2 ms·

It depends what you my mean by "do anything". If that includes "have a conscious experience," then you're the one who's going to have to descend into hand wavy

• michaelmrose 7y ago
  It's not clear that a computer storing input data and then modifying future computations based on that data and storing the results of that computation and using it to modify further computations is at all remarkable to start with. If there is nothing inherently remarkable beyond scale then no hand waving needed.
  • antonvs 7y ago
    The description you doesn't addresses consciousness. The remarkable aspect is that of conscious awareness. You (presumably) have an experience of the world, in a way that a computer does not. Paraphrasing Nagel, "there is something it is like to be you." Most people don't think that this is true of an executing computer program, for example - it executes whatever its instructions are, and even a self-modifying program, as you described, doesn't change that. There is no known way to write a computer program which has conscious awareness, and no plausible reason that scale should affect this. If you scale up a computer program, or a computational neural network, there's no reason to believe that it wouldn't just be a very big machine, blindly executing its instructions with no conscious awareness. The proposed explanations that do exist are all nothing but handwaving at this point, hence my original comment. The burden of explanation here is on those who claim that the brain is nothing but a computing device, since our current models of computing devices can't explain consciousness.