141–150 of 157 posts
If I understand this correctly based on a quick read, it argues that subjective experience arises at the (or in the) "alphabetization" process where continuous physical states (e.g. voltage) are mapped to discrete logical states (roughly like e.g. a bit) or "concepts" (figure 2). Per this reading, implementing something in ASIC would make it have (a different) experience, as opposed to CPU/GPU. Not sure what would be…
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I wasn't trying to use that as a definition of what computation means. My point is that regardless of how we define it, the fact is that the devices we build to do some form of computation are objectively successful at doing what they were built to do. For example, you can say that Firefox is a human-centric abstraction, and that my computer isn't running Firefox right now in an objective sense, that this is is just…
The paper addresses this point in section 3.2. They aren't debating the fact that a physical process is taking place in a computer running a program. They are arguing that the semantic interpretation of the output of that program is indeterminate and dependent on the mapping function: > A single physical vehicle (bottom) possesses a fixed causal trajectory. However, it does not instantiate a unique computation. Depen…
This is in fact very similar to the notion of text - text is a physical medium, that provably contains a message that one human intended to convey to other humans. The same physical text can be interpreted in an infinite number of ways, and they are all equally valid in that they are self-consistent, but only one is the intention of the original author.
In reality, we already are surrounded by beings that we know to be conscious, sentiment, and experience pain, joy and feelings.
And we breed tens of billions of them into existence, torture, imprison, and kill them at a fraction of their lives for mere trivialities.
It’s just so weird that we are obsessing over the sentience and morality around article intelligence that may or may not be sentient, while brutally killing trillions of known sentient beings every year.
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Necessity for what condition? To find truth? Making assumptions are the opposite of finding truth.
To function. You must assume many things on a daily basis to function and survive because we are limited.
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To function. You must assume many things on a daily basis to function and survive because we are limited.
Ok but isn't that a different topic? Whether you function or not is not the same as whether something is true or not.
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The paper addresses this point in section 3.2. They aren't debating the fact that a physical process is taking place in a computer running a program. They are arguing that the semantic interpretation of the output of that program is indeterminate and dependent on the mapping function: > A single physical vehicle (bottom) possesses a fixed causal trajectory. However, it does not instantiate a unique computation. Depen…
But the results that the computer screen shows, and the inputs fed into the machine, are entirely physical, observer-independent processes. Just like an inscribed papyrus contains letters in a physically observable, provable sense - even if the semantics of those letters are entirely man made. This is in fact very similar to the notion of text - text is a physical medium, that provably contains a message that one hum…
> Consider an analog clock. Physically, the device is a collection of gears and springs governed by continuous dynamics (P). It only “computes” time because a mapmaker intervenes, mapping a specific set of continuous angles to a semantic concept (e.g., “3:00 PM”). Without this semantic imposition, the clock is just metal moving in accordance with Hamilton’s equations; it contains no intrinsic “time.” Thus, the physical substrate does not “process information” absent a prerequisite alphabet of intrinsic symbols; rather, it generates continuous dynamics that an external mapmaker interprets as information.
In this example the time "3:00 PM" is instantiated in the mind of the person reading the clock, it is not a real physical property of the clock itself.
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Originally rejected the paper premise, but I get it now, certainly made me question my belief that consciousness binds to any arbitrary information processing that's of sufficient complexity. IIUC the author is saying that the human brain is running directly on "layer zero": chemical gradients / voltage changes, while AI computes on an abstraction one layer higher (binary bit flips over discretized dyanmics). In esse…
I thought your "layer zero" analogy was an interesting avenue to reason about but you lost me with: > My currently belief is that consciousness is some kind of field or property of the universe (i.e. a universal consciousness field) that "binds" to whatever information processing happens in our wet ware. First, because it requires a huge leap into fundamental and universal physical mechanics for which there is curren…
There is — arguably, as in, it is argued — evidence for some sort of field of higher dimensionality than three, and recently communication between brain areas through the field rather than physically.
The more we uncover of the brain's functionality, the more it appears the physical parts we've tended to stare at are not themselves performing computation, but more like computation antennae: a theremin not only moved by, but that can move, the hand.
What a banality: a model of a phenomenon is not the phenomenon itself. When did Google become a philosophy seminar instead of an AI company?
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But the results that the computer screen shows, and the inputs fed into the machine, are entirely physical, observer-independent processes. Just like an inscribed papyrus contains letters in a physically observable, provable sense - even if the semantics of those letters are entirely man made. This is in fact very similar to the notion of text - text is a physical medium, that provably contains a message that one hum…
To the best of my understanding I believe the response from the position taken by the paper is that this is still committing the abstraction fallacy (Assuming you aren't just agreeing with them here, which I don't think you are). The book itself doesn't physically instantiate the information it contains in its text. In a vacuum it is informationally inert. That doesn't mean it doesn't physically exist. Likewise the c…