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Consciousness is not computation

joe-antognini.github.io

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Re: Consciousness is not computation

#511

Post by sdenton4 »

hoseja wrote: post #417
sdenton4 wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've recently been enjoying thinking of GPT-3 utterances as creating short-lived consciousnesses for the length of an interaction. There's no consciousness during training (just filling in the blanks...) but when we interact with it in a generative fashion, there is - depending on your prompt - a somewhat coherent 'I' that is invoked, and maintained over the course of the conversation. Seeing as I have no strong clai…

I don't think it's maintained over the conversation. The recent history of the conversation is fed to the engine with each new interaction. So the potential flash of consciousness is even shorter than you think. Each reply is a new flash, without memory, only connected by the written content of recent text.

And that's just fine!

Quite reminiscent of 'Permutation City' in fact... (In which uploaded human consciousness is slowed down arbitrarily... And worse.)

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#512

Post by denton-scratch »

skohan wrote: post #414

I am of the mind that consciousness is an emergent property of the various interconnected information processing systems of the brain. There's just too much evidence: for instance, changing the physiology of the brain through drugs or trauma has predictable changes on consciousness. From that perspective, I think it's pretty clear that consciousness is some kind of computation rooted in the physical world. However to…

> for instance, changing the physiology of the brain through drugs or trauma has predictable changes on consciousness

Assumes a definition of consciousness, which is not in evidence. What drugs or trauma alter is experience, which one might define as the content of consciousness, i.e. thoughts, beliefs etc.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#514

Post by tshaddox »

kijin wrote: post #362
tshaddox wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with any sort of “justified belief” epistemology, so of course I disagree with you completely. If knowledge were “justified true belief” or anything like that, then it would indeed be the case that any knowledge would require either an infinite chain of justifications or a privileged self-justified fact that cannot be examined or criticized using reason. If, on the other hand, the pursuit of knowledge cons…

I'm not a big fan of JTB epistemology, either, but you can't help regressing to some sort of common ground in order to make conjectures and refute them. In order for someone to make a conjecture that A does B, and for someone else to point out that A actually doesn't do B, both parties need to agree on the meanings of A and B, as well as what it means for A to do B, usually by appealing to C, an independent common gr…

> but you can't help regressing to some sort of common ground in order to make conjectures and refute them.

> In order for someone to make a conjecture that A does B, and for someone else to point out that A actually doesn't do B, both parties need to agree on the meanings of A and B, as well as what it means for A to do B…

You try to establish common ground, of course, but there’s no process you can follow that guarantees that you’re not being misunderstood or justifies your belief that you’re not being misunderstood.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#515

Post by koide »

Aeolun wrote: post #412
koide wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. And the person following the Chinese program also knows they don't speak Chinese and that they aren't understanding anything. I don't really find the Chinese Room argument very compelling because there are too many "it's obvious that X can't really understand" in it. Also, you can't derive from it that there can't be computed consciousness in some other form.

That feels off. It’s like me saying I don’t know English. I merely know the correct alghorithm to give the correct responses to things people give me as input.

There supposedly is a (semantic) process in your brain that makes you believe you understand the sentences you are reading and writing that is on top of the (symbolic) process that tells you what to say and how to say it. And that's the quid of the issue. Searle argues that symbolic computation cannot produce understanding at the semantic level.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#516

Post by denton-scratch »

i_like_apis wrote: post #16

The author's "triviality argument" doesn't hold up: > 1. To say that a physical system is a computer requires an external observer to map the physical states of that system onto the abstract states of a Turing machine. > 2. Consciousness does not require an external observer to exist. > 3. Therefore, consciousness cannot be reduced to computation. A physical system may be a computer regardless of whether it is verifi…

I think you may have missed the point (of course, it could be me that missed the point :-)

The argument was that for a physical system to be a computer, an element of intent or interpretation is needed; otherwise it's just a bunch of stuff doing what stuff does naturally. Perhaps the (horribly flawed) iron bar example is making the point that whether some configuration of magnetic dipoles is a computer depends on your choice of mappings from that configuration to some state of some Turing machine - which is equivalent to an interpretation.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#517

Post by skohan »

denton-scratch wrote: post #512
skohan wrote: post #414

I am of the mind that consciousness is an emergent property of the various interconnected information processing systems of the brain. There's just too much evidence: for instance, changing the physiology of the brain through drugs or trauma has predictable changes on consciousness. From that perspective, I think it's pretty clear that consciousness is some kind of computation rooted in the physical world. However to…

> for instance, changing the physiology of the brain through drugs or trauma has predictable changes on consciousness Assumes a definition of consciousness, which is not in evidence. What drugs or trauma alter is experience , which one might define as the content of consciousness, i.e. thoughts, beliefs etc.

How would you define consciousness?

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#518

Post by tgflynn »

simonh wrote: post #491
tgflynn wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Talking about computation and consciousness is a sideshow, this is anti-materialism by the back door. Nothing more. I get the impression that philosophers of mind are slowly coming around to the conclusion that the existence of qualia alone refutes materialism (by which I mean the view that consciousness is produced by physical processes) . This post does assume that qualia exist so if you are taking the former pos…

I don't see it that way at all. I believe qualia exist, I'm experiencing them right now. I think consciousness is a real thing too, again I am experiencing that right now as well. I suspect that consciousness is an emergent property of systems which reflect computationally on a sophisticated model of themselves, their environment and other such systems. See "I am a strange loop" by Douglas Hofstadter. I see no reason…

So fundamentally I agree with the arguments presented in this post, but I find the presentation confusing and somewhat lacking in rigor. In particular I was confused by his description of the iron bar as a computer because he didn't actually explain how it computed anything. I think that to map a physical system to an abstract Turing Machine you need more than a way to represent bits. You also have to define how to do computations with them. In other words you need something like logic gates.

Nonetheless I do think that there is a sense in which computation only has meaning in relation to an external observer, but I think that is an idea that requires some more exploration. It is also a question that I think can be addressed by the methods of Theoretical Computer Science.

Beyond that however the strongest argument I can give for why consciousness is not a computation is that (like the post author says) computation is fundamentally about the manipulation of symbols (which means it is closely related to language, whether natural or formal) and qualia (ie. conscious experiences) cannot be represented symbolically (ie. linguistically). To be clear when I say "represented by" I mean "fully represented by" or "reducible to". If qualia were reducible to a symbolic representation then there should be some linguistic utterance which would cause you to experience the sensation of the pain of burning your finger on the stove. Obviously such utterances do not exist. In fact the closest thing in human literature to such an utterance would be a magic spell, which I'm sure you agree, aren't real.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#520

Post by jvanderbot »

voldacar wrote: post #237
jvanderbot wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>"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. A p-zombie could do all of those things just fine. >we do not understand consciousness, because i…

I did ramble, and of course it wasn't clear, it's not totally clear to me.

> A p-zombie could do all of those things just fine.

We are p-zombies. Just a collection of them. I don't understand and have consciousness over my hand when it jumps away from pain, my spine did that without any of my thoughts being directed towards it. I cannot control my reaction to almost anything, in reality. I couldn't change the initial feelings that happened when I read your post. Yes, are nothing more than our bodies accumulated evolved p zombies. Including this bit that types this out to calm the zombie that is evolved to respond to verbal rebuttals. Even the use of first person pronouns is part of the reflexes that are very deep.

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