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Hm, the argument seems to be "I don't like this conclusion, therefore I will deem it absurd, and arbitrarily select one of my many assumptions to discard". All

by dTal 8y ago

Hm, the argument seems to be "I don't like this conclusion, therefore I will deem it absurd, and arbitrarily select one of my many assumptions to discard". All of the "assumptions" in that link are correct, with the exception of 6 as a flawed intuition pump. A human being is not capable of emulating a suffering being by marking ones and zeroes in a notebook - a being with the lifespan, patience, working memory, intelligence, and motivation to do this would be far outside the scope of "human". If we posit that this being fully comprehends what it is doing, then it would certainly be guilty of torture. But it's beyond the scale of all but the most abstract apprehension of an actual human being, which is probably responsible for the revulsion against the notion of attributing guilt to one. The flawed intuition pump here is almost identical to Searle's Chinese Room, which roughly goes: 1) if a computer program can speak Chinese, then so can a human manipulating symbols from a rulebook 2) a human speaking Chinese from a rulebook doesn't understand Chinese 3) the computer program doesn't really understand Chinese The problem is that in both these cases, the vast complexity of a computer program capable of doing this task is abstracted away into an innocent little "book" of some sort, while the comparatively dumb mechanical execution of a simple set of rules is handed to the hugely complex and relatable human being. The argument then conflates the mental activity of the human with the activity of the entire computer, of which the human is a small mechanical part. It's also part of a larger class of flawed anti-synthetic consciousness arguments, which I call "stupid substrate" arguments, which go like this: 1) Suppose we posit a simulated conscious being, running on a computer made of <a human with a paper notebook/rats running a giant maze/a huge marble factory> 2) this is stupid and implausible 3) therefore consciousness can only exist on a human brain My response to all such arguments is - why is it so plausible that consciousness can exist on the 3 pound lump of jelly in your head? Isn't your argument too strong? What makes brains special? And why are they that way? Is it just "magic" and "because God loves us", respectively?

whack 8y ago
> All of the "assumptions" in that link are correct, with the exception of 6 as a flawed intuition pump. A human being is not capable of emulating a suffering being by marking ones and zeroes in a notebook Ironically enough, you too are rejecting this assumption, not on its own merits, but because you dislike its eventual conclusion. Here's the exact assumption as stated: > Assumption 6: Anything a computer does can be functionally replicated by a human being writing 1s and 0s in a massive ledger. Are you truly rejecting this assumption? It is almost trivially true. I know in detail exactly how a CPU works. All it does is perform extremely simple calculations, and then write/read the resulting 1s and 0s from various storage locations. I've literally solved exam problems where I had to debug/replicate a computer's behavior by writing 1s and 0s on a piece of paper. If your point is that humans are far too slow to replicate anything a computer does, then I will refer you to the previous assumption which you stated to be correct: > Assumption 5: The fact that a computer simulation can be conscious, is independent of the CPU speed of the computer. If your point is that human lifespans are too short to run any meaningful computer program, then I will ask you this: If we did achieve human immortality, and if someone did use their immortality to do exactly what the article suggests (writing 1s and 0s in a massive book), should they be found guilty of torture and murder? > why is it so plausible that consciousness can exist on the 3 pound lump of jelly in your head? Isn't your argument too strong? What makes brains special? That's the whole point of the article. There's nothing special about our brains, or about any other 3 pound lump of jelly. Consciousness requires both physical phenomena as well as supernatural phenomena, and without the latter, our brains would not possess consciousness either. We clearly have to reject one of the assumptions/conclusion, and the most reasonable one to reject is the assumption that consciousness can arise from purely physical phenomena. All the others assumptions are much more logically defensible, whereas the first assumption is nothing more than conjecture.

by dTal 8y ago

whack 8y ago

> All of the "assumptions" in that link are correct, with the exception of 6 as a flawed intuition pump. A human being is not capable of emulating a suffering being by marking ones and zeroes in a notebook Ironically enough, you too are rejecting this assumption, not on its own merits, but because you dislike its eventual conclusion. Here's the exact assumption as stated: > Assumption 6: Anything a computer does can be functionally replicated by a human being writing 1s and 0s in a massive ledger. Are you truly rejecting this assumption? It is almost trivially true. I know in detail exactly how a CPU works. All it does is perform extremely simple calculations, and then write/read the resulting 1s and 0s from various storage locations. I've literally solved exam problems where I had to debug/replicate a computer's behavior by writing 1s and 0s on a piece of paper. If your point is that humans are far too slow to replicate anything a computer does, then I will refer you to the previous assumption which you stated to be correct: > Assumption 5: The fact that a computer simulation can be conscious, is independent of the CPU speed of the computer. If your point is that human lifespans are too short to run any meaningful computer program, then I will ask you this: If we did achieve human immortality, and if someone did use their immortality to do exactly what the article suggests (writing 1s and 0s in a massive book), should they be found guilty of torture and murder? > why is it so plausible that consciousness can exist on the 3 pound lump of jelly in your head? Isn't your argument too strong? What makes brains special? That's the whole point of the article. There's nothing special about our brains, or about any other 3 pound lump of jelly. Consciousness requires both physical phenomena as well as supernatural phenomena, and without the latter, our brains would not possess consciousness either. We clearly have to reject one of the assumptions/conclusion, and the most reasonable one to reject is the assumption that consciousness can arise from purely physical phenomena. All the others assumptions are much more logically defensible, whereas the first assumption is nothing more than conjecture.