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I highly encourage anyone who is interested in the subject to listen through John Searle's lectures on the philosophy of mind [1]. He taught a course at UC Ber

I highly encourage anyone who is interested in the subject to listen through John Searle's lectures on the philosophy of mind [1]. He taught a course at UC Berkeley on the subject for many years, and one of the years was recorded and uploaded to Youtube. He walks through the history of the subject from Descartes onward and spends a lot of time about how philosophers got very excited during the 1960s and 70s as computer science was just taking off because it seemed that at long last we had a new way to explain consciousness. This idea is that the brain is just a kind of computer and consciousness is just doing a certain kind of computation. If we wrote the right program and ran it on a sufficiently powerful computer, we could make other kind of computers conscious as well. But Searle is most famous for the Chinese Room thought experiment which is (in my opinion) a fairly decisive counterargument against this position. That, along with the What Mary Knew thought experiment and Nagel's What Is It Like to Be a Bat together made the "consciousness is computation" position increasingly untenable. It took about 40 years, but by the time these lectures were recorded it seems that the tide has really turned among philosophers of mind (Searle has his own biases but he tries to be impartial in explaining all sides). At least among philosophers who specialize in the subject it's hard to find many who seriously believe that a GPU running Resnet is conscious. Obviously there's a whole semester's worth of material in those lectures and the arguments can't really be summed up in an HN comment, but anyone who is interested in thinking about these questions should really give the whole course a listen. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zi7Va_4ekko https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zi7Va_4ekko

PartiallyTyped 5y ago
A Resnet is not conscious, but one could argue that an RL agent, by some definitions of consciousness, is conscious. If the measure of consciousness is the ability to have a subjective experience, then that requires that the object has an internal state that is modified, thus the same experience in different agents results in different modifications, ergo, it is subjective. If a requirement for conscious experience is the capacity for self reference, then Hofstadter has already argued that that can be achieved with very simple rules of inference and natural numbers. An RL agent that can plan ahead and take into consideration its own internal state could be argued to be conscious, by even stricter means that require that the agent is aware of its own existence. To me, it looks as if humanity is trying to find ways to argue that it is anything but meatware. But I guess accepting that we are just computational units implies that agency is not a thing, and humanity isn't ready for this conversation.
- bonoboTP 5y ago
  For many people, this is a transcendental, almost religious claim, so no amount of technical discussion will convince them. Essentially, consciousness has taken on the role of the soul as the concept on which we hang our humanistic ideals, like the protection of human dignity and human life, human rights etc. Many people see this threatened when people say consciousness isn't special and human and instead can be possessed by silicon. That's what you are up against, when you argue in this topic.
bonoboTP 5y ago
In some more "rational"-oriented circles, the Chinese Room argument is seen as obviously wrong, outdated and mysticistic, for example see Dan Dennett. The Chinese Room would need to be so enormous, and it would work so slowly, that it's not a good intuitive analogy. It also introduces a homunculus actor that reads, interprets and understands the instructions, which muddles the analogy and focuses our attention to the conscious quality of the person following the instructions.
- antognini 5y ago
  Yeah, there are definitely some holdouts for the functionalist position like Dennett. Searle goes through Dennett's objections in detail in the lectures.
- DonaldFisk 5y ago
  The Chinese Room argument might have a number of problems, but it can be simplified. Put someone in a room who cannot see colours (an achromatope), and give them three different colour filters in the form of plastic sheets. A person outside the room passes sheets of paper of known colour into the room, the achromatope puts them under the colour filters, thereby determining each paper's colour, which he tells the person outside the room. The person outside the room thinks there's someone in the room who can see colours. But achromatopes can't see any colours, and will readily tell you that they have no idea what it's like to see colours.
  - bonoboTP 5y ago
    That's a very different situation. It's not about consciousness, but qualia, and is more like the Mary's Room [0] argument (though not the same). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_argument https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_argument
    - DonaldFisk 5y ago
      If you think it's very different, can you tell me when, in people or animals that we'd agree are conscious, that there's consciousness but no experience of qualia, or experience of qualia without consciousness? Experience of a stream of qualia is how I'd define consciousness. This is also consistent with the medical definition (leaving aside the other minds problem). If you have a different working definition, how does it differ from mine?
emtel 5y ago
The Chinese Room is a really, really bad thought experiment. It's just an attempt at misdirection. It asks you to imagine a computer (one that operates on slips of paper according to rules that are written down in a big book), puts a human inside that computer, and then says that because the human doesn't understand what the computer program is doing, the computer program isn't conscious. But this is just question-begging. The experiment purports to resolve the question "can a computer be conscious", and answers it by showing you a computer and claiming that it is not conscious. Worse, the Chinese Room is straight-up Cartesian dualism. By placing the human inside the computer, Searle is preying on your Cartesian intuition that there must be a theatre of the mind where reality is experienced. And since Searle's homunculus doesn't understand Chinese, nothing can be experienced, therefore no conscious experience is happening in this system. If I'm wrong, and the Chinese Room thought experiment is conclusive, it must be possible to reformulate it without the human. After all, the human does nothing but follow rules in a purely mechanistic fashion. Can anyone offer a reformulation of the experiment, that has no human, that they still feel is convincing?
- joshuamorton 5y ago
  I don't see how this follows at all. The human is necessary to the argument. The argument, briefly is "a human with a Chinese dictionary and translation instructions doesn't 'know' Chinese, therefore a computer with a Chinese dictionary and translation instructions also doesn't 'know' Chinese." It isn't an argument that no computer can be conscious, but an argument that a convincing simulation of consciousness is not sufficient to prove consciousness.
  - emtel 5y ago
    The conscious human is not a necessary part of the system, as he is just blindly following rules. Therefore, his lack of comprehension tells us nothing about the system in question. I am sorry to mostly repeat myself. I am trying to think of another way to make my point, and coming up blank.
    - joshuamorton 5y ago
bondarchuk 5y ago
Lecture 6 starting at about 22:00 is the Chinese room argument. https://youtu.be/zLQjbACTaZM?t=1322 https://youtu.be/zLQjbACTaZM?t=1322 Systems reply starts at 34:00. To be honest, I haven't found the detailed treatment of the counterarguments that you promised in another comment. His counterargument to the systems reply is that he's flabbergasted, and "it's not gonna work if you think about it". Then, of course, he gives the "what if I memorize the rulebook and do it all in my head" spiel. If you're committed to the systems reply, the man and the stuff in his head etc. is still a system and the systems reply holds just as much as before. It's fun indeed to hear it from the man himself, but from his tone it's abundantly clear that he is just not willing, or perhaps able, to give it serious consideration.
earth_walker 5y ago
My completely naive reply to the Chinese room is that as stated doesn't learn from the inputs and outputs. Let's modify it slightly to include a second stream of responses to the room's answers. Then make a guidebook that adds new rules based on the growing history of interaction. Now the rulebook doesn't just compute a 1-1 map of input to output: each interaction updates not only its experience, but all present and future answers. An input to the system invokes memory, taps into experience, evaluates nuance. Given lots of time and interaction and a good broad set of questions and responses, does the system understand Chinese? If it does not, then what is missing between it's understanding and ours?
sizzle 5y ago
Also worth mentioning is the Mind-body problem i.e. Cartesian dualism and related concepts https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind–body_dualism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind–body_dualism

PartiallyTyped 5y ago

A Resnet is not conscious, but one could argue that an RL agent, by some definitions of consciousness, is conscious. If the measure of consciousness is the ability to have a subjective experience, then that requires that the object has an internal state that is modified, thus the same experience in different agents results in different modifications, ergo, it is subjective. If a requirement for conscious experience is the capacity for self reference, then Hofstadter has already argued that that can be achieved with very simple rules of inference and natural numbers. An RL agent that can plan ahead and take into consideration its own internal state could be argued to be conscious, by even stricter means that require that the agent is aware of its own existence. To me, it looks as if humanity is trying to find ways to argue that it is anything but meatware. But I guess accepting that we are just computational units implies that agency is not a thing, and humanity isn't ready for this conversation.

bonoboTP 5y ago
For many people, this is a transcendental, almost religious claim, so no amount of technical discussion will convince them. Essentially, consciousness has taken on the role of the soul as the concept on which we hang our humanistic ideals, like the protection of human dignity and human life, human rights etc. Many people see this threatened when people say consciousness isn't special and human and instead can be possessed by silicon. That's what you are up against, when you argue in this topic.

bonoboTP 5y ago

In some more "rational"-oriented circles, the Chinese Room argument is seen as obviously wrong, outdated and mysticistic, for example see Dan Dennett. The Chinese Room would need to be so enormous, and it would work so slowly, that it's not a good intuitive analogy. It also introduces a homunculus actor that reads, interprets and understands the instructions, which muddles the analogy and focuses our attention to the conscious quality of the person following the instructions.

antognini 5y ago
Yeah, there are definitely some holdouts for the functionalist position like Dennett. Searle goes through Dennett's objections in detail in the lectures.
DonaldFisk 5y ago
The Chinese Room argument might have a number of problems, but it can be simplified. Put someone in a room who cannot see colours (an achromatope), and give them three different colour filters in the form of plastic sheets. A person outside the room passes sheets of paper of known colour into the room, the achromatope puts them under the colour filters, thereby determining each paper's colour, which he tells the person outside the room. The person outside the room thinks there's someone in the room who can see colours. But achromatopes can't see any colours, and will readily tell you that they have no idea what it's like to see colours.
- bonoboTP 5y ago
  That's a very different situation. It's not about consciousness, but qualia, and is more like the Mary's Room [0] argument (though not the same). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_argument https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_argument
  - DonaldFisk 5y ago
    If you think it's very different, can you tell me when, in people or animals that we'd agree are conscious, that there's consciousness but no experience of qualia, or experience of qualia without consciousness? Experience of a stream of qualia is how I'd define consciousness. This is also consistent with the medical definition (leaving aside the other minds problem). If you have a different working definition, how does it differ from mine?

emtel 5y ago

The Chinese Room is a really, really bad thought experiment. It's just an attempt at misdirection. It asks you to imagine a computer (one that operates on slips of paper according to rules that are written down in a big book), puts a human inside that computer, and then says that because the human doesn't understand what the computer program is doing, the computer program isn't conscious. But this is just question-begging. The experiment purports to resolve the question "can a computer be conscious", and answers it by showing you a computer and claiming that it is not conscious. Worse, the Chinese Room is straight-up Cartesian dualism. By placing the human inside the computer, Searle is preying on your Cartesian intuition that there must be a theatre of the mind where reality is experienced. And since Searle's homunculus doesn't understand Chinese, nothing can be experienced, therefore no conscious experience is happening in this system. If I'm wrong, and the Chinese Room thought experiment is conclusive, it must be possible to reformulate it without the human. After all, the human does nothing but follow rules in a purely mechanistic fashion. Can anyone offer a reformulation of the experiment, that has no human, that they still feel is convincing?

joshuamorton 5y ago
I don't see how this follows at all. The human is necessary to the argument. The argument, briefly is "a human with a Chinese dictionary and translation instructions doesn't 'know' Chinese, therefore a computer with a Chinese dictionary and translation instructions also doesn't 'know' Chinese." It isn't an argument that no computer can be conscious, but an argument that a convincing simulation of consciousness is not sufficient to prove consciousness.
- emtel 5y ago
  The conscious human is not a necessary part of the system, as he is just blindly following rules. Therefore, his lack of comprehension tells us nothing about the system in question. I am sorry to mostly repeat myself. I am trying to think of another way to make my point, and coming up blank.
  - joshuamorton 5y ago

bondarchuk 5y ago

Lecture 6 starting at about 22:00 is the Chinese room argument. https://youtu.be/zLQjbACTaZM?t=1322 https://youtu.be/zLQjbACTaZM?t=1322 Systems reply starts at 34:00. To be honest, I haven't found the detailed treatment of the counterarguments that you promised in another comment. His counterargument to the systems reply is that he's flabbergasted, and "it's not gonna work if you think about it". Then, of course, he gives the "what if I memorize the rulebook and do it all in my head" spiel. If you're committed to the systems reply, the man and the stuff in his head etc. is still a system and the systems reply holds just as much as before. It's fun indeed to hear it from the man himself, but from his tone it's abundantly clear that he is just not willing, or perhaps able, to give it serious consideration.

earth_walker 5y ago

My completely naive reply to the Chinese room is that as stated doesn't learn from the inputs and outputs. Let's modify it slightly to include a second stream of responses to the room's answers. Then make a guidebook that adds new rules based on the growing history of interaction. Now the rulebook doesn't just compute a 1-1 map of input to output: each interaction updates not only its experience, but all present and future answers. An input to the system invokes memory, taps into experience, evaluates nuance. Given lots of time and interaction and a good broad set of questions and responses, does the system understand Chinese? If it does not, then what is missing between it's understanding and ours?

sizzle 5y ago

Also worth mentioning is the Mind-body problem i.e. Cartesian dualism and related concepts https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind–body_dualism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind–body_dualism