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> I think logicallee's point is that any answer other than a clear "yes" would require the assumption that there is something fundamentally "unknowable" about t
by GuiA 10y ago
> I think logicallee's point is that any answer other than a clear "yes" would require the assumption that there is something fundamentally "unknowable" about the problem, and generally such objections are considered unscientific. Unscientific doesn't mean wrong, of course, but it does weaken the case.
My take on it is that anything other than a "we really don't know right now, being able to reason about this question is far beyond our current scientific models" requires a burden of proof that I have not seen matched anywhere (either in logicallee's posts, or in the writings of other "computable consciousness"-ists (don't know if there is a better word for them)). Testable, verifiable models would be what this particular burden of proof calls for for me to be satisfied with a clear "yes" or "no".
> Can we replace an individual neuron in a human brain with an electronic equivalent without affecting the perception of pain? The argument is that if one can, what's to prevent replacing all the other neurons in succession? Are certain neurons special and unreplaceable? Again, it's difficult to see that there could be any clear line between "pain" and "no pain".
Well, you can easily turn this around - can we remove an individual neuron in a human brain without affecting the perception of pain? We actually know the experimental answer to this one, and it is a resounding yes - in fact, a few of your neurons probably have naturally died since you started reading my post, and your perception of pain (or anything else) most likely hasn't changed. And there are medical cases of people losing significant brain mass and operating in society at a perfectly normal level.
This makes it quite hard to build a recursive argument around "if we can substitute one neuron with an electronic equivalent without changes, we can substitute all neurons with electronic equivalents without changes", because that argument would also work with "removing the neuron" instead of "replacing it with an electronic one" (and in fact, if removing a single neuron has no effect on the perception of pain, and replacing a neuron with an electronic one has no effect on the whole either, how does that help you in any way?).
The analogy with a bird's bones doesn't quite hold - there are specific bones that we can remove that will completely prevent a bird from flying, and others that will have no effect; modern science gives us a pretty good idea of how a bird's various bones fit in the "enabling flight" hierarchy. This clear and well defined "hierarchy of bones for flying" does not seem to be present in neurons.
We might yet establish a clear, systemic hierarchy of neurons one day that lets us explain consciousness rigorously, the same way that we can explain how the different bones and muscles of a bird let it fly! But we are far from it, and there is no certainty about the feasibility of such an endeavor.
- logicallee 10y agoThe recursive (more correctly: inductive) argument is that there is no effect. It's like saying that no matter how many times you subtract 0 from a positive integer, the result will still be a positive integer - because subtracting 0 has no effect on the functioning of the system (the two are "the same" - not just similar but exactly the same). Subtracting epsilon (an arbitrarily small number) is similar but the recursive argument breaks - if you do it enough times it's no longer a positive integer. The fact that your brain is already wired somewhat differently than since starting to read this comment doesn't have much to do with this argument. To break the inductive argument and prove that mechanical birds are impossible, what you would have to show is that there is some bone or ligament or muscle or feather or something else, where if you replaced it with a plastic/mechanical/etc version with the exact same properties and behavior, the flying system w=could no longer function "the same". In other words, that there is some bone or muscle or other mechanical thing that even in hundred thousand years, science could not replace with a non-biological version without making some change to the behavior of the whole system - that it could never be made "the same" even in theory. (I say "in theory" because it is quite likely that we could never do so with a neuron - the whole switching back and forth example is very far-fetched.) So it is only a thought experiment/inductive argument: not a practical statement about biology. One thing that is interesting to point out is that no birds have the carrying capacity of modern planes, but we haven't reproduced mechanical birds that function the same way birds do. Science doesn't really have a strong incentive to try to exactly copy the mechanics of a pigeon with plastic components and plastic feathers and ligaments and some kind of muscles, and trying to get it to be composed exactly the same way. Other than a novelty, it doesn't really "get us" anything. In perhaps the same way, science may not have any strong incentive to exactly copy humans into a virtual reality, setting up neural networks that are wired the exact same way, and feeding the virtual neural nets outputs exactly like a child would hear and see around them, etc. Even though very large server farms like Amazon's today have more memory and do more calculation than the human brains' neural connections imply (given our estimate of what actually does the computation), so that they're like "jets" and the human brain is like a "bird" -- still, there is no clear incentive to copy humans in a way that leaves the simulation conscious. What does a conscious simulation get us? What does a mechanical pigeon get us? So for this reason there is at least some reason to think that we are not about to build a conscious machine - we don't need it.