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> If one believes that consciousness can emerge from software on a computer alone, it also follows that consciousness can emerge from placing rocks in a certain

> If one believes that consciousness can emerge from software on a computer alone, it also follows that consciousness can emerge from placing rocks in a certain pattern following instructions in a book. I don't think this is as absurd as it sounds. I think it was Dennett who said our intuition about consciousness is pretty sensitive to timing. The rock construction you describe would "think" a billion times slower than a human brain, and there is something unsettling or unintuitive about a consciousness that operates in slow motion. I would expect extremely fast-paced AI to think that the idea that human beings are conscious is similarly absurd. Also, consciousness "feels" like it's ineffable, so it makes sense that we would have an inherent bias against understanding it as a process. There is something we see in our consciousness that we simply cannot wrap our minds around in any way (possibly because we're hallucinating it). So yes, I would bite the bullet on this: consciousness could emerge from placing rocks in a certain pattern following instructions in a book. It would just be an excruciatingly "slow" consciousness.

Frenchgeek 11y ago
https://xkcd.com/505/ https://xkcd.com/505/
pdonis 11y ago
> It would just be an excruciatingly "slow" consciousness. If it's too slow to interact with the rest of the world in appropriate ways, it wouldn't be a consciousness at all.
- breuleux 11y ago
  There's always something to interact with. If you had a conscious being made out of star systems, it wouldn't meaningfully interact with anything within our lifetime, but over billions of billions of years, it would presumably shift entire galaxies. The rockputer just needs inputs that operate at its own scale, like the shape of the coastlines it's expanding into, information about geological processes, another rockputer competing for territory, and so on. Alternatively you could simulate a whole universe using these rocks, and feed simulated inputs to the being. Of course, part of the difficulty of imagining a conscious rockputer is that it's also pretty hard to imagine its inputs :)
  - pdonis 11y ago
    > There's always something to interact with. This is trivially true as you state it; that's why I added the qualifier "in appropriate ways". Not all interactions will produce consciousness. One obvious difference between us and your hypothetical "rockputer" is that the "rockputer" can't change its behavior based on its inputs in a way that improves its chances of survival; rocks simply aren't built that way. Neither are star systems or galaxies. But we are.
    - psb217 11y ago
      The rockputer comprises both the rocks and the mechanisms for moving the rocks in response to input. If the rock moving mechanism is structured properly, then the rock movement patterns could adapt to changes in the inputs to the overall rockputer system. The level of complexity of the "passive" components of the system (i.e. the rocks) is irrelevant to whether or not the system can effect conscious-seeming behaviour when acting dynamically. Analogously, the underlying components of people, i.e. atoms, are clearly quite dumb on their own. When those atoms are allowed to evolve collectively over time, according to dynamics dictated by basic physical laws, conscious-seeming behaviour magically appears. You can't deny the possibility of a conscious rockputer just by considering properties of the rocks.
      - pdonis 11y ago
        > The rockputer comprises both the rocks and the mechanisms for moving the rocks in response to input. Yes, and in that case, all the actual computation is being done by the mechanism, not the rocks. As you say, the rocks are just "passive" components. I agree that, in principle, such a system could compute; but it still has the problem of computing on a time scale that supports appropriate interactions with its environment. Moving rocks around in accordance with some set of computational rules based on inputs is very slow--quite possibly too slow to respond appropriately to inputs. For example, if incoming light rays are carrying information about a tidal wave that is about to swamp the rockputer and destroy its structure, could the rockputer compute an appropriate response (such as moving itself to higher ground) quickly enough to save itself?

Frenchgeek 11y ago

https://xkcd.com/505/ https://xkcd.com/505/

pdonis 11y ago

> It would just be an excruciatingly "slow" consciousness. If it's too slow to interact with the rest of the world in appropriate ways, it wouldn't be a consciousness at all.

breuleux 11y ago
There's always something to interact with. If you had a conscious being made out of star systems, it wouldn't meaningfully interact with anything within our lifetime, but over billions of billions of years, it would presumably shift entire galaxies. The rockputer just needs inputs that operate at its own scale, like the shape of the coastlines it's expanding into, information about geological processes, another rockputer competing for territory, and so on. Alternatively you could simulate a whole universe using these rocks, and feed simulated inputs to the being. Of course, part of the difficulty of imagining a conscious rockputer is that it's also pretty hard to imagine its inputs :)
- pdonis 11y ago
  > There's always something to interact with. This is trivially true as you state it; that's why I added the qualifier "in appropriate ways". Not all interactions will produce consciousness. One obvious difference between us and your hypothetical "rockputer" is that the "rockputer" can't change its behavior based on its inputs in a way that improves its chances of survival; rocks simply aren't built that way. Neither are star systems or galaxies. But we are.
  - psb217 11y ago
    The rockputer comprises both the rocks and the mechanisms for moving the rocks in response to input. If the rock moving mechanism is structured properly, then the rock movement patterns could adapt to changes in the inputs to the overall rockputer system. The level of complexity of the "passive" components of the system (i.e. the rocks) is irrelevant to whether or not the system can effect conscious-seeming behaviour when acting dynamically. Analogously, the underlying components of people, i.e. atoms, are clearly quite dumb on their own. When those atoms are allowed to evolve collectively over time, according to dynamics dictated by basic physical laws, conscious-seeming behaviour magically appears. You can't deny the possibility of a conscious rockputer just by considering properties of the rocks.
    - pdonis 11y ago
      > The rockputer comprises both the rocks and the mechanisms for moving the rocks in response to input. Yes, and in that case, all the actual computation is being done by the mechanism, not the rocks. As you say, the rocks are just "passive" components. I agree that, in principle, such a system could compute; but it still has the problem of computing on a time scale that supports appropriate interactions with its environment. Moving rocks around in accordance with some set of computational rules based on inputs is very slow--quite possibly too slow to respond appropriately to inputs. For example, if incoming light rays are carrying information about a tidal wave that is about to swamp the rockputer and destroy its structure, could the rockputer compute an appropriate response (such as moving itself to higher ground) quickly enough to save itself?