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Consciousness is not computation

joe-antognini.github.io

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Re: Consciousness is not computation

#421

Post by amanaplanacanal »

artificialLimbs wrote: post #134
sebringj wrote: post #121

I have questions but first with a premise. Atoms configured in a certain way produce the rich behavior of awareness and agency that we can observe in humans and other animals. This awareness and agency seems similar enough to our own behavior that we associate our internal experience to be similar as well. This internal experience we assume exists can be called "consciousness". Based on the above definition of consci…

>> it seems reasonable to assume that one day, we could arrange atoms in a specific way to produce consciousness from an atom-based computer system. There is no evidence for this. It does not seem reasonable to me at all. Internal dialog is not consciousness. Many of the people who discuss consciousness at length do not need or simply do not engage in any internal dialog at all. We will never 'build' consciousness. I…

This implies that consciousness is some sort of “magic”, not obeying the laws of the physical universe as we know them. I’m not willing to completely discount this idea. However, it seems likely that both mammals and birds all have this magic. It’s pretty wide spread. Why assume that humans can never figure it how it works, and replicate it?

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#422

Post by ulfbert_inc »

It reminds me of this talk[1] and a conversation[2], both hinting at the possibility of the emergence of consciousness from a matter due to quantum properties/effects [edit] and having nothing to do with computation.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UT5CxsyKwxg [2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXgqik6HXc0

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#424

Post by undreren »

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…

> “is AI going to torture us for eternity if we don’t praise it enough?”

Probably not. It is after all not an Abrahamic god…

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#425

Post by bnralt »

doctor_eval wrote: post #350
bnralt wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is how humans confuse "consciousness" with the ability to mimic what human output that modern people associate with consciousness. 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…

I don’t find this to be a satisfying way to think about it. The problem is that it’s quite possible that the abstractions you’re talking about are all part of the genetic ROM that exists so we can boot up our clones more quickly. If this is true then there is no reason that these abstractions couldn’t be learned, in which case you could take away the language, and perhaps the machine would continue to have thoughts;…

> If this is true then there is no reason that these abstractions couldn’t be learned, in which case you could take away the language, and perhaps the machine would continue to have thoughts; it would just be unable to communicate them. Of course, in this case you would probably conclude that it’s not conscious because it can’t communicate.

If this were true - that it had a general human level abstraction, and not only the ability to mimic human speech - we would be able to attach LaMDA to some other outlet and see it do things we consider conscious. It would be able to navigate environments pretty accurately, for example, since that's something even animals that we consider much less conscious are able to do.

If it's only optimized in one specific domain - human speech mimicry - and isn't able to generalize to do other tasks - even tasks that can be done by much simpler animal minds - then it's a pretty good indication that there isn't conscious abstraction.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#426

Post by tsimionescu »

IIAOPSW wrote: post #380
tsimionescu wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, that's a sixth axiom to your system - now you've added a consciousness that has vastly more power than all the others. My point was that we can't find out anything about the phsycial world by just discussing it. We each have to experience it ourselves using our own senses. We can of course later discuss to devise new ways of understanding what the world is and how it works, but even then, we need to put any the…

> My point was that we can't find out anything about the phsycial world by just discussing it. We each have to experience it ourselves using our own senses. You cite the primacy of sensation, but what more is sensation than a message from the sensory organ to the brain. Perhaps encoded in the brains internal language rather than the plain text we are used to, but messages none the less. The concept of existence-as-me…

> You cite the primacy of sensation, but what more is sensation than a message from the sensory organ to the brain.

This is false, it's a version of the homunculus fallacy. A sensory organ is something that connects the brain to the physical world. Even if you chose to model it as a an agent that sends messages to the brain, it is an agent of a different nature. The sensory agent doesn't receive messages from other agents, it receives raw input from the outside world (photons, electrical fields, chemical reactions etc).

In contrast, if you were a brain in a vat with no ability to directly perceive the world or interact with it in any way, it would be impossible for you to know that "I can pass through walls" is fundamentally impossible.

Even for your GPT-3 thought experiment - ultimately it is the effects of the physical world perceived directly by humans sense organs that shape what GPT-3 would utter. That is, even if it can learn what the world is like simply by talking to us, it's still learning about the real world from someone's direct experience with it. If we were all GPT-3s, with no cameras and pressure sensors and motors etc, we would be unable to reason in any sense about the world itself.

We could perhaps come to agree upon some imagined world, but that could change arbitrarily much from one day to the next on a whim.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#427

Post by tsimionescu »

IIAOPSW wrote: post #338
tsimionescu wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, that's a sixth axiom to your system - now you've added a consciousness that has vastly more power than all the others. My point was that we can't find out anything about the phsycial world by just discussing it. We each have to experience it ourselves using our own senses. We can of course later discuss to devise new ways of understanding what the world is and how it works, but even then, we need to put any the…

>now you've added a consciousness that has vastly more power than all the others. Superficially yes but actually no. This fictitious admin character doesn't have any actual powers, I'm simply choosing a particular "consciousness" to be a fixed and agreed upon meter stick of objectivity. All measurement systems are arbitrary. We could choose anyones POV to fix as the "objective" truth. If we both agree on the same "de…

Ok, but then we might agree that there is no sun, that frogs are born from rocks and mice from leaves, that the stars are holes in the sphere of the heavens and so on - as many people did for millenia. They had consensus - and they were utterly wrong. The actual world actually exists. The world isn't any less round for members of the Flat Earth Society.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#428

Post by tsimionescu »

IIAOPSW wrote: post #392
tsimionescu wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, the physical world exists independent of our will and communication, so this text (and all the electric fields that traveled between our machines over vast distances) exist regardless of our will or communication. But I am only convinced of this fact because I have experienced it independently from any other agent. I know for sure I exist in some sense, I believe very strongly that the physical world exists, an…

>But I am only convinced of this fact because I have experienced it independently >In other words, I am more certain of the fact that your comment exists >So, the physical world is a much more believable explanation than Phrasing all of these in terms of what you believe and what you are convinced/certain of, instead of in terms of what absolutely is, makes my point for me. You didn't even realize you were talking in…

Phrasing is irrelevant. My senses are not little people talking to me about what they perceive, they are sensing organs connected to the brain. Saying that they "lie" is just a twist of the phrase so that I avoid something more unwieldy, like "my sense organs perceive the world incorrectly because of some defect".

> Starting with just the existence of the arguers and their arguments, can they argue for the existence of anything more? If not, what else do they need to assume?

No, you can't argue the world into being from these axioms. They could probably invent logic and mathematics, but nothing of the natural sciences can be discovered without the senses.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#429

Post by simiones »

feet wrote: post #394
sandgiant wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, this seems analogous to the argument that simulation of the weather can't produce rain. In some sense, that argument is true by prior definition. It's like saying that the Universe can't simulate itself. But consciousness is not rain. We don't really know what consciousness is, so I don't see a compelling reason to exclude computation as being sufficient to produce it. We need philosophers to tell us that co…

Also, we can definitely simulate rain? Not sure where that weird claim comes from

The point is that a simulation of rain (in a weather simulation) is not rain itself (e.g. you can't smell the rain after a weather simulation simulates some rain, obviously). This is actually similar to the observation that "the map is not the territory".

On the other hand, this is a red herring - computation can produce actual rain, with the right input/output systems.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#430

Post by layer8 »

Qualia is something we perceive. (If we didn’t perceive it, we wouldn’t talk about it.) In that sense, it isn’t a priori any more real or innate than any other perception that enters our conscious mind. It is essentially an input to the conscious part of our cognitive process. As such, it is information that surely can be fully represented — in the sense of data representation — in our brains. The subjective experience of qualia is complex and varied, but not that complex and varied that it can’t be conceived to be fully representable by neuron firing patterns (or whatever) in our brains. It seems straightforward to me that what is called “qualia” is just the perception of certain processing that is going on in our brains.

Note also that something feeling visceral is just a perception. By that, I don’t mean that the viscerality is an illusion, but that “feeling” is fundamentally a process of perception, and thus just means that certain inputs from unconscious parts of our mind are entering our conscious mind. As a consequence, I can’t imagine any perception that couldn’t be explained by information flow. Because when you think about it, any feeling or qualia is just a perception that entered your conscious experience. It’s not something your consciousness does, it’s just something it observes.

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