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Consciousness is not computation

joe-antognini.github.io

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Re: Consciousness is not computation

#151

Post by chongli »

mr_toad wrote: post #114
madeofmeat wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Consciousness is an illusion" I take the word "illusion" to mean, some type of experience which misleads one about reality. And "consciousness" to mean, the experience of having experiences. So I parse this claim as something like, "People both do not have conscious experiences, and also do continuously have a particular type of conscious experience: a misleading experience which leads them to believe they have cons…

The illusion is of conscious volition; that consciousness is an atomic unit in charge of your actions. The brain is in control. Whether the conscious ‘mind’ has any control at all is debatable.

That's conflating consciousness with free will. I didn't see anyone in this discussion make the claim that consciousness necessarily implies free will. These are conceptually separate phenomena. It is at that point that the claim "consciousness is an illusion" requires further explanation to avoid the trap of circular reasoning.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#152

Post by zarmin »

epgui wrote: post #139
zarmin wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm referring to subjective experience. Which neurons have to fire for me to experience the subjective taste of chocolate? And how many neurons do I need before that can happen?

Blumenfeld won’t answer exactly that specific question, but it will help you understand how that works more generally.

The book covers how quality (subjective experience) arises from quantity (# of neurons)? Could you point me to a section please? I'm super intrigued.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#153

Post by Dylan16807 »

> But! If a single observer can correctly determine that the bar of iron is conscious, we must conclude that the bar of iron is conscious for everybody, because consciousness is observer independent. If true, honest-to-God consciousness is just a matter of running consciousness.exe, we have indeed found someone who has correctly observed that the bar of iron is running consciousness.exe and we must conclude that the bar of iron really is conscious.

This is just the library of babel.

Yes, you can find a book that represents any calculation.

No, you cannot use the books in the library to replace any Turing machine. You need the full knowledge of an entire computation, including every input and output over its entire lifetime, before you can actually find the book that represents it.

The books are not computing, and neither is that arbitrarily-interpreted bar of iron.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#154

Post by epgui »

charliea0 wrote: post #145

The triviality argument seems to be an informal proof by contradiction. (1) Suppose there exists a program `conciousness.exe` whose computation is conscious. (2) A block of iron is not conscious. (3) There exists a (presumably time-dependent) function which maps the microscopic states of the block of iron to the states of the computation of `conciousness.exe.` (4) This mapping makes the block of iron is conscious. (5…

I would argue that the flaw is in 5: the block of iron at this stage is not the same as it was when statement 2 was made.

Other example:

1. Ice is a solid

2. There exists a “sun” function that maps the atoms of ice into the atoms of water.

3. Water is a liquid

4. Statement (3) contradicts statement (1).

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#155

Post by tsimionescu »

3g4o53g4o5 wrote: post #124
tsimionescu wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a good example, as it's very hard to call particles following the laws of physics "a computation" - what would be the computer in this case? What is the program? A much better example is the machinery inside every living cell that is interpreting the DNA or RNA to produce certain proteins - there, it's much clearer there is a computational process happening. Certain specific structures inside the nucleus a…

How is it not? Quantum Mechanics and quantum field theory applies everywhere except for the black holes. Human can even harness the power by building quantum computer by that. So here you tried to deny the exist of quantum computing paradigm, a completely different computation approach?

No, I am not denying anything.

My point is this: say an electron emits a photon and changes speed, in perfect accordance to the standard model and QFT. I don't think it makes sense to say that the electron "computed" the energy of the photon, or its own change of speed. It just happened, there was no computation going on here.

Even in a CPU, it doesn't make sense to say that the transistors, or even logical gates, are "computing" how much electricity passes through them. The entire system of transistors arranged into logical gates arranged into a processor is doing computation of the program written in memory, but the subcomponents are only following the simple laws of physics.

In a quantum computer, the same is true - the computer itself may be running Shor'a algorithm, but each individual qubit is simply doing the few things that the laws of physics allow it to do.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#156

Post by throwaway290 »

stormbrew wrote: post #73
trts wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My personal experience is that consciousness, like free will, is a useful illusion It is probably just a difference in semantics but for me, it seems like consciousness is the only thing that is assuredly not an illusion. That I am having a subjective experience is undeniable. The objects of my consciousness all might be (and probably are) something else than they appear to be (as is often the experience with diffe…

> That I am having a subjective experience is undeniable. If you wanted to go about proving (even to yourself) that you are not, say, an extremely advanced ML algorithm running on a system that provided synthetic inputs in the form of your senses, how would you go about it? Further, how would you go about proving to someone who doubted your subjective experience was real if they doubted it? Say, if they believed they…

Sorry but you don't "prove" your way out of someone else treating you as a philosophical zombie.

It'd be a major issue with their worldview that eliminates any need for ethics, but it has no relationship to you actually having conscious experience or not.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#157

Post by zarmin »

russdill wrote: post #117
epgui wrote: post #18

The idea that you cannot get to consciousness from computation requires accepting on faith alone that consciousness is magic. It’s fundamentally a religious-like bias. It’s not magic, I’m afraid.

Or more succinctly, all the known laws of physics effect things in a way that can be simulated by sufficiently complex computation. The idea that there's something going on in a wet, warm l, mushy brain that has a macroscopic effect, and yet isn't accounted for by the currently known physics or bonkers.

>The idea that there's something going on in a wet, warm, mushy brain that has a macroscopic effect,

What kind of complex computation simulates the subjective experiences of wet, warm, and mushy?

EDIT: my account appears to be rate limited, so i am unable to post a reply until idk when....

By "subjective" I am referring to my conscious inner life, that there is something it is like to be me. I am an experiencer because I can experience things. My experiences are subjective and qualitative.

When I see something red, there actually is no "red" in reality, there is just an electromagnetic wave vibrating at a certain frequency. But I still have a "red" experience. In the same way, I can also have a wet, warm, or mushy experience. How do the subjective qualities of my experience arise from quantities like spin, charge, mass, etc?

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#158

Post by [deleted] »

shp0ngle wrote: post #35

I don’t understand these discussions, but maybe it’s because I’m a Christian (and Catholic). Lamda is not conscious, because it’s not a human. Consciousness is a gift from God to humans (and not even to animals). Robots are not conscious, they are just programmed to act like so. Once your philosophy stop including God and you go purely materialistic, I guess you end up with nonsense like “is lamda conscious” (or even…

[deleted]

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#159

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

Ologn wrote: post #104
0xBABAD00C wrote: post #99

We don't know of anything that is provably not computation. There's not a single proof that "process X is not reproducible computationally, yet it is implemented in the universe". All the statements like the one in the subject line are desires (conscious or unconscious) for special privilege for humans.

> We don't know of anything that is provably not computation. How about the halting problem? :)

Presumably you mean the halting problem for Turing Machines? It's undecidable for other Turing machines, but that doesn't mean it's undecidable for all machines.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#160

Post by Sophistifunk »

The problem with all these arguments is that if consciousness is not an inherent side effect of computation, then it must have evolved, which means it have once given a very simple animal a competitive advantage.

But we have no theory, evidence, or even well-thought-out stoner postulations of consciousness having any effect on the material universe, other than fancies of wish fulfilment. It appears to be a one-way process, information travels from meatspace to consciousness, never the other way around.

From here, logically I can't get to any place other than consciousness being a side-effect or emergent property of computation in general. There's no reason for it to have evolved.

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