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Consciousness is not computation

joe-antognini.github.io

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Re: Consciousness is not computation

#381

Post by ivanhoe »

> consciousness is, at root, a physical phenomenon, not a purely computational phenomenon. Computation may be necessary to produce consciousness, but it cannot be sufficient.

What does "computational phenomenon" even mean?

I really don't see how any of the ideas presented in the text prove that "it cannot be sufficient", nor it's clear from the text what "physical phenomenon" author has in mind?

Brain is a network of 86 billion organic electro-chemical switches making 100+ trillion inter-connections, each either firing electrical impulses or not... so how it that not "computational" in it's nature? There're also chemical reactions going on that influence neurons and possibly some EM field interferences play roles, too, but that's all part of the "hardware"'s internal design.

Brain is, of course, not really modeled like general purpose programmable computers that we're used to today, more like old concept of specialized hardware machines and automata (or perhaps today's FPGA concept) - it comes with the programming implemented in the hardware itself. The obvious difference is that brain is incomprehensibly more complex than anything we can build, and also being made of living tissue capable of re-arranging and re-purposing tricks that no silicon based computer will ever be able to do - but in the end, it's still a "computational machine" processing inputs and internal states and generating some results based on that... how else to call it without going into the spiritual stuff?

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#382

Post by hoseja »

hgomersall wrote: post #379
hoseja wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may be a little deceptive depending on how you define "a properly connected real-time neuron simulator". Can it form new connections? Can it grow? Does it metabolize? Can it die? Etc...

These are all good questions and probably allow our realised thought experiment to gain more insight into what aspects are necessary for consciousness and what are just biological baggage.

I suspect the line is very blurry indeed.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#383

Post by Warwolt »

epgui wrote: post #253
antognini wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect we agree more than we disagree. But I think that your definition of a "computational process" is too broad. A bacterium does things that we can say are "performing a computation." But that is different from saying that life is, at root, a computational phenomenon. For instance, sorting a list is a computational process. It doesn't matter what kind of computer I run a sorting algorithm on, if I follow the al…

> I suspect we agree more than we disagree. I suspect the same, but I think there is tremendous value in taking a cosmic step back and seeing everything through the lens of information. It's the most reductionist neutral approach to the universe I can conceive us at this point in my life. > By contrast, if I construct a collection of chemicals that matches the positions of those of a real bacterium, I have created a…

> I suspect the same, but I think there is tremendous value in taking a cosmic step back and seeing everything through the lens of information. It's the most reductionist neutral approach to the universe I can conceive us at this point in my life.

What is your definition of "information"? I view the concept of computation so deeply entwined with consciousness that I fail to see how it can be meaningfully applied to physically phenomena that would be completely independent of a subject that can determine something to be a computation (i.e. the mathematical intuitionistic understanding),so I'm interested in what you mean by information and computation.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#384

Post by psychoslave »

trts wrote: post #33
n8cpdx wrote: post #3

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…

> 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…

>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.

It might be some bottomless, but it doesn’t look like an absolute impossibility. The classical "Brain in a vat" thought experiment gives a good insight of nothing theoretically prevent what we assume for assuredly "real" might be a virtual scenario.

Or taking an other metaphor, maybe we are like cinema screens and the film of our life is all pure illusion, while the most classical interpretation would suppose that the screen itself undoubtedly "exists" – the screen being the analogous to the current conscious attention in the metaphor. But nothing prevent to wonder that the whole cinema is some kind of hologram in solid light, so while the screen does "exist", it’s nonetheless itself an illusion.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_in_a_vat

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#385

Post by tsimionescu »

3g4o53g4o5 wrote: post #321
tsimionescu wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm saying that perhaps with the exception of dolphins and mayyyyybe chimps, there is a measurable, observable, quantifiable way in which animal communication is fundamentally different from human language. So, perhaps you can say that dolphins speak, and maybe chimps speak, and then we can even contemplate that bonobos speak (since they are very similar to chimps, but haven't been studied as much). But dogs definite…

Well since there is full of false assumptions, I just give you a name. @toshitaka_szk in twitter. A Japanese dude can translate languages of birds and successfully did some experiences on it. And he is kind of famous. And needless to say Hunger the dog[1]. Did this clear your humancentric brain? [1] https://nypost.com/2021/05/01/this-speech-therapist-taught-h... > 0 animals can be taught, as far as we've tried - more…

The claims about the dog are ridiculous - especially evident with the "love you" word. In fact, most of the article is describing a much more humane version of the famous Pavlov's dog experiment - the dog learned to associate the sounds of the "bells" with certain needs and persons, and uses them as such.

The Japanese research is much more interesting, and in a related comment I also cited a published article that proved that my claims, while fundamentally ok, are wrong in the details - animal calls are fundamentally simpler than human language, but some do show simple syntax.

> Also this applies to limited intelligence human infant and mathematic immature dudes. So by your logic, those underintelligence human do not have consciousness. QED.

I never claimed dogs aren't conscious, I only claimed they don't have language in the sense humans do. Infants also don't have language, but they learn it natively. All humans learn complex structures, even the mathematically illiterate, no idea where that came from. The only exceptions are people with serious brain disorders, and those people, indeed, don't "speak".

That, again, doesn't mean that they are not conscious beings.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#386

Post by xoac »

thom wrote: post #293
xoac wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But in this case Russell was completely wrong because he interprets Descartes' cogito as a syllogism whereas it is a performative statement. Descrates' is only establishing that it's self-evident for himself that he exists, and not to assert to anyone external that he or his thoughts exist.

He’s making the point that he-ness and himself-ness is too bold a conclusion to draw from the mere existence of thoughts.

Thinking these thoughts however (from a pov of some subject) is not a "mere existence of thoughts". This imo is a classic analytic/positivistic language game.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#387

Post by notahacker »

GWBullshit wrote: post #225
somenameforme wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it has nothing to do with "specialness" but with proof. I can prove I am conscious, yet only to myself. I cannot prove I am conscious to you, and nothing you could do could prove you are conscious to me. In fact, it's entirely possible that our entire reality is little more than a simulation - and other entities may not even really exist, let alone be conscious. The entities one encounters in a dream each nig…

This is what I find confusing; people are more willing these days to accept the possibility that we may be in a simulation. Such a simulation is presumably large in scale (this assumes the "rest of the universe" as we perceive it is the way we perceive it and not just some artificial fish tank background in a part of the fish tank the fish will never have access to). Within such a massive simulation as this universe…

> people are more willing these days to accept the possibility that we may be in a simulation.

> And YET, if you say to someone "what if you ran an Ai on a parallel processing scheme consisting of quantum computers hooked up together in a facility the size of a football stadium?" people seem to have this knee-jerk, "No way, nope – not conscious, just mimicking it."

These people are generally not the same

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#388

Post by psychoslave »

Tor3 wrote: post #290
kazinator wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's when you're anaesthesized for surgery that your consciousness goes away. No dreams, nothing. You don't exist during those hours. You cannot account for them later; they are deleted.

When I woke up after surgery I felt that 1.5 hours had passed. But in actuality it was something around 4 hours since I went under. It turned out that 1.5 hours before I woke up I had been brought out of anesthesia and after that I simply slept. I didn't have any dreams at all, but at least my internal clock had started working. A clock presumably doesn't need consciousness, but there's definitely a qualitative diffe…

How do you estimate time elapsed without external inputs? Experiments where people cut themselves from external stimuli seem to show that on the contrary, we don’t good internal clocks on this regard.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#389

Post by psychoslave »

fouronnes3 wrote: post #185
stocknoob wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If two thing cannot possibly be observed to be different then they are the same. I think that suffers the same flaw as logical positivism: if my axioms can't find a difference, there isn't one, no way my assumptions are wrong. (Namely, my axiom is that external observations capture the entirety of reality, there is nothing subjective.) If two people laugh at a joke, one faking and one actually finding it funny, wha…

The fake laugh can be observed to be different by the person faking it.

It makes me thing about laughter yoga[1]. Just because you "fake" it doesn’t mean it won’t have a concrete measurable effect.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laughter_yoga

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#390

Post by walleeee »

red75prime wrote: post #358
antognini wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The physical process is simply that the atoms in the bar of iron start in one Turing machine state, obey the laws of physics, and end up in another Turing machine state. But this is also true of any other physical computer. It sounds like your objection is that this is not a computer because it's not reproducible --- we just got lucky that the physical states mapped onto the appropriate Turing machine states one time…

Any physical system with a component that you can throw away to make the system a more reliable computer is not a feasible implementation of an abstract computation. If you replace the iron bar with a quartz generator, reliability will increase by ten to the power of, say, quadrillion.

we threw away vacuum tubes and replaced them with semiconductors

this made computers more reliable

were the vacuum tube monstrosities not computers?

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