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Is the "consciousness is just computation" side obliged to prove HOW consciousness is generated out of computation alone? (Which they never do?)
Or are the opponents obliged to find the unique aspect that couldn't possibly be reduced to computation? (Which they never do either?)
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The question is whether there was ever a good reason to suggest that mind is computational, and I think philosophy (i.e. Searle) have shown that there wasn’t. A brain CAN compute (albeit very slowly), but that’s the end of the similarities. The reason it’s not morally wrong, say, to recycle an old computer is that computers are not at all like human minds.
Alas, if you refer to Searle's Chinese Room, that hasn't shown anything, if you just bite the bullet and accept that the Room is conscious.
I think people start with the premise that consciousness is a specific “thing”, that it is unique and special to humans (and maybe dogs because we like them but definitely not spiders and flies because we don’t) and then try to work backwards to define it in some ways that keeps it special. I don’t think consciousness is so specific, and I think people aren’t clear about how they think about it as something separate…
> Generating text for hours without an anchor to the real world is not a productive method of generating insight about that world. Yet people see to be claiming that LaMDA does just this, and is therefore not conscious. Seems like a journalist is conscious if they do it, but it can’t possible be consciousness if LaMDA does it. I’m yet to see a convincing argument about why LaMDA isn’t conscious other than “it’s just…
I'd argue that what we refer to as "consciousness" is the ability to form certain kind of mental abstractions, particularly those involving ourselves. Take away language from a person (imagine someone who grew up in the wild, or someone like Helen Keller who didn't have language available until she was older), and these abstractions still exist. Language might be a way we express these abstractions, but they aren't the abstractions themselves.
LaMDA doesn't have these abstractions underneath; once you take away language, it's nothing.
To think of it another way - I can write a simple program for a cheap robot to navigate around a simple race track (with a simple enough path, I can even create an analog one out of mousetraps - see mousetrap cars). Companies can also create a very complex self driving car that can navigate anywhere on its own. These two things might look like they act the same if they're both places on the path that the robot has been trained for. In fact, a hard programmed robot might act _better_ than an AI car on specific paths. But only one of them is a "self-driving car," since only one of them will be able to go anywhere when it's taken off that path.
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Computation does not have anything essential to it that makes it different from other "atoms jumping around" other than it produces outputs that we find interesting. There's no reason to expect an adder circuit to be aware that it's adding numbers. There's no reason to expect an implementation of AlphaGo to know that it's playing Go. This should be extendable without limitation. There's no reason to expect that a cer…
How do you know that? Lamda AI claims itself as conscious being. How can you distinguish between two entities which can communicate? Do you discriminate on meat factor?
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Alas, if you refer to Searle's Chinese Room, that hasn't shown anything, if you just bite the bullet and accept that the Room is conscious.
I like Scott Aaronson's response[1] to the argument: > So, class, how might a strong AI proponent respond to this argument? Duh: you might not understand Chinese, but the rule book does! Or if you like, understanding Chinese is an emergent property of the system consisting of you and the rule book, in the same sense that understanding English is an emergent property of the neurons in your brain. Like many other thoug…
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>My personal experience is that consciousness, like free will, is a useful illusion An illusion to whom? It isn't meaningful to say that an unconscious thing experiences illusions.
To no one. "It is an illusion" is transcribed and recalled as an explanation for feelings that drive actions in the person who said it, because we evolved to be able to explain our actions with sophisticated language, and to judge the arguments of others so that we can act together to overcome challenges and to kill the out group. In this case, OP is, without knowing it, signaling which group is his, and which is not…
Humans have been killing other humans for hundreds of thousands of years without having to deny that their victims are conscious. In some cases even stressing this aspect (there have been numerous cultures that believed in various forms of 'capturing souls' of their slain, or eaten, enemies).
The "Chinese Room" argument isn't an argument against consciousness being computation. In the same way the man in the room doesn't understand Chinese to be able to produce Chinese, the mind in your brain does not need to understand consciousness to be conscious. The man in the room can be said to pass the Turing test, and so can you.
I've always felt this way about lucid dreaming. How do I know if I am aware during my dream, or if I am just dreaming that I am aware?
The consciousness problem is a tricky one, because unlike with most dilemmas, it's not that obvious on which side the burden of proof lies here. Is the "consciousness is just computation" side obliged to prove HOW consciousness is generated out of computation alone? (Which they never do?) Or are the opponents obliged to find the unique aspect that couldn't possibly be reduced to computation? (Which they never do eith…
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Alas, if you refer to Searle's Chinese Room, that hasn't shown anything, if you just bite the bullet and accept that the Room is conscious.
But the argument shows it's absurd to think the room is conscious. What if the person in the room takes a coffee break or goes on vacation? What connects the next computational step they do to the previous one and the next... which then somehow gives rise to a fragment of qualia. That seems like an impossibly complex and unlikely scientific theory.
Regular meat-and-bone people lose consciousness all the time, and regain it later. No big deal.
> What connects the next computational step they do to the previous one and the next...
Whatever index card system or similar the operating procedure in the room prescribes for keeping track of state?
> which then somehow gives rise to a fragment of qualia. That seems like an impossibly complex and unlikely scientific theory.
We don't have any 'scientific theory' of qualia. We don't even know if they exist, or how they would manifest in the physical world.
Since we don't know much of anything, I don't know whether a fragment of a figment would be more or less weird than the figment itself. Or whether we would even have fragments.
It's probably too early to try to have a theory of qualia that would apply here?
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Right, if you were to compute the mapping in real time on a computer, that would be conscious but it's really got nothing to do with the actual iron bar.
Scott Aaronson (if memory serves right) had an interesting take on this. He framed his thought in terms of the Turing test, but the argument would apply equally well to the mapped iron bar: In theory, we could pass any Turing test of finite duration (eg an hour or less) and run in a chat room with finite bandwidth with a giant lookup table. Just look up the entire past of the conversation to see what answer should be…