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Exactly, you have a handwave. A vague idea that when a system becomes "complex" enough it suddenly becomes conscious. There's no mechanism, no rigor, no cause a

Exactly, you have a handwave. A vague idea that when a system becomes "complex" enough it suddenly becomes conscious. There's no mechanism, no rigor, no cause and effect. With the browser you can chase down every bit through the hardware, down to the quantum tunneling effect dictating what's happening in the silicon and come up with a concrete explanation based in physical laws. With the browser example, at no level of abstraction does there exist any ambiguity. "Emergent" in that framing simply means we can explain abstracted behaviors in terms of other abstractions. But if you wanted you could drill down to the particle physics and have a complete, rational explanation of the system. Not so with consciousness, and thus the "hard problem"

joeberon 5y ago
I don't have it, because it's not my argument, it's their argument, and it's clearly making you emotional so I think it's better to stop it here.
- nickelpro 5y ago
  Apologies if my language is emotional, I like this debate a lot and get rare few opportunities to discuss it with people who are familiar with all the background. I don't mean to invalidate anyone, I think all camps are equally valid regardless of my personal feelings.
adriand 5y ago
One obvious difference between computers and humans is that only one of them is an animal. So far as we can tell, consciousness only arises in animals. This sounds like a truism, but I wonder if using phrases like “complex system“ masks it: both humans and computers are complex systems, and only one of them is conscious, and therefore what could possibly be the difference? Well, the list of differences between the two is enormous. As the article discusses, some of those differences include embodiment, emotions and moods. So perhaps the “hard problem” is not a philosophical one but a question of detailed knowledge: if we had the ability to drill down to the underlying particle physics of bodies, emotions and moods, plus all the other things that comprise our animal natures, then perhaps the problem would be solved. To put this another way: perhaps the issue with many approaches to understanding consciousness is that it assumes our animal nature doesn’t matter and that conscious minds can exist abstractly, or even be modelled in silicon. But maybe they can’t be, and so for us to truly understand consciousness we will need to truly understand the body, which we are very far away from. To sum this up: consciousness, in this view, is not an emergent property of complex systems. Rather it is a fundamental property of animals.
- k__ 5y ago
  But maybe a computer isn't a complex system. Most, if not all, animals are much more complex than computers.
- n4r9 5y ago
  If we take a human and replace one of their neurons with a silicon chip that exactly replicates its electrical activity, is the human any less "conscious"? Presumably their conscious experience is the same (if not why not?) If the human is still conscious, what if we continue one by one to replace all the neurons with silicon chips in the same way? Where does this thought experiment fail?
  - joeberon 5y ago
    Personally I think most people who argue consciousness is an emergent property of complicated physical systems would believe that the machine would still be conscious after replacing every neuron with a chip
    - slfnflctd 5y ago
      Given a sufficiently advanced chip which included all chemical interactions (or effective simulations), why wouldn't they be? If after the transition is complete we determine/decide they aren't conscious, then we have to argue about at what point the 'hybrid' brain ceases to manifest consciousness, and why. Maybe the organic parts would start to change their prior functionality in response to the synthesized parts... but that would suggest we just didn't have a complete enough model of the neuron and we're back to square one. Once that model is complete, there should by definition be no problem, unless you want to argue it can never be complete, for which you then need evidence to convince everyone. I say it's worth continued study.
      - lovecg 5y ago
        On the topic of simulating neurons, we might be able to simulate the _static_ structure but neurons also move around and make new connections. This video opened my eyes on how far we really are from a realistic simulation: https://youtu.be/CJ3d1FgbmFg https://youtu.be/CJ3d1FgbmFg
CuriouslyC 5y ago
The problem in your stating (and many others) is that the notion of consciousness has self-awareness is baked into it. It's odd to think that the ability to experience qualia magically occurs for sufficiently complex systems, but it's not odd to think that self-awareness just arises once a system that can experience qualia reaches a sufficient complexity level. Unfortunately, people latch on to the reasonableness of the latter, and ignore the ridiculousness of the former.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

joeberon 5y ago

I don't have it, because it's not my argument, it's their argument, and it's clearly making you emotional so I think it's better to stop it here.

nickelpro 5y ago
Apologies if my language is emotional, I like this debate a lot and get rare few opportunities to discuss it with people who are familiar with all the background. I don't mean to invalidate anyone, I think all camps are equally valid regardless of my personal feelings.

adriand 5y ago

One obvious difference between computers and humans is that only one of them is an animal. So far as we can tell, consciousness only arises in animals. This sounds like a truism, but I wonder if using phrases like “complex system“ masks it: both humans and computers are complex systems, and only one of them is conscious, and therefore what could possibly be the difference? Well, the list of differences between the two is enormous. As the article discusses, some of those differences include embodiment, emotions and moods. So perhaps the “hard problem” is not a philosophical one but a question of detailed knowledge: if we had the ability to drill down to the underlying particle physics of bodies, emotions and moods, plus all the other things that comprise our animal natures, then perhaps the problem would be solved. To put this another way: perhaps the issue with many approaches to understanding consciousness is that it assumes our animal nature doesn’t matter and that conscious minds can exist abstractly, or even be modelled in silicon. But maybe they can’t be, and so for us to truly understand consciousness we will need to truly understand the body, which we are very far away from. To sum this up: consciousness, in this view, is not an emergent property of complex systems. Rather it is a fundamental property of animals.

k__ 5y ago
But maybe a computer isn't a complex system. Most, if not all, animals are much more complex than computers.
n4r9 5y ago
If we take a human and replace one of their neurons with a silicon chip that exactly replicates its electrical activity, is the human any less "conscious"? Presumably their conscious experience is the same (if not why not?) If the human is still conscious, what if we continue one by one to replace all the neurons with silicon chips in the same way? Where does this thought experiment fail?
- joeberon 5y ago
  Personally I think most people who argue consciousness is an emergent property of complicated physical systems would believe that the machine would still be conscious after replacing every neuron with a chip
  - slfnflctd 5y ago
    Given a sufficiently advanced chip which included all chemical interactions (or effective simulations), why wouldn't they be? If after the transition is complete we determine/decide they aren't conscious, then we have to argue about at what point the 'hybrid' brain ceases to manifest consciousness, and why. Maybe the organic parts would start to change their prior functionality in response to the synthesized parts... but that would suggest we just didn't have a complete enough model of the neuron and we're back to square one. Once that model is complete, there should by definition be no problem, unless you want to argue it can never be complete, for which you then need evidence to convince everyone. I say it's worth continued study.
    - lovecg 5y ago
      On the topic of simulating neurons, we might be able to simulate the _static_ structure but neurons also move around and make new connections. This video opened my eyes on how far we really are from a realistic simulation: https://youtu.be/CJ3d1FgbmFg https://youtu.be/CJ3d1FgbmFg

CuriouslyC 5y ago

The problem in your stating (and many others) is that the notion of consciousness has self-awareness is baked into it. It's odd to think that the ability to experience qualia magically occurs for sufficiently complex systems, but it's not odd to think that self-awareness just arises once a system that can experience qualia reaches a sufficient complexity level. Unfortunately, people latch on to the reasonableness of the latter, and ignore the ridiculousness of the former.

deleted 5y ago
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