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Understanding how a brain works may only require a mechanistic model, but consciousness is different. Consider the following thought experiment: suppose that w

• Analemma_ 6y ago
  Sure, why not? That's literally what the materialist definition of consciousness means: it's a process that can be carried out on any appropriately-configured physical substrate; ours just happens to be neurons.
  • a_wild_dandan 6y ago
    You're describing the systems reply to the Chinese Room Argument[1] and I agree with you. To go further, what else could possibly generate consciousness? A soul? Some phlogiston that breathes fire into beings? I legitimately don't understand what the alternative is to physicalism without positing some completely unsubstantiated Other Thing that also gets us no closer to understanding consciousness. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room#Systems_and_virtual_mind_replies:_finding_the_mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room#Systems_and_virtu...
    • deleted 6y ago
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  • pontus 6y ago
    I agree that other mediums (like artificial neurons) would likely still be conscious, but an abstract calculation on a bunch of pieces of papers, possibly spread over years and across multiple people performing the calculations? That seems odd to me. Definitely still "intelligent", but should I feel bad about ripping up those pieces of paper? Should I feel like I'm killing someone by erasing calculations off of the paper or introducing a mathematical mistake somewhere in the middle?
    • deleted 6y ago
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    • wvenable 6y ago
      > should I feel bad about ripping up those pieces of paper? Do you feel bad every time you have a beer and potentially kill off a few brain cells?
    • jayd16 6y ago
      What does morality have to do with the nature of what is? How you feel about snuffing out some form of consciousness is irrelevant to whether it exists or not.
  • goatlover 6y ago
    The idea that scribbles on a paper would be conscious is really hard to believe. It also sounds like it's own form of dualism that's functional instead of substance-based. I wouldn't consider it a good physical theory of consciousness.
    • zozbot234 6y ago
      Well, to a panpsychist, there's no reason why "conciousness" would need to stop at a human scale. The universe as a whole might be concious, and part of that concious experience might be isomorphic to the subjective experience of the brain that's being replicated on those pieces of paper. Though I can see how people might object that this is merely conflating "conciousness" with "computation", that's really inherent in what the thought experiment is doing.
    • joe_the_user 6y ago
      The original claim was lots-and-lots-of-people calculating on many pieces of paper. But it's just an example of this endless stream of sort of ridiculous bait-and-switch arguments. First someone, says "so it's mechanical, so a big, fast, accurate speak-and-spell could simulate it" and you say "well, OK, it would have to be huge, incredibly fast and accurate and so-forth" and then the person "well, I doubt consciousness is just a speak-and-spell.
      • goatlover 6y ago
        If the claim is that certain functions are what "generates" consciousness, then it's fair to ask whether any sort of functional arrangement will do, including writing stuff out on paper. I don't think it matters whether a billion Chinese are busy writing out 1s and 0s, or a computer is moving electrons around. None of that is conscious in my view, or at least I see no reason it would be.
        • joe_the_user 6y ago
          I would sort of agree. Just avoiding first positing "well, even something silly would do" and then saying "well, that proves it's impossible 'cause it's silly". Then the argument is clearly unfair.
• derekp7 6y ago
  That was actually explored in https://xkcd.com/505/ https://xkcd.com/505/ but with rocks instead of paper. Also "Ship of Theseus". My take on it, is that my consciousness is not the one I was born with, or the one I had a few years ago -- instead, it just thinks it is that same one, but the only link to previous versions is just memories.
• joe_the_user 6y ago
  It seems like the "thought experiment" has no palpable meaning. You are basically repeating the OP's argument "I don't think consciousness can arise mechanically" except more slowly. There's no more argument there. Well, except that an entire universe of paper and pencil calculations probably could not simulate a neuron in the age of the universe. But that's not even interesting.
• perl4ever 6y ago
  People keep saying "consciousness" but it sounds like the topic is more specifically identity. I have a brain, you have a brain, billions of others do, it seems like there is a reasonable amount of symmetry, but "I" look out of my eyes and not anyone else's. Replacing you with an AI is much more feasible from my perspective than replacing me with a program.
  • davedx 6y ago
    I think identity is definitely related to consciousness but you can have no sense of identity and still be conscious.
  • gpderetta 6y ago
    Yes! I completely subscribe on the idea that consciousness is an emergent property, but I can't begin to see how the asymmetry of me vs anyone else is reducible.
• danbmil99 6y ago
  Your post sounds like it may be inspired by the work of Daniel Dennett and his riposte to the Searle Chinese room thought experiment.
  • EGreg 6y ago
    It’s actually the China Brain scenario
    • pontus 6y ago
      Woah, that's awesome! I had no idea this was a thing :) Thanks!
• yters 6y ago
  Or go even further and say there is nothing special about the calculation being performed or series of actions. What is important is the mathematical structure. And the structure itself has no physical existence. Therefore, no one really exists.
• Enginerrrd 6y ago
  >but would it actually be sad? To the fullest extent that you are capable of being sad. There is no even remotely plausible alternative to this physicalist argument. I would argue that you aren't nearly as conscious as you think you are. That's the conclusion I've come to after many hours and years on the meditation cushion cultivating awareness of my own cognition. Any thought, choice, or action that you make doesn't actually happen in your conscious brain. You just become aware of it after it's happened. That's all there is.
  • Scarblac 6y ago
    That doesn't solve anything though, there is still the "you" that becomes aware.
    • Enginerrrd 6y ago
      Not really. If you really start digging you realize that there isn't much "you" there left to be conscious. To a great extent I think consciousness is largely a bit of an illusion. Most of what people typically think of in terms of consciousness is really the contents of their attention. But you don't even truly control that attention. The decisions to switch from one unconscious information stream to another are themselves unconscious information streams. In essence, I'd argue that upon inspection, "attention" is the apparent last vestige where any consciousness may reside. But even deeper inspection reveals that it itself is quite an empty concept.
      • qubex 6y ago
        That’s the “Flashlight in the Dark” concept of consciousness as the focus of attention.
      • richard_todd 6y ago
        That's a good description of where I'm at, and I keep wondering if maybe the definition most people are using for "consciousness" just doesn't match mine. The longer I meditate, the less consciousness matters to me; it seems totally clear that I become aware of things after they've already been generated elsewhere in my brain, and that awareness is just a kind of self-reflection which maybe helps with higher-order planning or whatever. I'm still open to realizing I've missed the mark--especially because so many prominent meditators seem very focused on (or even enthralled by) mysteries of consciousness. Until then, I'm really struggling with why people would try to elevate this subjective experience to a fundamental aspect of physics.
• qubex 6y ago
  Isn’t that just Searle’s Chinese Library?
• mattigames 6y ago
  Sadness along every other feeling is indeed a computation, its just that people don't like to face such bleak reality, same way we can easily understand why a machine can be turned off and never to be turned on again and yet most of us have issues understanding when the same thing happen to our brains, so we rather invent a lot of mythology around such event (death). Simplified example: If I perceive my father died (input) I get sad (output). Is a system of stimulus/rewards/pushinement that has worked pretty well for the evolution of our species, is extremely complex but that doesn't make it not one.
  • acqq 6y ago
    And we know that the animals behave "sad" when somebody close to them dies or just goes away. Emotions aren't anything special to humans. Other behaviors too. The "being special" is what humans just want to believe. Most of those promoting "consciousness" as "something special, that can't be explained by physical interactions of electrons, atoms and molecules or above that by biological interactions of cells etc, are simply in some way still hanging on their religious beliefs and projecting them there. The rest just have a new book or whatever else to sell.
• jayd16 6y ago
  This argument begs the question and as such "Yes it would be sad" is a sufficient answer. Why not? We've failed to define "actually sad" in any interesting way. Emotion is an especially odd angle as we can so easily manipulate it with chemicals. Why would that be relevant to consciousness?
• youareostriches 6y ago
  >Now take this to the extreme: replace all of these neurons with empty shells and route the computation to a billion people in the world to perform on pen and paper. Is it still conscious? If so, what if you removed the brain altogether and just performed the computations directly on paper, is the paper conscious? Yes, absolutely consciousness would exist in all of those scenarios — but you couldn’t claim that any one “thing” such as the paper itself, would “be” conscious. The notion of a separate self is still fundamentally an abstraction placed on top of billions of neurons interlinked with a musculoskeletal system, through which quadrillions of new atoms are constantly cycling through. On a long enough scale you only have the psychological “gestalt“ of a human. Even the sensation of “self” is still ultimately just another internal cognitive model, because ultimately everything else we perceive is also just an internal model of reality. In your example, that internal “self” model would continue to exist within the abstract computationally-mediated consciousness-generating process. Each conscious process exists in its own fully separate ontological space—because it is inherently subjective.
  • TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
    Without wanting to cause too much controversy, this depends how broad your experience of consciousness is. That "internal model of reality" is capable of some very interesting things if you're prepared to read past the first few chapter or two of the manual.
• SirHound 6y ago
  Looking around at other living creatures it looks as if consciousness is a gradient. Several factors could move you up and down the gradient (to simplify), and I'd imagine that the speed of data transmission would be one of those. So as far as the thought experiment goes, I'd imagine the pen and paper method of transmission would be slow enough to knock the "brain" off the consciousness scale completely.
  • dodobirdlord 6y ago
    If you have a slow simulation process you can just run it in slowed-down simulation time.
    • SirHound 6y ago
      But there might be a link between the time-density of the simulation and the emergence of consciousness.
• dTal 6y ago
  Ah, the classic "argument from incredulity by implausible substrate". Step 1: point out that any number of wacky scenarios can be isomorphic to a human brain - a person in a room transcribing symbols, an unlikely cloud of dust in space Step 2: Note that the fantastically implausible scenario you've constructed is fantastically implausible. Redirect the implausibility into the thing you want to claim is impossible. Step 3: Wave hands, make argument about consciousness/AI
  • ajuc 6y ago
    In case of paper it's not implausible at all. It's just ignoring a necessary part of the system - a human that executes the process on paper. I don't think it's any more implausible (that this is a conscious proccess) than saying both personalities of people with split personality are conscious.
• simonh 6y ago
  This is basically a convoluted restatement of Searle's Chinese Room argument. To me yes, since I think conciseness is an emergent property of the matter in my brain, and the behavior of matter is in principle computable, I think this is the logical consequence. I don't think that this is practically possible though. Even a single brain cell is fantastically complicated and attempts to simply model neuronal behaviour from gross chemical simulations have failed. We can't even reliable model the behaviour of a single neuron yet. That's biological systems for you they are insanely complex with mind bendingly subtle feedback loops and cross-talk effects between seemingly unrelated systems that produce the macroscopic behaviour. That doesn't change the basic principle though, yes I think we're physical systems.
• laszlokorte 6y ago
  I guess if you replace a neuron with pen&paper calculation you have to keep the timing right. As in: A song played on a piano is just the various strings moving back and forth. So you could replace the strings with people walking forward and backward. But for it to be a melody: 1. the people have to move really fast 2. all movements must be synchronized sufficently 3. there must exist a point in space time at which all those vibrations come together, ie. all that movement must add up to the final frequency of the song. So if all people in the world try to create consciousness by calculating on paper their would have to carefully watch their timing in each step. What do you get if a lot of people synchronize their actions? Like in synchronized swimming? dancing? a concert? maybe some primitive form of consciousness? /edit: Try combine this synchronization with a feedback loop, ie. the swimmers or piano player not following previously determined steps of a sequence but determining the next step based on the input from other systems around them and their own output.
• coldtea 6y ago
  >If so, what if you removed the brain altogether and just performed the computations directly on paper, is the paper conscious? The paper would definiy still be intelligent, it would possibly come up with interesting inventions, claim that it was sad or happy etc, but would it actually be sad? One might argue that it would be sad, the way a human is sad, but lack the ability to immediately experience it in real time, while we can.
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  • twoslide 6y ago
    Isn't "real time" a concept that is somewhat biased by the frame of reference, i.e. it would just have a different concept of "real time" and consider our "real time" to very quick?
    • mannykannot 6y ago
      I very much doubt that a paper simulation could keep up with real-world events, and would immediately fall irrecoverably behind them, but if that simulated mind existed in a corresponding simulated world, then that world's pace would define realtime as experienced by the simulated mind.
• Retric 6y ago
  In that context it’s the rules that define how you update the paper that give the symbols on the paper meaning. And in that context sad is both the symbols and system that gives those symbols meaning. It’s the same situation as people playing a game of poker or go fish. The cards in their hands might be identical, but the game is what gives those cards meaning.
• ajuc 6y ago
  You'd like "Permutation City" by Greg Egan. It's about exactly this question, and he goes with it even further :) For one example he considers information processing to be consciousnes, then asks about random patterns in cosmic dust that by chance encode another steps in a conscious process every 3 million years. Is that a conscious thing? What if it is? It goes very abstract very fast, and I disagree with some conclusions, but I still recommend it. > is the paper conscious? Not paper, but the person implemented in such a way - yes. You don't say "my proteins are conscious", you say "I am conscious". The substrate only needs to ensure the process works correctly and the inputs and outputs are matched. In your example it's like virtualization in IT - you can run a game on the computer, or run a virtual machine on the computer and run the game on that virtual machine. The game is running either way, it even runs on these same transistors, but it's a different process. Besides, I think consciousness is very handweavy, and if I had to bet I would bet: - consciousness isn't a thing, it's just a bad abstraction (70%) - consciousness is emergent in a fully physical universe (25%) - consciousness is fundamental, and part of the laws of universe (5%)
• mannykannot 6y ago
  As I mentioned elsewhere, your last step would not actually work in real time, so maybe that part of its implausibility. As in Searle's "Chinese Room" (and also, though to rather different effect, in Jackson's "Mary the Neuroscientist"), you have proposed a wildly infeasible thought experiment, and then decided dismiss your rational conclusions about the outcome because... because it does not accord with your intuitions about normal situations? because it is infeasible? This simply is not the way to get to the truth of any matter.