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Consciousness is not computation

joe-antognini.github.io

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Re: Consciousness is not computation

#661

Post by 3g4o53g4o5 »

whatever1 wrote: post #214

I don’t know about computation, but it seems to me that memory is a necessary (not sufficient) condition for someone to be conscious. People with memory loss seem to struggle to pass the bar of consciousness

Yup. And people always fails to think about such boundary cases.

Like

> Human can do math proof

Human infant dont.

> Human can see and hear things and interact with the environment.

Obviously a certain amount of population is unable to do that.

> Human learn and grow.

Bacteria can do this too.

This kind of failure of the poor-defined "consciousness" leads to the end of conversation.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#662

Post by tgflynn »

bccdee wrote: post #634
tgflynn wrote: post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if you take something more concrete than "redness", like pain ? Let's say you stub your toe or burn your finger. In that moment is there any room for doubt that pain exists ?

Of course there is. We may feel strongly that an illusion is real, but that doesn't make it any less an illusion. The computer from my example would react very strongly to pain, and certainly it would believe that pain has a unique and distinct quality to it making it different from any other sensation, but that doesn't mean that that quality exists in some special metaphysical way. It is just a mind examining the ab…

There are many things one may be deluded about but the fact that one's subjective reality is not empty is not one of them.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#663

Post by epgui »

zarmin wrote: post #628
epgui wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consciousness isn't really the output, it's the category of all possible not-too-pathological running states of the program. The output is whatever the organism does to or in its environment (production of speech, movement, decisions, etc).

Okay, but how do we get to the subjective experience of the experiencer? I don't see how what you've said accounts for conscious inner life.

You also haven't really made any good-faith effort to read the neuroanatomy textbook I tried to suggest to you in another thread.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#664

Post by epgui »

zarmin wrote: post #659
epgui wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reply to your edit: I know it would be ideal if there was a simple, short answer, but this question is nearly the equivalent of "please explain all the core ideas of neuroscience/neurology/neuropsychology to me". It's a good question, but it's a big question. This is why in the other thread [1] I've tried to point you in the direction where you will find the answers you are looking for: the answers exist and are for…

First, I'm a little embarrassed because I didn't realize I had started another comment thread with you, I thought it was a different user. I may have done that twice on this post. Sorry to have split the discussion like that. Anyway.... >the answers exist and are for the most part known I deeply disagree with this. I am not afraid of doing some reading, but I challenge you to find a single study that demonstrates how…

Read the book and come back if you still feel like you have the same objection!

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#665

Post by dilap »

notahacker wrote: post #650
dilap wrote: post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that comic misses the point though. It mistakes "a thing that is in some superficial respects the same" for "a thing is in every externally observable respect the same". So far as we know, consciousness does not exist as a physical thing. The behavior of a human is completely derivable, in principle, from natural law. There is no physical test or manifestation of awareness. So arguments about what can or can…

> It mistakes "a thing that is in some superficial respects the same" for "a thing is in every externally observable respect the same So does all this talk about computers being "the same" if they can, given access to sufficient human-generated inputs, produce similar strings of Chinese characters to those a conscious Chinese person might do. If you're not stuck behind a WeChat prompts it's trivially externally obser…

I do think you're on to something here: a lot of what we feel is embedded in our bodies.

So imagine we put your brain in a vat; we'll give you a webcam and a microphone for input, and for output -- ah, sorry, budget constraints, just an old printer. You visualize typing on a keyboard in your mind's eye and the characters are tapped out irl on a long scrolling sheet of paper.

Would you still feel? Would you still feel like you?

I'd guess yes and only sort of, respectively. Perhaps you wouldn't be as interested in sex (or maybe it would depend on what mix of hormones the vat was feeding you).

I think we can safely say your sister wouldn't immediately recognize you, though. But given some quality time QA, I think she's end up concluding you were still you, and more than just a parlor trick.

But what do you think? Is it you? If it is, it doesn't seem THAT different from the computer program you, does it?

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#666

Post by bccdee »

tgflynn wrote: post #662
bccdee wrote: post #634

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course there is. We may feel strongly that an illusion is real, but that doesn't make it any less an illusion. The computer from my example would react very strongly to pain, and certainly it would believe that pain has a unique and distinct quality to it making it different from any other sensation, but that doesn't mean that that quality exists in some special metaphysical way. It is just a mind examining the ab…

There are many things one may be deluded about but the fact that one's subjective reality is not empty is not one of them.

Why? If we're logically guaranteed to hold belief X independently of whether X is true or not, it's irrational to say "yeah but I KNOW X is true. I can just tell." You would believe that no matter what; how can you trust that belief?

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#668

Post by csee »

simonh wrote: post #566
csee wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about the arguments outlined in the article? You first dismissed the arguments because an iron bar couldn't have enough physical states. But we both accept that there are physical objects which do have enough physical states, even if we have to use the entire observable universe as the object that the mapping draws from (and that's not related to the Boltzmann Brain). So the arguments in the article seems to be…

I actually don't think the observable universe is big enough, and that's been demonstrated mathematically by better people than I, but the universe as a whole including non-observable parts might be big enough. I don't see how this is not the Bolzmann's Brain proposition. What's the difference? >Consciousness can have a materialist explanation yet also be substrate dependent to an extent. I suppose so, maybe there's…

If the observable universe is too small, what about the observable universe sampled at multiple points in time? Or just an iron bar that's repeatedly sampled along a time interval, with the desired encoding changing between each sample such that the object doesn't need to undergo much change it state in order to map to distinct things. Each sample increases the number of physical states that we can create a mapping from. If we still don't have enough states, we can draw more samples over more points in time to create a longer string of bits for the mapping.

Or another way to do it would be to repeatedly sample the same object at the same point in time, and simply change the desired encoding on each sampling, e.g. on a first pass we use F_0(x), on a second pass we use F_1(x), and we concatenate the output of F_0(x) and F_1(x) into a single large bit array.

The Boltzmann Brain says that our conscious experience at the current moment is a chance quantum event. It might not even involve the whole universe, it could be a local quantum phenomenon. That seems distinct to the argument in the article, which is that physical states (quantum or otherwise) can be mapped to an arbitrary string of bits with the encoding chosen by the person doing the mapping, and the output of this mapping (which is itself a string of bits) can correspond to a computation on a Turing machine, therefore inanimate objects with sufficiently large numbers of physical states could be said to be running a proposed consciousness.exe, which leads us to an absurd/extreme form of panpsychism.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#669

Post by tgflynn »

bccdee wrote: post #666
tgflynn wrote: post #662

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many things one may be deluded about but the fact that one's subjective reality is not empty is not one of them.

Why? If we're logically guaranteed to hold belief X independently of whether X is true or not, it's irrational to say "yeah but I KNOW X is true. I can just tell." You would believe that no matter what; how can you trust that belief?

How would you know that you hold belief X if you have no subjective experience ? To have the knowledge that you believe X you must experience the thought "X is true" and that is a subjective experience.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#670

Post by russdill »

zarmin wrote: post #656
russdill wrote: post #647

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which necessitates that somehow, there's some law of physics important to operation in the brain who's effects aren't computable. Yes?

Not exactly. I am saying that consciousness is fundamental; that matter, physics, our brains, etc emerge from consciousness. Physics is the OS, consciousness is the transistors/electricity, and we are conscious agents (to borrow a term from Donald Hoffman) using the OS. So, instead of the physicalist paradigm of Physics -> Chemistry -> Biology -> Psychology -> Consciousness it is the idealist paradigm of Consciousnes…

That doesn't change the question though. We don't know how many layers are beneath the known laws of physics. Who knows, one of them could be consciousness. Maybe it's turtles all the way down.

They question remains. Can you provide a direct answer? If we measured all the particles in the brain, would they be operating in a way not compatible with the currently known laws of physics?

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