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Scott Aaronson and Giulio Tononi debated IIT five years ago. Personally, I think Aaronson had by far the stronger argument, and my much less analytical response

Scott Aaronson and Giulio Tononi debated IIT five years ago. Personally, I think Aaronson had by far the stronger argument, and my much less analytical response to IIT is that it broadens the definition of consciousness to the point of being uninteresting and unhelpful. From the article (Christof Koch's words): "The theory fundamentally says that any physical system that has causal power onto itself is conscious. What do I mean by causal power? The firing of neurons in the brain that causes other neurons to fire a bit later is one example, but you can also think of a network of transistors on a computer chip: its momentary state is influenced by its immediate past state and it will, in turn, influence its future state." In this view, a building with a thermostat would seem to be conscious to some degree. I very much doubt that any amount of study of simple systems that fit this definition will tell us anything useful about the sort of consciousness that is displayed by, for example, humans. https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1799 https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1799 https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1823 https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1823

barbecue_sauce 7y ago
Doesn't this apply to anything with a control loop?
colordrops 7y ago
> In this view, a building with a thermostat would seem to be conscious to some degree. I don't think this is as overly broad or bad of a definition as you presume. I recall sitting at a laundromat one day, in a somewhat sleepy state daydreaming, with the rhythm of the washing machine in front of me playing through my mind. My subconscious told me that the machine was conscious. I dug deeper into that intuition, and realized I was seeing a bit of the inner workings of the mind of the engineer that designed the algorithm. Not a perfect example, as I didn't know if the alg was closed-loop, but in any case, it made me realize that our minds are just large bodies of these algorithms working together. We have some additional oracles, random data generators, and probabilistic mechanisms thrown in as tools, but consciousness really is mechanistic and pluralistic. To recreate it requires not only the qualitative aspects of a being that can think, but also sufficient (read: vast) quantity of systems to get to a useful general purpose thinking machine. There is no "soul" or special sauce or singular definition of consciousness. It's an illusion.
- mewpmewp2 7y ago
  I personally don't understand how a logically and rationally thinking person could get to a conclusion anything other than that we are a combination of algorithms. So essentially we can in theory be simulated and there is nothing special about us. In this case the machine simulating us would be as conscious as ourselves. It seems any other conclusion is just fooling oneself.
  - goatlover 7y ago
    Replace algorithms with math and you'll see that you're making a rather strong metaphysical claim that is essentially Platonism.
    - mannykannot 7y ago
      One reaction to that statement might be "so be it." I did not, however, come here to defend the idea that consciousness is an algorithm. Personally, I consider it rather more plausible that a computer plus a random number generator might achieve consciousness through simulating the sorts of physical processes that occur in a brain, and if it is a 'true' random number generator, rather than a deterministic PRNG, then we are no longer talking about math, at least in the sense that you use to conclude Platonism. One might respond by saying that if the universe is deterministic, then there is no such thing as a 'true' random number generator, as distinct from a PRNG. My understanding of the philosophical implications of QM, and its competing interpretations, is insufficient for me to be sure whether the universe as we experience it is deterministic, but regardless of whether it is or is not, I suspect that the true hard problem of consciousness is 'why do we (feel that we) have free will?'
      - goatlover 7y ago
        > I suspect that the true hard problem of consciousness is 'why do we (feel that we) have free will?' Free will and consciousness are separate issues. You can potentially have one and not the other. What's important for free will is whether choice is free and what that freedom amounts to. What's important to consciousness is subjectivity. You can feel pain while not having a choice about feeling that pain, say if you were restrained and unable to do anything about it, just to give an example. And potentially, a robot could be free to make choices while not feeling anything.
mcguire 7y ago
"Tononi gives some simple examples of the computation of Φ, showing that it is indeed larger for systems that are more “richly interconnected” in an intuitive sense. He speculates, plausibly, that Φ is quite large for (some reasonable model of) the interconnection network of the human brain—and probably larger for the brain than for typical electronic devices (which tend to be highly modular in design, thereby decreasing their Φ), or, let’s say, than for other organs like the pancreas. Ambitiously, he even speculates at length about how a large value of Φ might be connected to the phenomenology of consciousness. ... Now, evaluating a polynomial on a set of points turns out to be an excellent way to achieve “integrated information,” with every subset of outputs as correlated with every subset of inputs as it could possibly be. In fact, that’s precisely why polynomials are used so heavily in error-correcting codes, such as the Reed-Solomon code, employed (among many other places) in CD’s and DVD’s. But that doesn’t imply that every time you start up your DVD player you’re lighting the fire of consciousness." Holy poop! So, spaghetti code is more "conscious" than modular code and parity check code is more "conscious" than any physical entity. Yeah, there's something wrong with this theory.

barbecue_sauce 7y ago

Doesn't this apply to anything with a control loop?

colordrops 7y ago

> In this view, a building with a thermostat would seem to be conscious to some degree. I don't think this is as overly broad or bad of a definition as you presume. I recall sitting at a laundromat one day, in a somewhat sleepy state daydreaming, with the rhythm of the washing machine in front of me playing through my mind. My subconscious told me that the machine was conscious. I dug deeper into that intuition, and realized I was seeing a bit of the inner workings of the mind of the engineer that designed the algorithm. Not a perfect example, as I didn't know if the alg was closed-loop, but in any case, it made me realize that our minds are just large bodies of these algorithms working together. We have some additional oracles, random data generators, and probabilistic mechanisms thrown in as tools, but consciousness really is mechanistic and pluralistic. To recreate it requires not only the qualitative aspects of a being that can think, but also sufficient (read: vast) quantity of systems to get to a useful general purpose thinking machine. There is no "soul" or special sauce or singular definition of consciousness. It's an illusion.

mewpmewp2 7y ago
I personally don't understand how a logically and rationally thinking person could get to a conclusion anything other than that we are a combination of algorithms. So essentially we can in theory be simulated and there is nothing special about us. In this case the machine simulating us would be as conscious as ourselves. It seems any other conclusion is just fooling oneself.
- goatlover 7y ago
  Replace algorithms with math and you'll see that you're making a rather strong metaphysical claim that is essentially Platonism.
  - mannykannot 7y ago
    One reaction to that statement might be "so be it." I did not, however, come here to defend the idea that consciousness is an algorithm. Personally, I consider it rather more plausible that a computer plus a random number generator might achieve consciousness through simulating the sorts of physical processes that occur in a brain, and if it is a 'true' random number generator, rather than a deterministic PRNG, then we are no longer talking about math, at least in the sense that you use to conclude Platonism. One might respond by saying that if the universe is deterministic, then there is no such thing as a 'true' random number generator, as distinct from a PRNG. My understanding of the philosophical implications of QM, and its competing interpretations, is insufficient for me to be sure whether the universe as we experience it is deterministic, but regardless of whether it is or is not, I suspect that the true hard problem of consciousness is 'why do we (feel that we) have free will?'
    - goatlover 7y ago
      > I suspect that the true hard problem of consciousness is 'why do we (feel that we) have free will?' Free will and consciousness are separate issues. You can potentially have one and not the other. What's important for free will is whether choice is free and what that freedom amounts to. What's important to consciousness is subjectivity. You can feel pain while not having a choice about feeling that pain, say if you were restrained and unable to do anything about it, just to give an example. And potentially, a robot could be free to make choices while not feeling anything.

mcguire 7y ago

"Tononi gives some simple examples of the computation of Φ, showing that it is indeed larger for systems that are more “richly interconnected” in an intuitive sense. He speculates, plausibly, that Φ is quite large for (some reasonable model of) the interconnection network of the human brain—and probably larger for the brain than for typical electronic devices (which tend to be highly modular in design, thereby decreasing their Φ), or, let’s say, than for other organs like the pancreas. Ambitiously, he even speculates at length about how a large value of Φ might be connected to the phenomenology of consciousness. ... Now, evaluating a polynomial on a set of points turns out to be an excellent way to achieve “integrated information,” with every subset of outputs as correlated with every subset of inputs as it could possibly be. In fact, that’s precisely why polynomials are used so heavily in error-correcting codes, such as the Reed-Solomon code, employed (among many other places) in CD’s and DVD’s. But that doesn’t imply that every time you start up your DVD player you’re lighting the fire of consciousness." Holy poop! So, spaghetti code is more "conscious" than modular code and parity check code is more "conscious" than any physical entity. Yeah, there's something wrong with this theory.