61–70 of 89 posts
The idea you can magically "generate" consciousness by running an algorithm is really silly superstition.
Also as theory is essentially useless as it does not predict anything.
They are throwing darts in the dark and making it sound cool.
I have read it half way, a lot of information there.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like your computer analogy because it's easy to reason about. Surely a powered-down computer is not conscious. So if consciousness has an off switch, then it's not immanent (inherent) to organization. Koch compares consciousness to the electric charge of an electron. But the electric charge has no off switch!
"But the electric charge has no off switch!" Exactly. And "consciousness is computation" is an hypothesis that does not really work.
Why not?
All of reality might be a computation.
> Why we should live in such a universe is a good question, but I don’t see how that can be answered now. His last point here is salient. Much like the various interpretations of quantum mechanics, any theories of consciousness are untestable. But my problem with "consciousness" is that it's not even a well-defined concept. Suppose I replace all occurrences of "consciousness" in that article with the word "qualgma".…
>I believe Koch is conflating two distinct concepts. I believe Koch is conflating many distinct concepts - as most of the consciousness research field seems to. How can you say anything useful until you define your terms? It seems to me humans have many different layers of experience: Visceral pain/pleasure Instinctive drives Emotional/limbic experiences Locational (physical mapping) Memory-based/learned Abstract/int…
The biggest neural network yet built was a 100 billion neuron simulation of the human brain[1]. That didn't exhibit consciousness, but is considerably smaller than the 1 quadrillion (1 million billion) synapses a human brain has. I'm unsure what the relationship between a synapse and a neuron is. There are claims[2] that a human brain has "only" 100 billion neurons itself. Of course, it's true that consciousness may…
Your "of course" is taking as proved something that is not (the consciousness is computation hypothesis).
In your benefit you said may so of course you're not convinced. Which is good because people shouldn't believe in things that aren't testable. :)
And you talk about birds but there are als unicellular organisms reacting to anestesics, so that doubt should be even broader
> Why we should live in such a universe is a good question, but I don’t see how that can be answered now. His last point here is salient. Much like the various interpretations of quantum mechanics, any theories of consciousness are untestable. But my problem with "consciousness" is that it's not even a well-defined concept. Suppose I replace all occurrences of "consciousness" in that article with the word "qualgma".…
A problem is that when we use concepts to describe new concepts, lots of little assumptions tag along each referenced concept that may be different to every person. So, when I explain a concept, many people may understand my concept differently, while some may understand my concept precisely.
There is a difference between 'what could exist' versus 'what is assumed to exist'. When we communicate, we have to be very careful about the definitions of terms and their context.
I say "tree", we both may think of a tree in our minds. Your tree may come with assumption that the tree must have leaves in order to be a tree. My tree may come with the assumption that a tree does not need to have leaves, in order to be a tree. Neither of us may touch upon this point, while we are busy communicating about trees, and I think that is what is most important to recognize.
The rest of what you say though, did click for me, so thank you.
> Why we should live in such a universe is a good question, but I don’t see how that can be answered now. His last point here is salient. Much like the various interpretations of quantum mechanics, any theories of consciousness are untestable. But my problem with "consciousness" is that it's not even a well-defined concept. Suppose I replace all occurrences of "consciousness" in that article with the word "qualgma".…
You can find common ground between the statement you quoted if you want to take solipsism as your definition of "consciousness." IE, experiencing your own existence is consciousness, or is the test for it.
That isn't necessarily a bad definition. I quite like it.
What I've never liked is this CS Philosophical debate. It devolves into semantics so often it makes me suspect that's most of what it is. We define consciousness in terms of what it does, in which ace we may discover multiple solutions. Or, we can define it in terms of how it does it, in which case we'll have to wait until it's discovered before we can see what it does. Either way, the word consciousness is not useful enough to merit all this trouble it causes.
Contemplating its own undeniable here-ness, that's the kind of spiritualism that separates bloodbags from greaseballs, for now.
> Why we should live in such a universe is a good question, but I don’t see how that can be answered now. His last point here is salient. Much like the various interpretations of quantum mechanics, any theories of consciousness are untestable. But my problem with "consciousness" is that it's not even a well-defined concept. Suppose I replace all occurrences of "consciousness" in that article with the word "qualgma".…
You can find common ground between the statement you quoted if you want to take solipsism as your definition of "consciousness." IE, experiencing your own existence is consciousness, or is the test for it.
That isn't necessarily a bad definition. I quite like it.
What I've never liked is this CS Philosophical debate. It devolves into semantics so often it makes me suspect that's most of what it is. We define consciousness in terms of what it does, in which ace we may discover multiple solutions. Or, we can define it in terms of how it does it, in which case we'll have to wait until it's discovered before we can see what it does. Either way, the word consciousness is not useful enough to merit all this trouble it causes.
Contemplating its own undeniable here-ness, that's the kind of spiritualism that separates bloodbags from greaseballs, for now.
This brings me to an interesting thought experiment I struggle with: Most likely most people here would agree that if you make an exact copy of a person's brain, whilst leaving the original intact, it would be a new person, identical but divergent from the original. A new thread of consciousness by such definition. But then, what if you destroy the original at the moment of copy? It would appear to the same. But then…
When you wake up after a dreamless sleep, are you the same person, the same conscious entity, as went to bed the night before? Or is that entity now "dead", and "you" are a new entity that has just inherited its memories (most of which it in turn inherited from its predecessors)? How could you ever tell? In fact, are you the same conscious entity from moment to moment, or at least from thought to thought?
More "making a copy" thought experiments, none terribly original:
- If you're disintegrated and immediately reassembled, are you still you?
- Does using different atoms make a difference?
- Does leaving a gap between disintegration and reassembly make a difference? If so, how long a gap? What if you're resurrected at the Omega Point by sufficiently advanced aliens/post-humans?
- If you're split in two (sagitally, coronally, or however), and each half is immediately reconstructed into a whole human, each identical to you before the split, which is you? Which pair of eyes would you find yourself looking out of? Both? Neither?
- If the two "yous" exchange atoms, such that one ends up with the entire complement of atoms that made up you before the split and the other ends up with none, does that affect the claims of either to be the "real" you?
The simplest definition is that consciousness is a property of a program which has the capacity to compute something determined by at least one of its previous outputs (which can be an identity function, a perfect memory). Integrated information theory is basically this, only made more complex with the addition of a quantitative property, presumably because people feel an aversion to simplicity. This has a danger of producing absurd results in some edge cases, still, overengineering is a minor infraction compared to the deadly sin of bullshit (like p-zombie).