/cognitive apparatus having access to it's own internal states, then it would be pretty clear what type of animals/systems are likely have this (and which ones certainly not), since without any sensory/cognitive apparatus it could not exist. It then would seem very likely that the guy in the next cubicle is conscious since he has the same brain architecture as us, and most animals too, unless you get down to the level of insects and below in terms of complexity of nervous systems.

So, your assertion that the only way to assess whether something is conscious is to interrogate it, rests entirely on the above being incorrect and consciousness being some mystical/dualistic phenomena who's existence we can't deduce from a functional analysis of the "brain" of the thing in question.

You may still be correct in a round about sort of way since I doubt most people will accept that AIs could be conscious until such things exist, and are common enough that people can spend considerable time interacting with them, and through the unreliable measure of interrogation eventually convince themselves that "yeah, well, I suppose it might be .. is does SEEM to be ..".

It seems long due really ... first we had people denying Copernicus, then Darwin, and perhaps this will be the final step in people eventually accepting that there's really nothing much special about humans at all. Who knows, maybe we're too dumb as a species to realize it, and it'll be some more advanced future species writing textbooks about the odd beliefs of homo sapiens at this "emerging intelligence" phase of evolution.

I showed you that subjectivity doesn’t effect whether computation occurs. Several ways.

If you disagree you should really be editing Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_of_computation Why don’t you go add your theory there?

It’s silly because it’s obvious. If you understand cells, you understand that computation in the absence of subjectivity has been happening on Earth for billions of years.

(Mic drop)