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You need to start by proving that brains and all idealized computers we can build are inherently on different levels. Intuitively it seems like intuition is jus

You need to start by proving that brains and all idealized computers we can build are inherently on different levels. Intuitively it seems like intuition is just a probabilistic analysis on incomplete data. For example that shadow is "probably" a predator that may eat me or that sound is probably a prey animal I can kill and eat. Current AI which probably doesn't fit either of our definitions of intelligence can design novel untrained strategies. See for example AlphaGo Zero. It's not even clear exactly how our brains work so its hard to imagine that they couldn't be implemented with a sufficiently powerful computer but more broadly a computer doesn't necessarily mean a silicon chip any more than it meant a vacuum tube. If silicon chips prove an insufficient mechanism there is no particular reason we couldn't somehow use a biological substrate or indeed even one we haven't thought of. Perhaps you simply need to acknowledge our limited understanding of the brain AND expand your definition of the term computer.

happythomist 6y ago
> It's not even clear exactly how our brains work so its hard to imagine that they couldn't be implemented with a sufficiently powerful computer... Not commenting on what OP said, but I don't think this is correct. Even in principle, how can any computational process produce conscious experiences, which are by nature subjective and unquantifiable?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- jkhdigital 6y ago
  Calling consciousness “subjective” feels kind of like calling water “wet”. But anyways, life itself is built on computational processes. Most of these processes are “purpose-built” to accomplish very specific tasks, but in humans the development of a massive cortex created something of a general-purpose computer. Consciousness seems to be the necessary compromise to run such an embodied computer on top of all the other functions of the brain that serve to keep us alive.
  - happythomist 6y ago
    I don't think you can say that life is built on computational processes unless you use a definition of "computation" that is so vague and all-encompassing that it becomes effectively meaningless. The Wikipedia definition of "computation" is "any type of calculation that includes both arithmetical and non-arithmetical steps and which follows a well-defined model". But this only makes sense in the context of a designer or observer external to the computation who can identify what that model is and thereby make sense of the output. So you can't say that brain processes are computational, much less life itself, without committing some variation of the homunculus fallacy. John Searle (famously known for his Chinese Room thought experiment) made this argument in a paper called "Is the Brain a Digital Computer?" [1] He points out that "if we are to suppose that the brain is a digital computer, we are still faced with the question 'And who is the user?'" A related problem is qualia. There is no computational process that will produce the sensations of colour or sound or touch. At best you will have some representation that requires having actually experienced those sensations to understand it. So a computational process cannot be the basis of or an explanation for those sensations, and therefore consciousness generally. [1] https://philosophy.as.uky.edu/sites/default/files/Is%20the%20Brain%20a%20Digital%20Computer%20-%20John%20R.%20Searle.pdf https://philosophy.as.uky.edu/sites/default/files/Is%20the%2...
    - astrophysician 6y ago
      > I don't think you can say that life is built on computational processes unless you use a definition of "computation" that is so vague and all-encompassing that it becomes effectively meaningless. I mean, there's nothing physically stopping us from simulating a brain, right? It's a finite object with a finite amount of physical ingredients, and therefore with a finite amount of computing power we can simulate what it does. To me personally, that's a computational process. Maybe that's an overly broad definition of computation, but I think these debates tend to be about whether there is something fundamentally different about "life" (by which I assume you include consciousness). But maybe that's not what you're saying. > He points out that "if we are to suppose that the brain is a digital computer, we are still faced with the question 'And who is the user?'" What does that question even mean? I think it seems deep because we humans have a tendency to ascribe some sort of supernatural aura to our lived experience. Life is something incredible but that (at least to my knowledge) is not uncomputable... > There is no computational process that will produce the sensations of colour or sound or touch. Got one: the brain! > At best you will have some representation that requires having actually experienced those sensations to understand it. Why does a computer not "experience" something?
- AnHonestComment 6y ago
  I always find this a bit like “do submarines swim?” Dunno, don’t care, just want a functional machine. If it gets from A to B, “swimming” is irrelevant. ———— As a matter of philosophy, the typical response is qualia happens to everything, but we only recognize it in things with dense computation and self-awareness similar to ours. Like a cat or a dog or a whale. We can maybe see hints of it in birds, insects (colonies), etc. We’re starting to discover some of the complex signaling pathways in, eg, old growth forests — but they’re so out of scale and unlike us, we have trouble comprehending whatever experience, eg, the giant fungus under Oregon might have.
- michaelmrose 6y ago
  If you can't define consciousness beyond self awareness and self reference I don't see how I can prove that a computer can't have it.
- michaelmrose 6y ago
  Trivial what you think of as subjective and unquantifiable are simply so because your brain is too complicated to be taken apart while its running to inspect it effectively with our present level of technology. A subjective experience is just how your brain models your own program in order to produce a progressively refined program that will have a higher chance of successful reproduction. The magical thing you think is beyond comprehension just isn't real.
  - happythomist 6y ago
    How do you go about quantifying the sensory experience of red, then? You can observe that red light has a wavelength of 620 to 750 nm, or that we've assigned it the RGB colour code of #FF0000, but neither fact actually captures or explains the sensory experience. Even trying is a fool's errand, because sensory experiences are inherently qualitative, not quantitative.
    - tsimionescu 6y ago
      That's an assumption. Perhaps if we were able to understand the brain's inner workings, we could see that 'the experience of red' is precisely 'these 3 neurons firing ever 0.0112 seconds at an intensity of X while receiving 0.001 micrograms of serotonin' (completely made up, obviously). Until we start understanding how the brain encodes and 'computes' thought, we can't really claim to know if it is or isn't simply a computer.
      - happythomist 6y ago
        > Perhaps if we were able to understand the brain's inner workings, we could see that 'the experience of red' is precisely 'these 3 neurons firing ever 0.0112 seconds at an intensity of X while receiving 0.001 micrograms of serotonin' (completely made up, obviously). Even if we knew that a person saw red when such and such neurons fired, the neurons firing would still just be a material correlate. It would be in no way equivalent to or explain anything about the sensation itself.
- tsimionescu 6y ago
  We don't understand yet, in any formal sense, what consciousness and subjective experience are. It may turn out that they are fundamentally different than mathematics and computation, but the vast majority of scientists believe today that they are not. The most common belief is that consciousness is simply the self-introspection of a sufficiently powerful computer that can form models of other agents. That is, this computer is able to infer what other agents may do using a model of their inner state, such as beliefs about the world and desires; then, if it applies the same model to itself, it comes up with a similar image of an agent which it calls its own consciousness. Qualia and such are then just illusions, theoretical properties of these models, not fundemantal properties of this world (somewhat equivalent to saying that in fact we are all philosophical zombies, no one has any qualia). I am not claiming that we know for a fact this is true. But we also don't know anything that can conclusively disprove these hypotheses for now, certainly not something as simple as the idea of qualia.
  - AnHonestComment 6y ago
    Saying “no one has any qualia” is the kind of thing that gives philosophy a bad name — it’s obviously false to everyone who hears it, by the very fact they feel something in response.
bobthechef 6y ago
> It's not even clear exactly how our brains work so its hard to imagine that they couldn't be implemented with a sufficiently powerful computer We don't need to know. It suffices to expand "reason" to include not just inference, but properly those things which inference depends on, namely, conceptualization+abstraction and judgement. You could never infer that "all triangles have angles adding to 180 degrees" unless you were in possession of the signified concepts. And here is where the temptation to frame brains in terms of computers becomes plainly, let's say, problematic. Concepts like "triangularity" or "the color green" are abstract in that they do not exist as concrete things in their own right. You can have concrete green triangular objects in the world, but not triangularity or green as such...except in a mind that is able to abstract universals from particulars. So images (including the vulgarized CS sense) won't help you because they're always concrete impressions (one green triangle at the expense of all other possible green triangles). Formal structures expressed in what amounts to some notation won't help you either because they only get their meaning from an interpreting mind. Often, it seems attributions of intelligence to computers stem from a tacit failure to remove ourselves from the picture, projecting our capacities onto a hunk of cleverly arranged metal. > If silicon chips prove an insufficient mechanism there is no particular reason we couldn't somehow use a biological substrate or indeed even one we haven't thought of. Computation is a formalism independent of substrate. You can implement a Turing machine using anything that can maintain the appropriate interpretive correspondence. But even then, a computer is not an objective kind of thing like a tree. Unlike a tree, a computer is only a computer because the observer has chosen to interpret it as such, or to use it as such. (The naive materialists in the room might try to expand that claim to encompass anything, but in the very act they've made things worse. The mind's capacity to comprehend the world is severely crippled if not destroyed, and now you have to explain this mind that somehow can entertain the existence of wondrous things like trees and elephants that the rest of the universe is unable to evince, thus making the mind even more mysterious than it was before the reductionist took to his hatchet.) So if substrate makes a difference, then it's the substrate that matters, not some correspondence with a computational formalism. > You need to start by proving that brains and all idealized computers we can build are inherently on different levels. The burden of proof is on those claiming minds and computers are the same thing.
- 6y ago

happythomist 6y ago

> It's not even clear exactly how our brains work so its hard to imagine that they couldn't be implemented with a sufficiently powerful computer... Not commenting on what OP said, but I don't think this is correct. Even in principle, how can any computational process produce conscious experiences, which are by nature subjective and unquantifiable?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jkhdigital 6y ago
Calling consciousness “subjective” feels kind of like calling water “wet”. But anyways, life itself is built on computational processes. Most of these processes are “purpose-built” to accomplish very specific tasks, but in humans the development of a massive cortex created something of a general-purpose computer. Consciousness seems to be the necessary compromise to run such an embodied computer on top of all the other functions of the brain that serve to keep us alive.
- happythomist 6y ago
  I don't think you can say that life is built on computational processes unless you use a definition of "computation" that is so vague and all-encompassing that it becomes effectively meaningless. The Wikipedia definition of "computation" is "any type of calculation that includes both arithmetical and non-arithmetical steps and which follows a well-defined model". But this only makes sense in the context of a designer or observer external to the computation who can identify what that model is and thereby make sense of the output. So you can't say that brain processes are computational, much less life itself, without committing some variation of the homunculus fallacy. John Searle (famously known for his Chinese Room thought experiment) made this argument in a paper called "Is the Brain a Digital Computer?" [1] He points out that "if we are to suppose that the brain is a digital computer, we are still faced with the question 'And who is the user?'" A related problem is qualia. There is no computational process that will produce the sensations of colour or sound or touch. At best you will have some representation that requires having actually experienced those sensations to understand it. So a computational process cannot be the basis of or an explanation for those sensations, and therefore consciousness generally. [1] https://philosophy.as.uky.edu/sites/default/files/Is%20the%20Brain%20a%20Digital%20Computer%20-%20John%20R.%20Searle.pdf https://philosophy.as.uky.edu/sites/default/files/Is%20the%2...
  - astrophysician 6y ago
    > I don't think you can say that life is built on computational processes unless you use a definition of "computation" that is so vague and all-encompassing that it becomes effectively meaningless. I mean, there's nothing physically stopping us from simulating a brain, right? It's a finite object with a finite amount of physical ingredients, and therefore with a finite amount of computing power we can simulate what it does. To me personally, that's a computational process. Maybe that's an overly broad definition of computation, but I think these debates tend to be about whether there is something fundamentally different about "life" (by which I assume you include consciousness). But maybe that's not what you're saying. > He points out that "if we are to suppose that the brain is a digital computer, we are still faced with the question 'And who is the user?'" What does that question even mean? I think it seems deep because we humans have a tendency to ascribe some sort of supernatural aura to our lived experience. Life is something incredible but that (at least to my knowledge) is not uncomputable... > There is no computational process that will produce the sensations of colour or sound or touch. Got one: the brain! > At best you will have some representation that requires having actually experienced those sensations to understand it. Why does a computer not "experience" something?
AnHonestComment 6y ago
I always find this a bit like “do submarines swim?” Dunno, don’t care, just want a functional machine. If it gets from A to B, “swimming” is irrelevant. ———— As a matter of philosophy, the typical response is qualia happens to everything, but we only recognize it in things with dense computation and self-awareness similar to ours. Like a cat or a dog or a whale. We can maybe see hints of it in birds, insects (colonies), etc. We’re starting to discover some of the complex signaling pathways in, eg, old growth forests — but they’re so out of scale and unlike us, we have trouble comprehending whatever experience, eg, the giant fungus under Oregon might have.
michaelmrose 6y ago
If you can't define consciousness beyond self awareness and self reference I don't see how I can prove that a computer can't have it.
michaelmrose 6y ago
Trivial what you think of as subjective and unquantifiable are simply so because your brain is too complicated to be taken apart while its running to inspect it effectively with our present level of technology. A subjective experience is just how your brain models your own program in order to produce a progressively refined program that will have a higher chance of successful reproduction. The magical thing you think is beyond comprehension just isn't real.
- happythomist 6y ago
  How do you go about quantifying the sensory experience of red, then? You can observe that red light has a wavelength of 620 to 750 nm, or that we've assigned it the RGB colour code of #FF0000, but neither fact actually captures or explains the sensory experience. Even trying is a fool's errand, because sensory experiences are inherently qualitative, not quantitative.
  - tsimionescu 6y ago
    That's an assumption. Perhaps if we were able to understand the brain's inner workings, we could see that 'the experience of red' is precisely 'these 3 neurons firing ever 0.0112 seconds at an intensity of X while receiving 0.001 micrograms of serotonin' (completely made up, obviously). Until we start understanding how the brain encodes and 'computes' thought, we can't really claim to know if it is or isn't simply a computer.
    - happythomist 6y ago
      > Perhaps if we were able to understand the brain's inner workings, we could see that 'the experience of red' is precisely 'these 3 neurons firing ever 0.0112 seconds at an intensity of X while receiving 0.001 micrograms of serotonin' (completely made up, obviously). Even if we knew that a person saw red when such and such neurons fired, the neurons firing would still just be a material correlate. It would be in no way equivalent to or explain anything about the sensation itself.
tsimionescu 6y ago
We don't understand yet, in any formal sense, what consciousness and subjective experience are. It may turn out that they are fundamentally different than mathematics and computation, but the vast majority of scientists believe today that they are not. The most common belief is that consciousness is simply the self-introspection of a sufficiently powerful computer that can form models of other agents. That is, this computer is able to infer what other agents may do using a model of their inner state, such as beliefs about the world and desires; then, if it applies the same model to itself, it comes up with a similar image of an agent which it calls its own consciousness. Qualia and such are then just illusions, theoretical properties of these models, not fundemantal properties of this world (somewhat equivalent to saying that in fact we are all philosophical zombies, no one has any qualia). I am not claiming that we know for a fact this is true. But we also don't know anything that can conclusively disprove these hypotheses for now, certainly not something as simple as the idea of qualia.
- AnHonestComment 6y ago
  Saying “no one has any qualia” is the kind of thing that gives philosophy a bad name — it’s obviously false to everyone who hears it, by the very fact they feel something in response.

bobthechef 6y ago

> It's not even clear exactly how our brains work so its hard to imagine that they couldn't be implemented with a sufficiently powerful computer We don't need to know. It suffices to expand "reason" to include not just inference, but properly those things which inference depends on, namely, conceptualization+abstraction and judgement. You could never infer that "all triangles have angles adding to 180 degrees" unless you were in possession of the signified concepts. And here is where the temptation to frame brains in terms of computers becomes plainly, let's say, problematic. Concepts like "triangularity" or "the color green" are abstract in that they do not exist as concrete things in their own right. You can have concrete green triangular objects in the world, but not triangularity or green as such...except in a mind that is able to abstract universals from particulars. So images (including the vulgarized CS sense) won't help you because they're always concrete impressions (one green triangle at the expense of all other possible green triangles). Formal structures expressed in what amounts to some notation won't help you either because they only get their meaning from an interpreting mind. Often, it seems attributions of intelligence to computers stem from a tacit failure to remove ourselves from the picture, projecting our capacities onto a hunk of cleverly arranged metal. > If silicon chips prove an insufficient mechanism there is no particular reason we couldn't somehow use a biological substrate or indeed even one we haven't thought of. Computation is a formalism independent of substrate. You can implement a Turing machine using anything that can maintain the appropriate interpretive correspondence. But even then, a computer is not an objective kind of thing like a tree. Unlike a tree, a computer is only a computer because the observer has chosen to interpret it as such, or to use it as such. (The naive materialists in the room might try to expand that claim to encompass anything, but in the very act they've made things worse. The mind's capacity to comprehend the world is severely crippled if not destroyed, and now you have to explain this mind that somehow can entertain the existence of wondrous things like trees and elephants that the rest of the universe is unable to evince, thus making the mind even more mysterious than it was before the reductionist took to his hatchet.) So if substrate makes a difference, then it's the substrate that matters, not some correspondence with a computational formalism. > You need to start by proving that brains and all idealized computers we can build are inherently on different levels. The burden of proof is on those claiming minds and computers are the same thing.

6y ago