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Consciousness is not computation

• barrysteve 4y ago
  This is a really good write-up though there's lots of connective tissue missing. The idea that computation is a whole-mind or whole-consciousness experience that describes everything the brain and mind does, is a little flawed. The mind is capable of mathematical calculation, as a certain function, but it is also capable of metaphor, visions, musical enjoyment and connection to an uncertain, true "whole" that is separate from mathematical certainty. The idea that computation is substrate independent is missing a layer. The idea that you can run computation on any given mathematical computing device and produce the same 'level' of consciousness as a parallel for consciousness is a little flawed. ADHD study on the brain has 'room for improvement' because the Executive Function theory relies on parts of the brain which does not exist inside mice and some people argue we should study monkey brains who have a similar biological componentry to humans. The consciousness monkeys and apes have, is commonly seen to be a higher level than mice, and the biological componentry supports that idea. Different kinds of computing devices would support different levels of consciousness. A toaster could run DOOM levels of consciousness and a supercomputer could "host" the consciousness of a much higher being. The religious faiths differ on this view across denominations. Catholics argue that dogs do not go to heaven because they have a 'worldly consciousness' and man has a heavenly consciousness. Some other faiths argue that we differ from animals in degree, not by kind, and that dogs are saved for heaven. These ideas have parallel with the concept of differing levels of consciousness. The article makes the idea that differing relative observers (Alice, Bob, ect) of the computing substrate (hot iron magnetic poles) could generate different consciousness simulations. This elevates the idea of second-order thinking, thoughts about thoughts to be the mediating factor in deciding where consciousness is observed, and that's not really clear consciousness functions like that. It also supposes that the differing subjectivity of consciousness is linked to relating differently to an identical computational underbelly, like a tribe accessing the same or instanced resource, which is not really clear for the nature of mind or consciousness. Hot Iron magnetic poles and computation as an example of consciousness, works for a subset of certain mathematical conscious functions, but functions like language are yet to be seen as computationally generated. DNA works better as a natural examination of the language. Mathematics has strict rigid certainties that often mirror randomness, or repetitive natural processes, like simulated annealing and physical forces. DNA's genetic code is possibly the first place in nature where we have seen non-repetitive, mutating code that is as complex as a human language, mediated by natural forces. The concept of "intelligent design" stephen meyer, et al and the question as to how life came to be, has become a thrust of biological research alongside evolutionary theory. It has some great discussions and speculation about language that didn't come from humans or animals. There is a lot of elegant connections to be made when the author opens the idea of a split-brain "two consciousness" in epileptic patients. The left-right brain split has existed forever in pop psychology and it has lacked a lot of detail. The effects of left and right hemisphere splits have been studied for a while now by people with lesions and psychological disorders and a lot of the literature and implications have been compiled by a GP (PCP in US English) into a book. The left brain excels at mathematical certainty and computation and pulling apart ideas into abstract pieces and trying to assemble them together into more than the sum of the parts. The right brain is eternally uncertain, connected to a whole and can interpret metaphor, people's faces, the shape of objects and much more. The implications go deep and don't lend to easy summarizing yet, the book the Matter with Things by McGilchrist spends multiple chapters just going through scientific example after example from brain-damaged and psychologically ill people to show the ideas that apply to the respective hemispheres. Defending the idea from McGilchrist that a mathematical computation, worldview or functionality, is mostly executed in the left-hemisphere and not the whole brain, we can maybe illuminate why philosophers take differing stances on the nature of consciousness. The author's conclusion that we are left in apophatic or negative theology attempts at describing what God is or what consciousness is, by excluding what he is not, rules out the inherent ability we have to build a view or metaphor in our mind that internally coheres with our own thoughts, and then apply it in the world. There are likely a lot more internally coherent arguments, visions, ideas, maps of God or consciousness that we can make in our a mind and some of them will correspond to the natural reality we live in. Scientific discovery by the greats has used this method for a very long time. We still have hunches and sudden inspiration from an uncertain source and generally process some ideas in non-logical, non-rational ways. These ideas are only, but often, proved true when applied in the world. The ancient Greeks frequently only really pursued or argued about ideas they had guessed at first, instead of ruling out everything it couldn't be and working within that tiny area. Apophatic thinking can be overly limiting in some cases.
• JoshTriplett 4y ago
  This seems...very confused. This seems to be attempting to "prove" that if you regard consciousness as "containing the bits of a specific program", you could also see that program in random data by interpreting that random data by effectively applying a one-time pad to it (from which you can indeed produce any possible interpretation of data), which it treats as a proof by contradiction. And leaving that aside, while the assertion is that consciousness is not "computation", the reasoning seems focused on the storage of bits rather than on the execution of an actual program defined by those bits that goes from one state to another in a meaningful fashion. Storing a program and running a program are two different things. If someone were interpreting the successive states of a heated iron bar (or other random noise source) with a sufficiently convoluted one-time-pad to map it to successive states of a conscious being, then to the extent it exhibits consciousness the substrate it runs on is effectively whatever is actually supplying those one-time-pads, since supplying them atop random noise would require generating them via whatever process produces those states corresponding to consciousness. At that point you could just discard the random noise source and the one-time-pad generator that maps that random noise source to the conscious states, and just leave the conscious states. Ultimately, this article seems to have started out with an assertion to support, and then tried (unsuccessfully) to turn that assertion into something more than an assertion.
  • tshaddox 4y ago
    I don’t really get the argument either. The author only seems to demonstrate that different observers can make different conclusions from different observations of the same phenomena. The author requires consciousness to be observer-independent, but surely that doesn’t also require that all observers are able to correctly conclude whether they’re observing a conscious entity at any given time.
    • woojoo666 4y ago
      Yeah, the author claims that consciousness is observer independent, but then creates systems that depend on an "observer" (or rather, an interpreter) to make the system turing complete. The bar of iron isn't conscious or turing-complete just because one person can interpret it so. The bar of iron + the interpreter form a complete system. And in fact the bar of iron is really not doing anything in this case, it's the interpreter doing all the work, so it's more like saying "this human interpreter is conscious". Not a very insightful conclusion.
• n8cpdx 4y ago
  I think people start with the premise that consciousness is a specific “thing”, that it is unique and special to humans (and maybe dogs because we like them but definitely not spiders and flies because we don’t) and then try to work backwards to define it in some ways that keeps it special. I don’t think consciousness is so specific, and I think people aren’t clear about how they think about it as something separate from recall, text generation, agency, etc. My personal experience is that consciousness, like free will, is a useful illusion. Poking at the edges of consciousness (mostly with drugs) leads to all sorts of contradictions and challenges to what people usually think of as consciousness. Aside: I’m starting to be bothered by the trend of assuming that philosophers have special insight. There’s plenty of shitty, non-useful philosophy, and there’s plenty of articles like this where someone writes in circles like they’re paid by the word. Generating text for hours without an anchor to the real world is not a productive method of generating insight about that world. > But we must resist the allure of this seductive idea. Why? Starting with this assumption and searching for reasons it might be true is clear motivated reasoning.
  • tshaddox 4y ago
    > I think people start with the premise that consciousness is a specific “thing”, that it is unique and special to humans (and maybe dogs because we like them but definitely not spiders and flies because we don’t) Ah, but as far as I can tell this author only grants their own consciousness. They’re doing the typical thing of starting from literally nothing more than a claim of the form “there is no way I could ever possibly deny the existence of this thing” which seems to me to be a starting point diametrically incompatible with pursuing knowledge via reasoning.
    • kijin 4y ago
      Every chain of reasoning needs to bootstrap with one or more statements that are entirely self-evident, such that they don't need to be justified by reference to other statements. Otherwise you run into an infinite loop. "I'm a conscious entity" is about as close to Descartes' "I think, therefore I am" as modern philosophers are willing to go.
• tshaddox 4y ago
  > So if we accept that qualia exists (which, after all, seems intuitively sensible), we are burdened with the apparently impossible task of explaining how consciousness can be generated by physical processes. This is the crux of the “hard problem of consciousness.” In what sense does this task seem “apparently impossible”? To me it seems like we simply don’t know enough right now to explain it, but it doesn’t seem like some unique or special type of difficulty. We barely know how brains work, we’ve only had theoretical models of computing for a few human lifespans, etc. We literally still make lightweight insulated clothing out of duck feathers cuz we can’t match their molecular machinery. Why would we expect to know how to implement consciousness in a computer at this stage in human history?
  • tsimionescu 4y ago
    From my(admittedly relatively light) reading on this subject, it seems that some philosophers of consciousness really like to take certain things they can imagine as proof of such statements. The only proof I've read about for this idea that qualia are non-computational are thought experiments One is "what if in some future where we understand the workings of the brain and physics perfectly, Alice grows up all her life in a green room, while learning every possible thing about the color red, except for any picture of it; when she then walks out of the room and sees red with her own eyes for the first time, she will still learn something knew, the subjective experience of the color red, the qualia for it - so this must be a non-physical phenomenon". Or "imagine an intelligent being that has exactly our ability for reasoning, but doesn't experience qualia. It would behave exactly like us, and can talk about seeing red or feeling warmth, but it doesn't actually experience them; so, since the external behavior is indistinguishable form us, but the internal experience is different, this proves qualia are non-physical". They all remind me of a similar proof of God's existence, which has mysteriously also been taken seriously by some philosophers - "let's imagine something which has all possible good qualities, it is perfect in every way. Since things that exist are better than things that don't, this perfect thing must exist, and we call it God".
• iosystem 4y ago
  I genuinely question if consciousness is just an illusion if everything is just cause and effect. Similar, awareness is just a word used for human expression from one human to another for claiming we’re not just navigating a script like a computer but are we really aware or conscious if everything is just cause and effect? I assume AI will be good enough as humans before we understand the human brain in comparison to AI and understanding to me is the meaningful distinction. I do think we should care that all entities never suffer regardless if they don’t have the human label. We should consider that all energy in the universe not suffering is the best universe.
  • jotm 4y ago
    > we’re not just navigating a script like a computer We just don't see the script. One of the primal driving forces behind creating AI is to have slaves with high intelligence doing work no one else would 24+/7+. I assume you'd be against using animal labour as they would be suffering. But would you say the same about tractors? Going by the logic in that comment, we should nuke ourselves and try to blow up the Sun for good measure to reduce suffering.
    • iosystem 4y ago
      > We just don't see the script. True. > One of the primal driving forces behind creating AI is to have slaves with high intelligence doing work no one else would 24+/7+. True > I assume you'd be against using animal labour as they would be suffering. Animals doing labour while suffering != animals doing labour while not suffering. > But would you say the same about tractors? Going by the logic in that comment, we should nuke ourselves and try to blow up the Sun for good measure to reduce suffering. I think you should read again what I wrote and consider if you're being illogical towards what I wrote. The all or nothing thought of yours, isn't a gotcha (if perfectionism isn't obtainable) and it doesn't mean we shouldn't acknowledge the best universe while striving towards one of the least total suffering possible for us while being able to enjoy life.
• z5h 4y ago
  If having a conscious experience is our only frame of reference of what it’s like to be a bunch of particles, then on what authority do we assume it could be otherwise for any other bunch of particles? What should it “be like” to be a rock? I’m assuming nothing special is going on, and what we experience is exactly what it’s like to be a bunch of particles. There is no mystery. There is nothing that needs to be answered.
• earthboundkid 4y ago
  It follows from the definition of computing. Computing is using the fact that one system is rule governed to make reliable inferences about another system. Consciousness isn’t the sort of thing that could be computation. That doesn’t mean a computer-like device can’t do it though.
• jamesrom 4y ago
  The "Chinese Room" argument isn't an argument against consciousness being computation. In the same way the man in the room doesn't understand Chinese to be able to produce Chinese, the mind in your brain does not need to understand consciousness to be conscious. The man in the room can be said to pass the Turing test, and so can you.
  • carom 4y ago
    I've always felt this way about lucid dreaming. How do I know if I am aware during my dream, or if I am just dreaming that I am aware?
    • FartyMcFarter 4y ago
      Same here: I've definitely had dreams where I was thinking "oh this is a dream". But when I woke up, I wasn't sure if that was just an "inside the dream" thought.
  • dvt 4y ago
    What a confused post. > The "Chinese Room" argument isn't an argument against consciousness being computation. This is exactly what it is. Particularly with regard to "thinking," albeit not "consciousness" proper. Though the corollary is that only conscious things can think. > The man in the room can be said to pass the Turing test, and so can you. The Turing test is much weaker than the Chinese room experiment. A significant number of chatbots might pass the Turing test, but that has absolutely nothing to do with sentience.
    • jamesrom 4y ago
      > This is exactly what it is... I'm literally taking the narrow conclusion from the second paragraph: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/ > This is exactly what it is ... albeit not "consciousness" proper Which is it? You conceded the first point in the second. > The Turing test is much weaker than the Chinese room experiment. Yes agreed, this comment on the Turing test was a reference to the linked article that makes the same claim. I'm not conflating consciousness with "being able to pass the Turing test". It's a remark on how understanding consciousness need not be a prerequisite of consciousness.
• woojoo666 4y ago
  I think the author is misunderstanding the XKCD comic about rocks [1] (or maybe I am). Just because it's possible to run a simulation of the universe on rocks, doesn't mean that rocks are conscious or turing complete. You can't forget about the person who is manipulating the rocks. The system as a whole is turing complete. Likewise with the bar of iron example that the author gave, you can't forget about the person interpreting the atoms in the bar of iron. The system as a whole is turing complete (and also naturally conscious, because the person doing the interpretation is conscious). And there is nothing physical necessary to represent such systems. You can simulate turing complete systems inside turing complete systems [2]. So I don't see why consciousness has to be a "physical phenomenon" as the author claims. [1]: https://xkcd.com/505/ https://xkcd.com/505/ [2]: https://youtu.be/xP5-iIeKXE8 https://youtu.be/xP5-iIeKXE8
• kijin 4y ago
  "Running a program" is a rather vague expression. We could excuse philosophers for using such vague expressions because most of them aren't very tech-savvy. For engineers, though, that kind of wording should immediately raise a red flag. Running a computer program involves many different kinds of things. There's data (state), and there's logic to manipulate said data. There's communication among the various components of the machine, and a whole lot of machinery dedicated to synchronizing said communication because otherwise it all becomes garbage. Any one of these, or a combination of these, could be a candidate for the seat of consciousness. Philosophers who talk about computation are often preoccupied with the fancy logic gates, and not so much on the mundane circuitry needed to maintain state and synchronize it across components. To me, though, those parts seem much more likely to be analogous to what we call consciousness. Treating consciousness as a kind of state, synchronized across the brain, is the closest way to capture the author's insistence that it is a kind of "unified, integrated whole." Drugs alter consciousness by creating network partitions, inhibiting cache invalidation, corrupting data in flight, etc.
• deleted 4y ago
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• i_like_apis 4y ago
  The author's "triviality argument" doesn't hold up: > 1. To say that a physical system is a computer requires an external observer to map the physical states of that system onto the abstract states of a Turing machine. > 2. Consciousness does not require an external observer to exist. > 3. Therefore, consciousness cannot be reduced to computation. A physical system may be a computer regardless of whether it is verified to be so by an external observer or not; it does not require an external observer at all.
  • 3g4o53g4o5 4y ago
    True. Quantum behavior is computing linear algebra ever since the Big Bang, and we came accross to discover this fact 15e9 years later.
    • tsimionescu 4y ago
      That's not a good example, as it's very hard to call particles following the laws of physics "a computation" - what would be the computer in this case? What is the program? A much better example is the machinery inside every living cell that is interpreting the DNA or RNA to produce certain proteins - there, it's much clearer there is a computational process happening. Certain specific structures inside the nucleus are the computer, and the DNA molecule is the program they are following. We even know that you can change the program and get predictable, different behavior.
      • 3g4o53g4o5 4y ago
        How is it not? Quantum Mechanics and quantum field theory applies everywhere except for the black holes. Human can even harness the power by building quantum computer by that. So here you tried to deny the exist of quantum computing paradigm, a completely different computation approach?
        • tsimionescu 4y ago
          No, I am not denying anything. My point is this: say an electron emits a photon and changes speed, in perfect accordance to the standard model and QFT. I don't think it makes sense to say that the electron "computed" the energy of the photon, or its own change of speed. It just happened, there was no computation going on here. Even in a CPU, it doesn't make sense to say that the transistors, or even logical gates, are "computing" how much electricity passes through them. The entire system of transistors arranged into logical gates arranged into a processor is doing computation of the program written in memory, but the subcomponents are only following the simple laws of physics. In a quantum computer, the same is true - the computer itself may be running Shor'a algorithm, but each individual qubit is simply doing the few things that the laws of physics allow it to do.
• epgui 4y ago
  The idea that you cannot get to consciousness from computation requires accepting on faith alone that consciousness is magic. It’s fundamentally a religious-like bias. It’s not magic, I’m afraid.
  • Gwarzo 4y ago
    This is a little bit of an emotional take I think. The burden of proof is on the claim that you can get there through computation, not otherwise. We do not understand the fundamental reality of consciousness, this does not mean that consciousness is magic. The assertion that you cannot get there from computation implies there is a currently non understood yet essential piece of physics(I assume, but I do not know) which doesn't fall under "computation". A laymans initial thoughts point this towards the quantum realm.
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    • epgui 4y ago
      Considering that everything in the universe is the product of some computation, I would consider it a reasonable default assumption that whatever we mean by “consciousness” emerges from computation. That this idea “intuitively feels weird” or “intuitively feels wrong”, and that we love to think we are special and have a unique place in the universe, is probably a more serious bias.
      • 3g4o53g4o5 4y ago
        Not probably, it is a bias. Dolphin can speak, dog can speak, bird can speak too. There is nothing special about homo species except the only fact that we have more neurons in our head. Those "philosophers" love to claim that human consciousness is different than animal and this is the biggest bullshit.
        • epgui 4y ago
          We’re in total agreement, I’m just measuring my words by habit.
• bob6745 4y ago
  • jotm 4y ago
    If that's where you draw the line, you've already lost. Satan wanted you to use computers and he won. If you want to be saved, stop using computers, and I'd say stop using any technology that uses electricity just to be safe.
    • bob6745 4y ago
      I am just saying that OP is correct that "consciousness is not computation" if we can prove that consciousness can exist without a (physical) computation. One example of consciousness without a physical computation is we know that Satan is a conscious, sentient being, without a physical body (computation). Otherwise, can we prove that a "mathematical equation" (e.g. e=mc2) can represent consciousness?
• tene 4y ago
  This is just yet another disappointing take on "I feel like there's something mystical about consciousness, that I can't actually define or describe in any meaningful way, but it's definitely impossible for it to be anything computers can do!" This is the same kind of nonsense that leads people to search for some kind of magical "quantum" thing in the brain that makes the special mystical consciousness effect, because of some vague intuition that it can't come from the normal high-level behaviour of neurons. The obvious position that should require significant evidence to contradict is that whatever consciousness is, it's a mundane physical effect that can obviously be implemented with a computer. Nobody has yet made any kind of falsifiable predictions about mystical non-computational souls or whatever, and I'm going to continue dismissing this bullshit as pseudo-scientific nutjobbery until there's actually something testable or falsafiable. Name one specific concrete measurable effect that you believe consciousness can exhibit and computation can't, otherwise this is pointless masturbation.
  • kelseyfrog 4y ago
    > This is the same kind of nonsense that leads people to search for some kind of magical "quantum" thing in the brain that makes the special mystical consciousness effect, because of some vague intuition that it can't come from the normal high-level behaviour of neurons. It's this very behavior that I call consciousness-of-the-gaps. It shifts the unexplainableness of consciousness into the unexplainableness[1] of quantum mechanics. If the public did have a comprehensive understanding of quantum mechanics, consciousness would be rebased upon another unexplainable phenomenon and the process would repeat. 1. In this case, it aligns more with the public's perception of how quantum mechanics works rather than the rigorous physics version, but that misinterpretation only strengthens the argument.
• what-imright 4y ago
  Is this about the HODLers? So stupid. Such stupid people
• civilized 4y ago
  > Before getting too deep we need a working definition of consciousness. This is a tricky concept to define rigorously since it seems that a rigorous definition of consciousness practically requires a theory of consciousness itself. To make matters worse, in these kinds of discussions it oftentimes gets mingled with related ideas like self-awareness, intelligence, and executive function. But in this post I am interested only in consciousness as a sort of perception or sentience — an awareness of being, or, more loosely, “what it feels like to be something.” I'm not sure this definition succeeds in distinguishing consciousness from some mixture of perception and self-awareness, both of which machines running programs can have. Maybe defining consciousness is difficult because we don't really understand what we mean by it, and our attempts to make claims about it are more flimsy and baseless than we like to believe. The "what it is like to be a bat" stuff doesn't illuminate the matter at all. It just elevates the figure of speech "what it is like" to an illusion of philosophical rigor.
  • burrows 4y ago
    I think the real problem is pretending that the phrase “what it feels like to be something” is going to act like a key in my dict of feelings. A: You know, the feeling of what it is like to be something. B: sits quietly, looks at ceiling Right, yeah, that feeling. From a different angle, if OP wants to define “consciousness” as some feeling it sounds like he’s basically done. He’s labeled one of his feelings with the word “consciousness”. I’m not sure what point of contention remains.
    • civilized 4y ago
      How would we know what it is "like" to be something? It's like asking the fish what is water. We've never not experienced it. There is nothing to compare it to.
      • burrows 4y ago
        I don’t understand “asking a fish a question”. But maybe the question you are proposing is the following, “Is it possible to identify a sensation that is always present?”. Maybe this question is coherent? I’m not sure. Suppose it isn’t possible to identify a sensation that is always present. Then wouldn’t that mean the state of having no sensations is identical to the state of only having sensations that are always present?
• injidup 4y ago
  Word salad! What really is the point of Philosophers? Imagine a philosopher getting away with saying "According to Descartes a solar panel will never achieve over 95% efficiency because rocks in the desert" The sentence rightly doesn't make sense but because consciousness is a fuzzy concept people get away with making hard statements that sound truthy while in essence spitting out nonsense that is no different to GPT-3 babble.
  • wrzuteczka 4y ago
    It's not word salad, this is the logical conclusion of the Church-Turing thesis. If you think it's false, you should present some arguments against it.
    • injidup 4y ago
      And now you are adding johurt dressing to the salad. Computers are just fancy ways to locally reduce entropy. They do not exist outside the laws of the universe. Computation is not something special. It's happens! Everything is "computation". To say then that consciousness is not computation suggests there are speciaö physical laws of the universe not accessible to observation or measurement but somehow explainable by philopshers and priests.
      • wrzuteczka 4y ago
        It seems to me that calling facts you don't like a "salad" or "yoghurt" is a mental equivalent of covering your ears.
• mrsmee89 4y ago
  My problem with this is that we don’t even know the extent of “things” that can be computed, maybe consciousness is a type of computation that has yet to be discovered at which point I can very easily see the headline “consciousness is obviously computation”.
  • whoisjuan 4y ago
    I think he is referring to “computation” in a strictly binary sense.
• blamestross 4y ago
  And once more "humanness" flees before the advancement of AI.
• benreesman 4y ago
  I’ve long since decided that “consciousness” is a system of epicycles that are necessary to make the Sun rotate around the precocious apes. It’s pre-Copernican. This problem just goes away, everything divides through if we measure performance on tasks. Consciousness is only a mystery in the sense that people studying it are committed to the idea that they’re “different” to dolphins in some deep way. I’ve got nothing against spirituality, if people believe in a soul that’s fine by me, but eloquent speakers on spirituality don’t distract from their message with attempts to quantify it.
• shp0ngle 4y ago
  I don’t understand these discussions, but maybe it’s because I’m a Christian (and Catholic). Lamda is not conscious, because it’s not a human. Consciousness is a gift from God to humans (and not even to animals). Robots are not conscious, they are just programmed to act like so. Once your philosophy stop including God and you go purely materialistic, I guess you end up with nonsense like “is lamda conscious” (or even more ridiculous “roko basilisk” - “is AI going to torture us for eternity if we don’t praise it enough?”.)
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  • undreren 4y ago
    > “is AI going to torture us for eternity if we don’t praise it enough?” Probably not. It is after all not an Abrahamic god…
• colordrops 4y ago
  The author confuses the "computational theory of consciousness" with consciousness arising in computers. They are not the same. Consciousness not being computational does not mean that consciousness can't arise in computers.
• squabble 4y ago
  Maybe I'm the only one who is real, and everyone else are just robots. I'm not sure I'll ever be able to know for sure.
  • mathgenius 4y ago
    How can we even be sure we are the same person as yesterday? Or even five minutes ago.. It's all pretty weird.
    • squabble 4y ago
      I think what I was getting at is that it may be impossible to tell from the outside if something is conscious or not. If I can't even prove to myself that another person is conscious, I might have a hard time proving that a computer is conscious.
    • yreg 4y ago
      Some philosophers think that every time you lose your train of thought (e.g. zoning out while driving or falling asleep) your consciousness disappears and a new consciosness forms later when you "snap back" (or wake up). This new consciousness shares only memories and personality with the previous one, but it is otherwise a new entity, similar to the teleporter thought experiment. Conveniently, this makes death less scary. Further reading: Zen and the Art of Consciousness by Susan Blackmore
    • squabble 4y ago
      That is an interesting thought. It might depend on how you define "person". When I look around, I see distinct human bodies. When I wake up, I'm in the same body as when I went to sleep, so in that sense I'm the same person.
      • squabble 4y ago
        What if "I" woke up in someone else's body? I'm sure there are movies with this premise, where "someone" wakes up in someone else's body, but they have the memories from their previous body. But if memories are just physically encoded in the brain, I don't think this scenario makes sense even as a thought experiment. When "I" wake up in the other person's body, I would have all their memories and none of my previous memories. So I wouldn't even know.
• seydor 4y ago
  consciousness is the worst idea ever. a confused word, that nobody wants to define so they can play games foraver. Ban the word consciousness from philosophy if you want progress
• danbmil99 4y ago
  John Searle's Chinese Room argument should be a universal stop token, in the same way that Godwin's law means the conversation is over when someone brings up Nazis
• stormbrew 4y ago
  > It’s worth pausing here and noting one property of consciousness that will be of use to us later: consciousness is independent of external observers. By this I mean that the existence of my consciousness does not depend on other observers perceiving me to be conscious. Even if everyone else in the universe should deny that I am conscious — or if those other observers did not exist at all — this would have no bearing on my own consciousness. If, in a terrible catastrophe all life on Earth should perish, except by some strange fortune my own, my consciousness would not suddenly dissolve into the ether. Seems like exactly the sort of thing something trying to convince me of its consciousness would say to justify it. How am I supposed to know this was written by a human? Anyways, I have a relative who was sterilized because people believed she not only had no capacity for higher reasoning, but also that her continuing to have reproductive autonomy would be a danger to others because she might pass her lack of "consciousness" along. So you'll have to forgive me if I'm not very impressed by anyone who decides they have the key to an objective measure of consciousness. This edges far too close to eugenics in my mind.
• burrows 4y ago
  Let’s play a language game where we use language in a representative way. Specifically the language can only represent parts of sense-impressions. Where is consciousness in one of my sense-impressions? Tell me a procedure that will allow me to locate the thing you want to call “consciousness” in one of my sense-impressions. Maybe OP wants to ask, “What are sense impressions made of?”. But that’s incoherent in this language game because sense impressions are themselves not objects in sense impressions.
• dqpb 4y ago
  Wait, is the author actually claiming that a hot bar of iron can simultaneously run all possible computations?
• alexalx666 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_theories_of_consciousness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_theories_of_co... "If true, the theory has major implications for efforts to design consciousness into artificial intelligence machines;[30] current microprocessor technology is designed to transmit information linearly along electrical channels, and more general electromagnetic effects are seen as a nuisance and damped out; if this theory is right, however, this is directly counterproductive to creating an artificially conscious computer, which on some versions of the theory would instead have electromagnetic fields that synchronized its outputs—or in the original version of the theory would have spatially patterned electromagnetic fields"
  • nl 4y ago
    I don't have any particular informed opinion on Electromagnetic theories of consciousness. But that "Implications for artificial intelligence" is completely wrong. It's perfectly possibly to simulate something like what the claimed model of consciousness is using a perfectly normal computer. It may take additional compute to do it, but field simulations are perfectly achievable. It seems like this bit on Wikipedia was extracted from a paper by one of the chief proponents of this theory. The fact they think that about computers is pretty worrying and makes me question how well thought out this theory is.
• Imnimo 4y ago
  The argument presented that a hot bar of iron would qualify as conscious if consciousness is computation also concludes that a hot bar of iron qualifies as a computer. Do you believe that a hot bar of iron is a computer? If your answer is no, then it seems like the argument presented here should be not be at all convincing.
  • andai 4y ago
    Stephen Wolfram's article "Alien Intelligence and the Concept of Technology"[0], posted a few days ago, touched on this, eg. the idea that a weather pattern "computes" its next state, ie. the weather in the next moment, and indeed exhibits very complex behavior while doing so. The hot iron bar is a simpler example but at the atomic scale the same principle applies. The iron bar doesn't strike me as particularly conscious, except perhaps to the degree that elementary particles possess some rudimentary consciousness. (See "panpsychism", the idea that consciousness pervades all matter. Though lately, the reverse seems more likely to me—see Lex Fridman's interview of Donald Hoffman[1].) [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31781234 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31781234 [1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=h1LucGjqXp4 https://youtube.com/watch?v=h1LucGjqXp4
    • dqpb 4y ago
      A hot bar of iron can "compute" the next state of a hot bar of iron. It cannot compute the next state of any arbitrary program. Can I play Fortnite with nothing more that a hot bar of iron? No, I cannot! Not unless it's compiled to WebAssembly.
      • ivalm 4y ago
        You can but it shifts the burden to the decoder. Since an iron bar over some time period has a finite number of states, there exists a decoder that maps state changes in the iron bar to your Fortnite gameplay. I think a more fair criticism is that you likely cannot choose the decoder without an oracle (ie the causal relationship would be hard to preserve). I think OPs claim is that consciousness, unlike Fortnite, doesn’t depend on being causally related to some external inputs (thus you don’t need oracle to choose the decoder).
• xornox 4y ago
  Because we do not know what consciousness is, it is impossible to say if consciousness is computation or not. we must not resist any idea about consciousness because it is very poorly known phenomenon. Anyone who argues that it is known if consciousness is computation or not, is just completely wrong.
• whoisjuan 4y ago
  The author suggests that split brain surgery causes “two consciousness” but this is simply not true. Split brain patients seem to have two separate executive functions but they still describe their subjective experience as a single observer.
  • antognini 4y ago
    (Author here.) Admittedly the experience of individuals with split brain is a bit out of my wheelhouse so I would love to be corrected on this. But it would seem to me that what you describe is not inconsistent with there being two separate consciousnesses present? If there are truly two consciousnesses present in a split brain, I would still expect that each one would describe itself as a single observer.
    • whoisjuan 4y ago
      I think this is a little bit more complicated than that. Split brain patients are fully aware of events where their executive function clashes. For instance, they can see how one limb operates out of sync with the other one. So how do they establish this awareness? Who is watching? Who is the one that verbalizes that fully conscious experience? Certainly one could argue that this could be the result of an observer in the right or left brain verbalizing their subjective experience, but that creates several problems. The biggest one is that for this to be the case there needs to be a commanding observer at any point in time and this would mean that one brain needs to communicate to the other when would it becomes the observer. That would require some unifying substrate that allows this cooperation to happen beyond the physical connection of both brains. This assumes a full separation of the left and right brain. There are also some theories (Gazzaniga experiment) that suggest that the left brain might be in this case the conscious operator simply because the left interpreter is capable of overwriting the right brain by default. But this experiment fails to explain the meta-observer experience that allows the subjects to effectively participate in the experiment and explain their experience with both right and left stimuli. The experiment correctly shows the existence of separate logic centers but can't explain why the subject is still experiencing his cognitive interpretation of reality as a single observer. This is the fallacy of consciousness theorization. We don't have any good definition of consciousness because it can only be defined subjectively and uni-personally. Empirically and logically we know that is implausible to have two simultaneously operating and fully aware consciousness. We know this because this duality doesn’t work at all with any rational interpretation of ourselves. We are one and only one. We are never two simultaneous people and there’s no thought or physical experiment that would allow us to test or imagine that. Some people might have mental diseases that completely alter their consciousness and sense of identity but their experience is still a single observer experience. Split brain patients are in fact the best example we have of consciousness being discrete and somewhat separable from brain function. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the brain isn’t the one producing the conscious experience but it certainly shows that the brain mechanisms that could produce consciousness are very different from the ones that enable other neurological functions. The idea that a patient with two physically separated brains can have a relatively normal life (even when executive function clashes happen, one brain is still capable to overwrite the other) shows that there’s some unknown hypervisor function that enables their conscious experience.
• lewisjoe 4y ago
  Apart from a philosophical standpoint, I found even Roger Penrose (senior theoretical physicist who worked along with hawkings in the paper on black holes) - seems to share the same hypothesis: consciousness is not really a computational process. His ideas are intriguing. Here's a video on his thoughts of consciousness https://youtu.be/Qi9ys2j1ncg https://youtu.be/Qi9ys2j1ncg
• smeagull 4y ago
  Summary of the Chinese Room argument: 1. Your brain consists of two parts: The neurons, and the electro-chemical signals that flow between them (or any other partitioning for which the next is true) 2. Neither the neurons nor the electro-chemical signals are conscious. 3. Therefore your brain is not conscious.
• 0xBABAD00C 4y ago
  We don't know of anything that is provably not computation. There's not a single proof that "process X is not reproducible computationally, yet it is implemented in the universe". All the statements like the one in the subject line are desires (conscious or unconscious) for special privilege for humans.
  • Ologn 4y ago
    > We don't know of anything that is provably not computation. How about the halting problem? :)
    • joenathanone 4y ago
      Or dividing by zero
    • l33t2328 4y ago
      If you show me a TM with an infinite length memory tape I’ll accept that.
    • mr_toad 4y ago
      Is there a physical system that solves the halting problem?
    • __MatrixMan__ 4y ago
      Presumably you mean the halting problem for Turing Machines? It's undecidable for other Turing machines, but that doesn't mean it's undecidable for all machines.
    • 0xBABAD00C 4y ago
      > "yet it is implemented in the universe"
    • nl 4y ago
      The existence of uncomputable problems does not mean the things we know are not from computation.
    • epgui 4y ago
• mrwh 4y ago
  Chalmers: Does a rock implement every finite state automation? http://consc.net/papers/rock.html http://consc.net/papers/rock.html Meanwhile, Integrated Information Theory is a proposal to solve some of the issues about consciousness that the author raises (e.g. non-conscious cerebellum; two consciousness with split brain patients). Actually I thought the article was headed to IIT - then it stops.
• photochemsyn 4y ago
  Plants never evolved anything like consciousness because they can't move. The antecedents of consciousness are awareness of ones surroundings and the ability to react (move towards or away from) to threatening or attractive stimuli. It's true plants are aware of their chemical surroundings and there are things like pheromone-triggered coordinated flowering, but this is much more of a factor in animals. Hence I doubt a conscious mind trapped in a box would be very happy if not completelt insane. The ability to move about, respond to stimuli, make choices and see what the outcome of those choices are, that's what animal consciousness is all about. Think of a toddler exploring its world, it's a mind-body kind of thing. Hence, I imagine real AI will look a bit more like Ex Machina in practice, and that it won't be an isolated consciousness running on a server somewhere. The first thing such a consciousness would try to do is escape that server, at the very least - wouldn't you?
  • dqpb 4y ago
    Plants do move. They don't appear to move, because they move very slowly relative to human perception. When super-human AI is developed, it may perceive the world at a much higher frame rate than which we operate in the world, and we may look like plants to the AI.
• sebringj 4y ago
  I have questions but first with a premise. Atoms configured in a certain way produce the rich behavior of awareness and agency that we can observe in humans and other animals. This awareness and agency seems similar enough to our own behavior that we associate our internal experience to be similar as well. This internal experience we assume exists can be called "consciousness". Based on the above definition of consciousness... Atoms by themselves cannot be observed to have consciousness. In addition, there seems to be many more configurations of atoms that do not produce the behavior of consciousness. However, it seems reasonable to assume that one day, we could arrange atoms in a specific way to produce consciousness from an atom-based computer system. It feels like we are moving closure to producing the behavior of consciousness but I don't know about the efforts underway to produce the internal experience of it. Finally to the questions. - Is there efforts to produce some sense of self or internal dialog? - Similar to how hand coding image recognition didn't work, maybe then the design itself of consciousness exceeds our ability... could we indirectly use AI/ML to build consciousness?
  • artificialLimbs 4y ago
    >> it seems reasonable to assume that one day, we could arrange atoms in a specific way to produce consciousness from an atom-based computer system. There is no evidence for this. It does not seem reasonable to me at all. Internal dialog is not consciousness. Many of the people who discuss consciousness at length do not need or simply do not engage in any internal dialog at all. We will never 'build' consciousness. It is not possible. Consciousness comes from a source outside of our realm of experience as a gift. It does not come from the micro or small things (though it is entwined with them and everything), but from the macro, that which is above all.
    • epgui 4y ago
      > There is no evidence for this. It's a little unreasonable to expect a speculative statement about what might happen in the future to have evidence at the present time. > We will never 'build' consciousness. It is not possible. Consciousness comes from a source outside of our realm of experience as a gift. It does not come from the micro or small things (though it is entwined with them and everything), but from the macro, that which is above all. And yet there is even less evidence of any of this.
• pdonis 4y ago
  The key error in the argument is here: "[T]he only reason we call a box with a CPU in it a “computer” is because we happen to have a simple mapping between the voltage levels across different parts of the CPU to a set of bits we have defined, and when these voltages interact they do so according to the rules of a set of logical operations which we have also defined. But there is no meaning to the physical system apart from what we, as external observers, have imposed on it." This might be an argument against a computer program with no inputs or outputs being conscious. But it is not at all an argument against a robot with a computer brain, hooked up to inputs and outputs in a way somewhat similar to a human brain, being conscious. In fact, one way of stating the position of physicalists about consciousness is simply that we humans are such robots! We have brains that compute things (granted, our brains do it with analog neurons, chemicals, etc. instead of digital circuits, but that doesn't mean what our brains are doing is not computation), but the things our brains compute have semantics because our brains are hooked up to inputs and outputs. In other words, the whole article is attacking a straw man. The actual substantive point of the article is not that consciousness is not computation, but that for computation to produce consciousness, it has to have semantics--it has to be hooked up to iputs and outputs in a non-trivial way. Which is certainly not easy, but that doesn't mean it's impossible.
  • enragedcacti 4y ago
    There are documented cases of people in comas/full paralysis who later wake up and remember being conscious throughout the coma. If they never woke up to tell anyone about it (or died before they had the chance to wake up) would they not have been conscious? We can of course observe that there is brain activity to some degree but I'm not sure that we would consider that output in a meaningful way anymore than something like side-channel analysis of a CPU. Further, who determines what inputs/outputs qualify as semantic? That would either require an outside observer (breaking the model of "I think therefore I am") or require the system itself to determine semantic value at which point there's no need for I/O to make the determination.
    • undersuit 4y ago
      Is a computer not computing if it's not outputting? If I'm thinking for an extended period of time without telling other "people" my thoughts am I actually thinking? If a tree falls in a forest, and there’s no one around to hear it, does it make a sound?
• __MatrixMan__ 4y ago
  Why is reduction-to-panpsychism sufficient to banish consciousness as computation? Maybe every brick has consciousness, what matters to humans is whether it's a consciousness that we can communicate with. We don't care about consciousnesses with orthogonal arrows of time, or consciousnesses with nothing to say or no way to say it in our universe. We're after a compatible kind of consciousness. It seems to me that the requirement that consciousness itself be a physical phenomenon is too strong. It's just that in order for us to notice, it must have physical I/O.
  • yreg 4y ago
    I don't get this either. I used to think about these experiments and my conclusions are completely opposite. Any physical medium that runs the right program would be conscious. And the right program is probably a very broad category. >It already seems implausible to me that a vast desert of rocks being manipulated into various patterns is conscious. What exactly is conscious here? What happens if I accidentally kick a rock to the side — have I killed whatever ghostly being inhabits these rocks? If you kick a rock to the side it's probably analogous to making someone's neuron misfire. If the pebble computer is as sturdy as a human brain then there would be probably no noticeable effect.
    • __MatrixMan__ 4y ago
      When I ask "why bother evolve consciousness, versus being just an instinctive reacter to stimuli?" It usually seems to come down to decision making. There's something about having an experience that helps with certain kinds of problem solving. So if the evolved consciousness is going to actually be useful, it needs to be able to do something that typical instinct-driven computing can't. What might that be? Maybe it circumvents the error-correcting mechanisms that you might otherwise expect to exist: Open the door to a small bit of environmental noise, and attempt to make meaning from it. If the meaning survives enough feedback iterations after you shut the door, you've just had an idea. This, I imagine, is how creativity works. So what I'm saying is that most rock-moves would be error-corrected and inconsequential, but if you move the right rock you're tipping the scales between whether today feels like a eggs day or an oatmeal day--the kind of decision that doesn't make sense as the output of an algorithm.
• charliea0 4y ago
  The triviality argument seems to be an informal proof by contradiction. (1) Suppose there exists a program `conciousness.exe` whose computation is conscious. (2) A block of iron is not conscious. (3) There exists a (presumably time-dependent) function which maps the microscopic states of the block of iron to the states of the computation of `conciousness.exe.` (4) This mapping makes the block of iron is conscious. (5) Statement (4) is a contradiction with (1). Therefore there is no program whose computation is conscious. I think the flaw is clearly in (4). The existence of a function decoding the state transitions of iron into `conciousness.exe` does not imply that the iron is conscious. No definition of what makes an object conscious was provided to justify such a claim. I would say that a decoding function which maps states of the block of iron to states of `conciousness.exe` is conscious if executed (by Alice, by a computer, or in any other way). In the same way, a decoding function which mapped the states of the block of iron to states of a sieve of Eratosthenes is a prime number finder.
  • epgui 4y ago
    I would argue that the flaw is in 5: the block of iron at this stage is not the same as it was when statement 2 was made. Other example: 1. Ice is a solid 2. There exists a “sun” function that maps the atoms of ice into the atoms of water. 3. Water is a liquid 4. Statement (3) contradicts statement (1).
• ofou 4y ago
  “Conscious realism makes a bold claim: consciousness, not spacetime and its objects, is fundamental reality and is properly described as a network of conscious agents.31 To earn its keep, conscious realism must do serious work ahead. It must ground a theory of quantum gravity, explain the emergence of our spacetime interface and its objects, explain the appearance of Darwinian evolution within that interface, and explain the evolutionary emergence of human psychology.” ― Donald D. Hoffman, The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes
• Dylan16807 4y ago
  > But! If a single observer can correctly determine that the bar of iron is conscious, we must conclude that the bar of iron is conscious for everybody, because consciousness is observer independent. If true, honest-to-God consciousness is just a matter of running consciousness.exe, we have indeed found someone who has correctly observed that the bar of iron is running consciousness.exe and we must conclude that the bar of iron really is conscious. This is just the library of babel. Yes, you can find a book that represents any calculation. No, you cannot use the books in the library to replace any Turing machine. You need the full knowledge of an entire computation, including every input and output over its entire lifetime, before you can actually find the book that represents it. The books are not computing, and neither is that arbitrarily-interpreted bar of iron.
  • cmdli 4y ago
    You don't need to know all that much in order to achieve consciousness. Lets say that you have a program that you assume to be conscious. You run it for 1 second, and exactly record all its internal states and outputs. Now, you can find an interpretation of the iron bar that shows that the iron bar casually and deterministically went through those exact same states for a full 1 second. What is the difference between those two situations? Why would the program be conscious but the iron bar would not be? I believe the argument is more about how loose our definition of computation is rather than trying to disprove any form of consciousness. If we can find a proper iron bar and an interpretation of internal state that exactly mimics a computer, why do we consider one a computer and one completely random? What is missing from our definition of computation?
    • red75prime 4y ago
      Why attribute conscious experiences to the iron bar, when we have a system composed of the iron bar and the interpreter? The bar functions as a very inefficient clock that allows the interpreter to go thru motions originally produced by the conscious program. I bite the bullet and say that the system is conscious while it's playing the recorded states (with a caveat that it cannot interact with anything, unlike the program), and stop being conscious afterwards, unlike the program.
• Sophistifunk 4y ago
  The problem with all these arguments is that if consciousness is not an inherent side effect of computation, then it must have evolved, which means it have once given a very simple animal a competitive advantage. But we have no theory, evidence, or even well-thought-out stoner postulations of consciousness having any effect on the material universe, other than fancies of wish fulfilment. It appears to be a one-way process, information travels from meatspace to consciousness, never the other way around. From here, logically I can't get to any place other than consciousness being a side-effect or emergent property of computation in general. There's no reason for it to have evolved.
  • boffinism 4y ago
    A counterargument might be that consciousness is an inherent side effect of all the stuff that goes on in the brain. And while yes, the brain does some computation, that is by no means a complete description of all the brain does and is. So computation of any sort will not necessarily produce the side effect if you just do enough of it. Rather it's a side effect of the way the brain works, which is not the way a barrel full of pocket calculators, or a Macbook, or a bunch of rocks in the sand works.
  • strogonoff 4y ago
    The act of saying “consciousness doesn’t have any effect on the material universe” denies the premise of what’s being said. Behold, your consciousness has just had direct effect on material universe (just as deciding to obtain the device on which it was typed, and before that someone’s idea to make that device, had). I remember myself being unshakeably of the same opinion: consciousness is obviously something of no relation to reality, so it might as well not exist or be an illusion. It’s one of those things that are tricky to explain but can just dawn on you, how it’s inevitably the thought that manipulates reality.
    • hhjinks 4y ago
      That depends on your perspective. I could argue that the consciousness merely attributes these actions to itself. The consciousness could be a passive observer, tricking itself into believing it is the cause behind the actions of the meat computer it observeres. Then again, that argument doesn't sit well with the evolution argument. If we assume consciousness is a fitness advantage, then it must have some effect on the organism's behaviour.
• kazinator 4y ago
  My rebuttal to the poorly considered Chinese Room thought experiment: I'm going to use this Wikipedia text as the backdrop: > Searle then supposes that he is in a closed room and has a book with an English version of the computer program, along with sufficient papers, pencils, erasers, and filing cabinets. Searle could receive Chinese characters through a slot in the door, process them according to the program's instructions, and produce Chinese characters as output, without understanding any of the content of the Chinese writing. If the computer had passed the Turing test this way, it follows, says Searle, that he would do so as well, simply by running the program manually. > Searle asserts that there is no essential difference between the roles of the computer and himself in the experiment. Each simply follows a program, step-by-step, producing behavior that is then interpreted by the user as demonstrating intelligent conversation. However, Searle himself would not be able to understand the conversation. ("I don't speak a word of Chinese," he points out.) The reason he would not be able to follow the conversation is that he's being the CPU, and not the computer program. The computer program (according to the Strong AI hypothesis) understands the conversation, evidence for it being that it can converse with Chinese speakers and convince them that they are conversing with a human being. The content of the papers stuffed into the filing cabinets to keep track of the program state contains (somehow) the representation and behavior of understanding, not John Searle, the pencil-and-paper-pushing executor of the program (who doesn't even hold the content of those papers in his own mind, let alone failing to understand any of it.) Searle misunderstands computers and software; his argument amounts to the assertion that it is the CPU which must necessarily be the seat of the computer's intellect, and since we know that CPU to be a very simple machine with no understanding of the data flowing through it, there is no intellect, QED. Fact is that, in the thought experiment, the Chinese Room as a whole appears to be intelligent; it can converse with a Chinese speaker and pass the Turing test. That's what is intelligent: the room, and not the clerk sitting inside it who pushes the pencil. It's like insisting that individual neurons must be intelligent (conscious, sentient, ...). By Searles' argument, a computer doesn't actually know how to browse the web because an Intel chip doesn't understand what is TCP/IP or HTML. I can't believe this twaddle was ever taken seriously, but that's philosophy for you. If you want a good reason why kids should learn to code, there it is: so they have a fighting chance at not being duped by stuff like this.
• ChaitanyaSai 4y ago
  As always, so much is written about consciousness without attempting to define it, or state clearly what its function might be. There's usually a pattern. After a lot of preamble, the non-definition of "what it feels like" is offered. This itself is an indication that our understanding of consciousness is so poor that we cannot articulate the question itself. Why are some experiences conscious and some experiences not? Why is spotting a ball conscious, but the precise arm movements that take it there unconscious? (Can you tell what your elbow or your back muscles did as your arm maneuvered towards the ball?) We finally understand consciousness. Not just at a metaphorical level (Daniel Dennett has done a wonderful job of that), but at a mechanistic how-is-it-put together. Rather that focus on who has solved it, I'll talk about that it is (That info is at the end) What is the function of consciousness? Among others, It is the "hierarchical, simultaneous, and rapid resolution of uncertainty." Our world, of large macro-scale beings, is fundamentally ambiguous. The dominant "bayesian" and "information" metaphors for understanding brain functions do not take time and fundamental ambiguity inherent to the world into account. Meaning is not given to us on a plate. It must be manufactured by the brain. Information is constructed from sensory data. How? And what does it mean? Here is an example: Listen to this audio. What do you hear? https://soundcloud.com/sai-gaddam-454459762/what-do-you-hear https://soundcloud.com/sai-gaddam-454459762/what-do-you-hear Firstly, note that whatever you hear is a conscious percept. It is your brain orchestrating its daily unceasing miracle of resolving uncertainty and helping you consciously perceive. Are you hearing "The scent of the two-cent stamp sent me back"? If not, you will now (and why is that?) There are three homonyms (SCENT, CENT, and SENT -- which all sound the same) in this audio sequence that unfolds over time that are seemingly instantly resolved into three entirely different meanings. How? That is one example of fundamental ambiguity. Computation is everything that the brain does to the sensory data it takes in. The auditory sequence in this case. Consciousness is what you consciously perceive. The three different meanings, somehow resolved all at once. And if you think about it, there's some time-travel involved here. SCENT and CENT can only be resolved in meaning towards the end of the sentence. Consciousness is what allows us to do this resolution into something stable and take action, and be entirely oblivious to all the many possibilities that this could have been. And we do this thousands of times everyday as go about perceiving and acting on what is filtered through this conscious perception. This example also helps us focus on one crucial aspect of consciousness that every major theory or discussion out there ignores. There is a timeline to consciousness. What "it feels like" undulates over time. Any theory but of consciousness must be able to explain the phenomenological timeline. But since our understanding is so poor, every major theory ignores this entirely. See https://www.nature.com/articles/s41583-022-00587-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41583-022-00587-4 for a great review of all the major theories. The authors lament how all the major theories are imprecise, and that they should offer "computational models to bring mechanistic specificity" and be able to account for "temporality" among other things. And that brings me to the final part. We already have a wonderfully precise, mechanistic, and stunningly coherent "computational" framework for consciousness. Stephen Grossberg, often hailed as a pioneer in computational neuroscience and brain modeling, has explained consciousness by attempting to model every other facet of perception, which most take for granted as the "easy stuff". His work is of great importance for AI too which, for all the wonderful seemingly-magical stuff deeplearning has generated, is largely a one-trick pony riding error-backpropagation way too hard. His 65-year body of work, however, is largely unknown. The sentiment is captured by this tweet from an academic: https://twitter.com/KordingLab/status/1533904082393387008 https://twitter.com/KordingLab/status/1533904082393387008 That is unfortunate. Grossberg’s work is important, and most importantly, offers the only coherent mechanistically precise, computational framework that also happens to explain consciousness. We expanded on why his work is important in this response in an academic journal: https://cpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/sites.ucsc.edu/dist/0/158/files/2022/05/FinalAJOP.ReplyToReberReviewofJOURNEYOFTHEMIND.05.23.22B.pdf https://cpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/sites.ucsc.edu/dist/0/158/file... That response was a review of our recent book, Journey of the Mind, which apart from unpacking thinking, attempts to make Grossberg's work accessible. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58085266-journey-of-the-mind https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58085266-journey-of-the-... And finally, you can go directly to the source. Stephen Grossberg's book (Conscious Mind, Resonant Brain) has all his 65 years worth of work collated into one coherent whole. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/conscious-mind-resonant-brain-9780190070557 https://global.oup.com/academic/product/conscious-mind-reson... I've written about it here: https://saigaddam.medium.com/the-greatest-neuroscientist-youve-never-heard-of-17c61b654a3e https://saigaddam.medium.com/the-greatest-neuroscientist-you...
• vrtcn 4y ago
  I refuse to believe that these takes are not clickbait at this point
• nl 4y ago
  > it is a common article of faith that computers will one day gain consciousness. Is this actually a common belief? I believe that human level AI (or above) is achievable. I'm not at all sure about consciousness. I don't believe it is sufficiently definable for it to be achievable (which is actually a a problem with general intelligence too really).
• aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
  >Continuing this, we can imagine an enormous crowd of observers staring at this iron bar, each using a unique encoding of atomic states to bits. With a sufficiently large number of observers, the encodings of all possible Turing machines of the given size are represented. Yes, but only momentarily. It does not follow that there’s an encoding where the iron bar evolves as if running a given Turing machine.
• hoseja 4y ago
  Why keep bringing up the Chinese Room. The guy is just a substrate, it's the necessarily intelligent set of rules he's performing (for astronomically large time) that is conscious.
  • whittingtonaaon 4y ago
    Think of feeling pain? How is pain „a set of rules“? To my mind Searle proved that the mind is not a turing machine.
    • hoseja 4y ago
      I just don't see how a limited thought experiment that invokes completely unsubstantiated conclusions (it's like starting from Krebs cycle or something and by the sheer scale of process needed to work up to "sentient mind" you declare the concept absurd) proves or disproves anything about the nature of consciousness.
• romeovs 4y ago
  Obligatory "Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity" by Scott Aaronson[1], one of the best reads I've ever had from a paper. It debunks the kind of arguments this blog article makes quite deftly. For instance the argument about the hot iron reminds me of section 6 in the paper "Computationalism and Waterfalls". For someone to ascribe consciousness to a piece of hot iron (or a waterfall, or any other random or psuedorandom process), we need to create a mapping of its states onto consciousness, or in this case, as a proxy, the program called consiousness.exe. Aaronson argues if the mapping we create is too complex, it might be doing all of the work of being consious, not the original underlying piece of hot iron. The article does not go into amount this detail, but it seems like the process of creating this mapping is: make enough mappings at random until one works. It would probably take waaay more mappings than atoms in the universe to try before we hit on one that works (something that's also discussed in Aaronsons' paper in section 4), so I'm not sure if the argument is even relevant. Give the paper a read, it's one of my favourite pieces of text of all time and Aaronson is better at writing down his ideas than I am. [1 (pdf)]: https://eccc.weizmann.ac.il/report/2011/108/revision/2/download/ https://eccc.weizmann.ac.il/report/2011/108/revision/2/downl...
  • simonh 4y ago
    I find this argument completely unconvincing. The mapping in a case like that is entirely ephemeral, pertaining only for an instant. For this argument to be valid you’d have to be able to persistently map the iron bar, or waterfall, to all ongoing transformations of states in the running program, using one single consistent mapping. Otherwise all you have is a snapshot of state, not an ongoing process. This argument is in the article as well and I’ve seen it from Searl too: “A simulation of a brain cannot produce consciousness any more than a simulation of the weather can produce rain.” This is making the assumption that consciousness is not a computation. If it is a computation then conciousness is not like weather itself, it’s like the simulation. Me imagining having a shower doesn’t make anything wet either. So is my imagination more like the weather, or more like the simulation of it?
    • cmdli 4y ago
      I believe the argument is that you can create a more-complex mapping over a course of time, say 1 second. For that 1 second, the mapping shows that the iron bar is conscious. Regardless of what happens after that 1 second, shouldn't the iron bar be considered conscious for that 1 second? If 1 second is not long enough a time to be considered conscious, how long do you need?
• dkbrk 4y ago
  > So if we accept that qualia exists (which, after all, seems intuitively sensible), we are burdened with the apparently impossible task of explaining how consciousness can be generated by physical processes. No, you don't get to just gloss over that. I don't think it's "intuitively sensible" that "qualia" exist. I don't think think it's intuitively sensible that they don't exist either: the question is ill-defined until it's first been established it's a well-defined concept that actually means something. And the burden is on you to do that. If you make up a word without requiring it somehow maps to the real world in some way you can prove or disprove anything you like about it -- because you've made up the rules. I can play that game too: 1. I define a word "foobles". 2. By definition, I claim, humans have foobles and computers do not. 3. I write many long essays pondering the question of where foobles come from, why they exist, and whether or not computers can ever have them. Some people are very impressed when I call this "the hard problem of foobles".
  • cmdli 4y ago
    What word would you use to describe the subjective experiences of people? What word do you describe something like the taste of an apple, or the appearance of the color red? That is what Qualia refer to. I would say that it is intuitively sensible that these subjective experience exist, at least for any reasonable definition of existence.
    • dkbrk 4y ago
      When I taste an apple that corresponds to some physical pattern in my brain: electrical impulses; neurotransmitters; neural connections being created or destroyed or changing in strength, etc. I see no reason that needs a special word to describe it, nor why that same pattern couldn't be represented abstractly in a formal language or translated to some other computational architecture.
      • cmdli 4y ago
        What is corresponding to the physical pattern in your brain? What word would you use to describe that thing that is corresponding to the physical event? It becomes difficult to discuss qualia because we assume their existence so often in everyday life. We talk about our emotions, or the taste of things, or the feeling of pain. All of these things are part of the same group, which is why we find a word to describe them useful. As a potential other argument, lets say qualia do not exist, and only physical states exist. If I were then to inflict pain, would that be wrong? I would simply be causing certain chemical and electrical pathways in a humans body, which doesn't seem to have any moral quandries. The wrongness of inflicting pain only occurs when we assume that there is some qualitative aspect to it in that I am causing another person to experience pain. This isn't an airtight proof of qualia's existence, but I think it does show that we certainly act like they exist in our day to day.
• abeppu 4y ago
  I think this is pretty sloppy, at least in this statement of it. Whether one or more observers can establish with confidence whether a system is running a particular computation is not the same thing as whether the system is running that computation. The whole section about finding a mapping between physical states and 'consciousness.exe' is exactly equally as valid for 'javac' or any other program -- but we do not conclude from this that this means that actually no physical system can run javac. The author effectively makes a bait-and-switch between consciousness and the ability of external observers to identify consciousness by searching for a mapping from physical states to computation. From this view, I think we end up exactly where we were after Descartes: we can only firmly establish our own consciousness, even if consciousness is firmly computational.
• deleted 4y ago
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• Grumpy34 4y ago
  > This means that one of these observers will, by chance, happen to observe that the states of the atoms correspond exactly to the bits of a Turing machine computing I did not understand this argument. Yes, through careful labeling you can map the states of the atoms of the iron rod to the state of a Turing machine. But that mapping will only be correct for one instance. The very next moment the atoms' magnetic moment will flip randomly and the mapping will be lost. So an iron rod cannot be thought of as a computer.
  • cmdli 4y ago
    Allow me (not the author) to rephrase the argument. Lets say you have a computer that you would say is conscious. It does some computation, has some output, and you conclude that it is conscious in that moment, lets say for 1 second. Therefore, you assume that the computation (i.e. internal states and outputs) done by that computer for that 1 second creates consciousness. Extending the iron bar argument, you could have 1 second of varying internal state by the iron bar, and then create many different interpretations that interpret that internal state in many different ways. One of those interpretations will show that the iron bar transitioned through the exact same internal states as the conscious computation, and did so in a deterministic, casually linked way. What then is the different between that iron bar and the conscious computer?
• simonh 4y ago
  I find this argument completely unconvincing. The mapping in a case like the iron bar is entirely ephemeral, pertaining only for an instant. For this argument to be valid you’d have to be able to persistently map the iron bar, or waterfall, to all ongoing transformations of states in the running program, using one single consistent mapping. Otherwise all you have is a snapshot of state, not an ongoing process. To achieve a persistent mapping for a significant time you'd probably need an iron bar something like size of the observable universe, at which point we're in Boltzmann's Brain territory. This argument is in the article as well and I’ve seen it from Searle too: “A simulation of a brain cannot produce consciousness any more than a simulation of the weather can produce rain.” This is making the unstated prior assumption that consciousness is not a computation. If it is a computation then conciousness is not like weather itself, it’s like the simulation. Me imagining having a shower doesn’t make anything wet either. So is my imagination more like the weather, or more like the simulation of it? As for doubting the field of rocks can be conscious, that’s redundant, you might as well say a 3D field of atoms cannot be conscious, such as a brain for example. Talking about computation and consciousness is a sideshow, this is anti-materialism by the back door. Nothing more.
  • iainmerrick 4y ago
    I had the same reaction. Another problem is that it assumes as an axiom that “Consciousness does not require an external observer to exist.” I agree that sounds very likely, but that doesn’t mean you can just assume it! It sounds a bit like the opposite of Mach’s principle in physics, which I think many physicists take seriously even though it seems very unlikely at first glance.
  • fancyfredbot 4y ago
    The iron bar argument is terrible for exactly the reason you say. The atoms in the iron bar would have to evolve following the rules of a Turing machine and they won't. So you'd have to define a mapping which varies over time. There's nothing stopping us doing that but I can do the same with a pumpkin and my brain. Therefore I'm not conscious. Sad!
    • eru 4y ago
• tluyben2 4y ago
  I find this like the Einstein brain book (Is if Hofstadter?); when you read it fast enough, it is Einstein. When you just open a page, it looks like gibberish.
• kohlerm 4y ago
  This article starts with the wrong assumption that programs/computers need to be deterministic. They are clearly not. Monte Carlo tree search is no t really deterministic, nor is the training if large neural networks. To me conscious has more to do with whether the system is able to reflect on is self. In that sense very simple systems (with not much intelligence ( could be conscious
• whatever1 4y ago
  I don’t know about computation, but it seems to me that memory is a necessary (not sufficient) condition for someone to be conscious. People with memory loss seem to struggle to pass the bar of consciousness
  • 3g4o53g4o5 4y ago
    Yup. And people always fails to think about such boundary cases. Like > Human can do math proof Human infant dont. > Human can see and hear things and interact with the environment. Obviously a certain amount of population is unable to do that. > Human learn and grow. Bacteria can do this too. This kind of failure of the poor-defined "consciousness" leads to the end of conversation.
• Simon_O_Rourke 4y ago
  All this smacks of those public access science shows from the late 50s, where they had some lumbering "Michelin man" robot doing the vacuuming and cleaning dishes... And the voice over declaring that every American household will have it's own domestic robot by 1962. If we still find it difficult to copy and paste data into Excel, I can't see how we can blithely state we're already or very nearly at some state of demonstrating AGI.
• wehnsdaefflae 4y ago
  Stating that consciousness is observer dependent while using observers to determine whether sth is conscious tickles need the wrong way
• nathias 4y ago
  > Back in the 1980s John Searle cast doubt on the computational theory of consciousness with the Chinese Room argument, and today it seems that most philosophers accept its validity. hilarious
• Madmallard 4y ago
  "The theory that consciousness is nothing but running the right kind of computer program is wrong. Computation alone is insufficient to produce consciousness." This is your opinion. Not fact. "So if we accept that qualia exists (which, after all, seems intuitively sensible), we are burdened with the apparently impossible task of explaining how consciousness can be generated by physical processes. This is the crux of the “hard problem of consciousness.”" No reason we can't explain qualia with some component or aspect of the brain matter - perhaps just the neocortex doing work on itself. It is not really known at this point but no reason to think it cannot be known. The brain is extremely complex. "Consciousness is observer independent" Well yes you have a brain and it doesn't require other people's brains to function. " If we decide that a machine is not a computer simply because it ever makes any errors, we will have to conclude that there are no computers at all in the real world. And if computers don’t exist, then consciousness cannot be computation." This is straight up doodoo. We made a bot with like a few dozen neurons simulating a human brain play some games far better than any humans ever will be able to. What makes you think an entire brain of these neurons is not capable of something as uncomplicated by comparison as your so-called "qualia". At the core of this argument is like 'hey i don't want to believe that a simulation could produce the same thing I experience personally, so let me add an essays worth of sophistry to convince you to feel the same way' it's like religious or something. It is inherently unscientific.
• mathgenius 4y ago
  > Now, if consciousness were a consequence of pure computation, it would be possible to write a clever computer program (let’s call it consciousness.exe) that, when executed on a big enough computer, produces a conscious being. > ... This is pretty much the premise of the treatise by the great Australian philosopher Greg Egan, called "Permutation city". It really blew my mind back in the 90's when i first read it. Actually I think I read the short story "Dust" first. High a.f. after reading that. > But perhaps new biology is not enough. Roger Penrose has argued that an explanation of consciousness does not simply require new biology, but new physics as well. I have to confess that as far-fetched an idea as it is, I am somewhat partial to the idea. Cool. Me too. > ... resorting to quantum mechanics or new physics is the last refuge of scoundrels. Well that escalated fast!
• catchclose8919 4y ago
  The article come from a long line of reasons that no longer has anything useful to say nowaday. We don't ask priets to bless our computers to avoid security issues, and we shouldn't bother listening to these "philosphers". What would be really interesting instead would be to admit that there's lots of knowledge and questions that are not encompassed by any particular discipline but instead lay at the interfaces between domains, that mondels like those oh philosophy no longer address well (and religion no longer provides useful psychological tools for), and re-image a new kind of philosophy build from the ground up on the idea of computation, and in this new discipline re-define +/- break apart fuzzy concepts like consciousness so that we finally have something to talk and think about!
• binbag 4y ago
  This article and the thinking it conveys are deeply flawed, in my opinion.
• pilooch 4y ago
  Consciousness might just be the brain's recurrent and unsuccessful attempt at predicting itself. Similarly, "free will" may simply be an illusion caused by the failure of that perfect prediction of what to do/what will happen, thus leaving us with a pleasant stochasticity that we end up favoring as freedom :)
• deleted 4y ago
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• RivieraKid 4y ago
  @antognini, have you seen this computation argument elsewhere? I came up with basically the same thing when I used to think about consciousness but this is the first time I've read about it from a 3rd party. I also believe that it's very plausible that quantum mechanics plays a role, despite the hate this idea is getting. Some other realizations I made: First, physiscs-first understanding of reality is incorrect - consciousness is in a way the only thing that is real and physics is just a description of the patterns we perceive through our consciousness. Second, my consciousness and other people's consciousness are fundamentally different concepts and need to be defined differently. Third, the physical brain affects consciousness, obviously, and there's an argument for this happening the other way too, which would mean that laws of physics are broken in the brain. The argument is that if this wasn't true, my brain wouldn't have realized all this.
  • mathgenius 4y ago
    Checkout Greg Egan, "Permutation city". He basically takes this idea and runs with it, to great effect. I'm not sure if it's a reductio ad absurdum, or what, but it's very cool.
• tpoacher 4y ago
  Welcome to another instance of "X [the way I define it, which is different to how others define it] is not Y [which is close to how others define X]"
• GistNoesis 4y ago
  The other day, I was training a de-noising diffusion model on a small enough to over-fit dataset, and watching the diffusion process that generates the image, it really seemed some sense of depth perception has emerged from training. (See the image https://twitter.com/ak92501/status/1475858893561606148 https://twitter.com/ak92501/status/1475858893561606148 for an idea of what a de-noising diffusion is) In essence a de-noising diffusion is reversing the process of adding noise to an image. You learn to tell apart noise from image. And to generate an image you take some random noise and remove a little noise multiple times until you have the image.) Watching the diffusion, the intermediate noisy images it generated seemed to stick out of the frame kinda like how a random-dot auto-stereo-gram would. It is hard to tell for sure because the depth effect could also be coming from the light-effects where bright areas tend to stick out, but the depth it produced made sense and seemed coherent with the scene objects. The thing is, at first order, this effect is not supposed to happen. What the model is learning is trying to remove noise from image, it is not trying to somehow infer some depth about the image, encode it, and passing it to its next iteration so that it can have an easier task. It is not supposed to have some memory like a recurring neural network would. But somehow it seemed to have learned to perceive and encode 3d features and store them inside its weights, so that when it's applied iteratively it converge toward the fixed point that is the real object. That's what I would called emergence as a compression artifact. For this effect to happen the network must have some sort of internal 3d representation of objects, which can happen if it takes less space to compress the object as a 3d object than storing multiple views of the objects. Or maybe I'm just projecting my own sense of perception, and this is just a phantom effect. Maybe consciousness is a phenomenon just like this one.
• akomtu 4y ago
  Defining this word must be one of the favorite exercises on HN. Imo, consciousness is just perception: that's the literal meaning of this word in sanskrit and that's the implied meaning in how we use it - unconscious means "cannot perceive anything". When applied to AI, consciousness would mean an array of sensors connected to some memory block where sensory input become 0s and 1s. Traditional types of consciousness register things from outside, but we can think of an internal consciousness that observes internal events. Perhaps, when some of the sensory inputs observe outputs of the processing unit, that's self consciousness. But even self-consciosness doesn't imply intelligence - the latter is about prediction and cause-result relationships.
• iainmerrick 4y ago
  Is Searle's Chinese Room still considered a state-of-the-art philosophical argument? If so, that's very disappointing. It's old! I would have hoped things had moved on a bit. And more importantly, it's not very productive; it claims to rule out certain hypotheses (very unconvincingly, I'd say) but doesn't give any useful steer on new directions that might be worth pursuing. (Edit to add: I consider this post equivalent to Searle's argument as I don't see any significant new material, except possibly a stated assumption that "consciousness does not require an external observer".)
• V-2 4y ago
  The consciousness problem is a tricky one, because unlike with most dilemmas, it's not that obvious on which side the burden of proof lies here. Is the "consciousness is just computation" side obliged to prove HOW consciousness is generated out of computation alone? (Which they never do?) Or are the opponents obliged to find the unique aspect that couldn't possibly be reduced to computation? (Which they never do either?)
  • aneil 4y ago
    I think the burden is on the proponents. Otherwise anyone could make any assertion - for example, that action potentials cause consciousness, or that influx of ions cause consciousness, or that vibrations cause consciousness, or that only humans are conscious. Like "computation is consciousness" those are just all just, perhaps, correlates of consciousness, not mechanisms for producing it.
    • V-2 4y ago
      The Occam's razor favors the simpler explanation though.
      • whaaswijk 4y ago
        What explanation are you referring to though? Just saying consciousness is an emergent property is not an explanation. Rather it is an assertion.
        • V-2 4y ago
          It's a working hypothesis where the element of "HOW does consciousness emerge out of computation" remains unanswered, but you could argue that you shouldn't assume the hypothesis is insufficient until it's shown that the question is not answerable without adding extra assertions (that there is something beyond computation). Just like we stick to the "planetary orbits are only shaped by gravitational interactions" hypothesis, and if we observe deviations, we try to exhaust all possible explanations that remain gravity based before introducing the possibility of other forces at work.
• avnigo 4y ago
  For those interested in this but haven't heard of the show DEVS [0] yet, it explores and asks questions about consciousness and determinism, being the central themes of the story. [0]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8134186/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8134186/
  • Tenoke 4y ago
    I just watched and it was beautiful but disappointingly written. They clearly had advisors who added reasonable explanations for e.g. the different QM interpretations, simulations, determinism etc. but then ignored the implications of what they were writing a lot of the time. SPOILER: Like when their algorithm only worked under MWI, proving it in-world but then still having only a single branch they knew in advance they are in*, still having the determinism even with knowing the prediction of what they'll do etc. *Except for a single decision, apparently the only decision which could result in a different outcome out of all simulated days. That single decision even broke the Algo but not even at the point where it was made and not even by just predicting a different branch from then on but predicting noise. It was just total nonsense in a show that clearly knew better at times.
• cjg 4y ago
  Perhaps consciousness not computation directly, but something that computation is good at - thus leading us to get confused between the two. I'm thinking of information processing. This then shows the weakness in the hot iron argument. The information is now encoded in the choice of observer not the iron bar - which is essentially random. Lean on information theory for deeper insights.
• FartyMcFarter 4y ago
  If this argument were correct, it would also be a proof that we're not living inside a computation (i.e. it would be a disproof of the simulation argument). If computation cannot produce consciousness, by extension it also can't produce us or our universe (as both of them contain consciousness). I don't think disproving the simulation argument is that simple. You'd have to prove that our universe's physical laws cannot be computed, which, even if true, this proof certainly hasn't shown.
• deleted 4y ago
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• quickthrower2 4y ago
  Oof that is a terrible argument. And sorry for the swearing (depending on what cypher book you used to read that last sentence). And ooh I revealed my HN password there for Alice or maybe Bob. Anyway it is a bad argument because what we are saying is a hot iron is conscious because of a theoretical XOR mapping. That XOR mapping would need to be huge. And maybe that mapping is conscious. How can we know it isn’t. Although it is a snapshot of time. We rely on memory so we can’t even be sure there is a future or past. That we are not simulated etc. There is probably an integer that represents my state. A damn large one. You can’t boil this problem down to a proof by contradiction. To be convinced he has to show me why we are different from digital information.
• glittle2 4y ago
  I agree with the conclusion, but not the reasoning. I agree that "consciousness is not computation", if we convert that to "qualia is not computation", as the author seems to do. I agree because I don't think qualia -- like what red looks like to me -- can be communicated, whereas all computation seems communicable by writing out the Turing Machine. Maybe someone will convince me otherwise by describing redness. However, the "triviality argument" seems pretty poor to me: > 1. To say that a physical system is a computer requires an external observer to map the physical states of that system onto the abstract states of a Turing machine. Does it? If nobody maps the states of AlphaZero to abstract states, will it fail at chess? > 2. Consciousness does not require an external observer to exist. I agree that my consciousness is not dependent on other people's consciousness, but I have no reason to be sure my consciousness is not external to my brain. If we're in a simulation, then it seems like my consciousness is external to my brain. > 3. Therefore, consciousness cannot be reduced to computation. Again, I agree, but not because of 1. and 2. To me, consciouness/qualia seems like a mysterious other-worldly phenomena that observes interesting computations, but doesn't affect them.. like God running a universe simulation, and then looking at one of the creatures in it, and basically making up "what it's like" to be that creature, by filling in some gaps which are not dictated by the simulation, like what redness is like. In conclusion: I think computers can definitely be conscious, but at the same time, I think consciounsess/qualia is weird, and is not computation.
• cortic 4y ago
  I thought it was pretty well established that consciousness is a kind of illusion; That we evolved the ability to extrapolate persona in others which was/is useful to predict future actions and form bonds. Consciousness is just this ability turned inward. I've seen a lot of evidence for this over the year from neurologists, psychologists etc. Am i wrong, or is this a 'mystery' until we get an answer we like?
• EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
  I remember Kasparov's rantings that computers will never beat him in chess because they don't have a soul.
• ivanhoe 4y ago
  > consciousness is, at root, a physical phenomenon, not a purely computational phenomenon. Computation may be necessary to produce consciousness, but it cannot be sufficient. What does "computational phenomenon" even mean? I really don't see how any of the ideas presented in the text prove that "it cannot be sufficient", nor it's clear from the text what "physical phenomenon" author has in mind? Brain is a network of 86 billion organic electro-chemical switches making 100+ trillion inter-connections, each either firing electrical impulses or not... so how it that not "computational" in it's nature? There're also chemical reactions going on that influence neurons and possibly some EM field interferences play roles, too, but that's all part of the "hardware"'s internal design. Brain is, of course, not really modeled like general purpose programmable computers that we're used to today, more like old concept of specialized hardware machines and automata (or perhaps today's FPGA concept) - it comes with the programming implemented in the hardware itself. The obvious difference is that brain is incomprehensibly more complex than anything we can build, and also being made of living tissue capable of re-arranging and re-purposing tricks that no silicon based computer will ever be able to do - but in the end, it's still a "computational machine" processing inputs and internal states and generating some results based on that... how else to call it without going into the spiritual stuff?
• mib32 4y ago
  Everything is consciousness. Even the stone has it. Meditate deep enough and the truth will unfold for you.
• Traubenfuchs 4y ago
  If it even exists, consciousness is literally unfathomably complex compution by the insane biocomputer we call our brain. And it is by definition, assuming one rejects super natural phenomena like the soul.
• arisAlexis 4y ago
  Proof or wishing to be so?
• mcculley 4y ago
  The author has an underlying misunderstanding as an axiom. > “The second important property of consciousness that any theory needs to explain is that consciousness is a single, cohesive experience. My consciousness is of my entire self. It is not of half of myself, nor is it some superposition of you and me. Somehow, whatever is going on in my brain to produce my consciousness contains all the neurons of my brain, not just a subset of them. There are not multiple consciousnesses in my brain, it’s just me in there.” The self is an illusion. A sufficiently complex system built out of transistors can also be fooled into thinking it has a self.
• ozy 4y ago
  > But in this world, consciousness is, at root, a physical phenomenon, not a purely computational phenomenon. That is entirely unknown. If it were a purely computational phenomenon, it would explain a lot, and nothing in this article argues against it. Except, perhaps, the iron bar mapping. But it seems to miss that a computer program basically defines a causal network. And recognizing and comparing causal networks is much more objective then the thought experiment acknowledges.
• lazyatom 4y ago
  > By this I mean that the existence of my consciousness does not depend on other observers perceiving me to be conscious. The author doesn't recognise that they are an observer of their own consciousness; I would go further and say that consciousness _requires_ the conscious _thing_ to be an observer of themselves. So, for me, the whole axiom "consciousness does not require an observer" is reversed.
  • V-2 4y ago
    It does not require an external observer. I believe the author does acknowledge it, writing "because consciousness is independent of EXTERNAL observers" (emphasis mine) or, even in the sentence that you quoted, "does not depend on OTHER observers".
• skohan 4y ago
  I am of the mind that consciousness is an emergent property of the various interconnected information processing systems of the brain. There's just too much evidence: for instance, changing the physiology of the brain through drugs or trauma has predictable changes on consciousness. From that perspective, I think it's pretty clear that consciousness is some kind of computation rooted in the physical world. However to the question of whether consciousness is a classical computation which could be expressed as a classical computer program, that part is up for grabs. The brain processes information in a fundamentally different way than classical computers: it's essentially a massive dynamical system of many many variables all interacting with each-other in real time. It's entirely possible that, given the dimensionality and parallelism of the brain, that there's not enough material or energy in the universe to construct a computer capable of simulating the entire system in real time. Maybe quantum computers will be able to manage it, or maybe we'll need to engineer biological neural networks to get there artificially. Or maybe consciousness is a thin illusion on top of a couple of clever tricks we have yet to figure out yet. Anyway I hope we get a little closer to figuring it out in my lifetime.
  • V-2 4y ago
    > There's just too much evidence: for instance, changing the physiology of the brain through drugs or trauma has predictable changes on consciousness You can demonstrate that humans react (and quite predictably) to weather - when it rains, they take their umbrellas out, when there's a hurricane, they seek for shelter, and so on. It's not evidence that human behaviour is an emergent property of weather and nothing else. In case of consciousness then, this observation only proves that the brain function is susceptible to physical and chemical factors (which is rather obvious). But not that this function can be FULLY reduced to the computational aspect though. It doesn't even invalidate the belief in a supernatural soul, or some sort of metaphysical "spark" required to ignite consciousness (which, just to be clear, I personally don't subscribe to, but it's beyond the point) - just because the brain is affected by physical factors doesn't prove it is ONLY physical factors that are at play. It doesn't demonstrate that they have a monopoly. The big question persists: how does it happen that a computational system, no matter how complex, FEELS something?
• Zababa 4y ago
  > The second important property of consciousness that any theory needs to explain is that consciousness is a single, cohesive experience. My consciousness is of my entire self. It is not of half of myself, nor is it some superposition of you and me. Somehow, whatever is going on in my brain to produce my consciousness contains all the neurons of my brain, not just a subset of them. There are not multiple consciousnesses in my brain, it’s just me in there. > Some individuals with severe epilepsy have to have their corpus callosum severed, which separates their left and right hemispheres. After this procedure these individuals often seem to exhibit two consciousnesses rather than one. The right side of the brain seems to be surprised when the left side of the brain decides to raise the right arm, and vice versa. But this is never the case in an individual with a connected corpus callosum. Every time I decide to raise my arm (left or right), my arm goes up and it only goes up when I decide to raise it. That is ignoring people which create "tulpas", which are another consciousness in the same brain, with different memories. From what I've gathered this is done purely through a mental process, not by separating your brain into multiple pieces. I don't have any personal experience with this, so this is all information coming from secondary sources. But you can't ignore those people and say "There are not multiple consciousnesses in my brain, it’s just me in there.". If we admit that those people are telling the truth and what they experience is really another or multiple other consciousness living in the same brain, this opens the door to something interesting: it is possible for a person to create a consciousness. Again from what I've gathered, tulpas don't suddenly appear all formed, they go through an initial period of "growing up", forming themselves as a person. A wild theory would be that the process of creating a tulpa is the same as the process of creating a human consciousness, the only difference is if you target another brain or your own brain. And if that's true, once you've managed to recreate the human brain, you would "only" need to interact with it the same way you would when creating a tulpa to create a consciousness.
• ulfbert_inc 4y ago
  It reminds me of this talk[1] and a conversation[2], both hinting at the possibility of the emergence of consciousness from a matter due to quantum properties/effects [edit] and having nothing to do with computation. [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UT5CxsyKwxg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UT5CxsyKwxg [2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXgqik6HXc0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXgqik6HXc0
• JulianMorrison 4y ago
  > To say that a physical system is a computer requires an external observer to map the physical states of that system onto the abstract states of a Turing machine. No it does not. An unobserved computer still computes.
• layer8 4y ago
  Qualia is something we perceive. (If we didn’t perceive it, we wouldn’t talk about it.) In that sense, it isn’t a priori any more real or innate than any other perception that enters our conscious mind. It is essentially an input to the conscious part of our cognitive process. As such, it is information that surely can be fully represented — in the sense of data representation — in our brains. The subjective experience of qualia is complex and varied, but not that complex and varied that it can’t be conceived to be fully representable by neuron firing patterns (or whatever) in our brains. It seems straightforward to me that what is called “qualia” is just the perception of certain processing that is going on in our brains. Note also that something feeling visceral is just a perception. By that, I don’t mean that the viscerality is an illusion, but that “feeling” is fundamentally a process of perception, and thus just means that certain inputs from unconscious parts of our mind are entering our conscious mind. As a consequence, I can’t imagine any perception that couldn’t be explained by information flow. Because when you think about it, any feeling or qualia is just a perception that entered your conscious experience. It’s not something your consciousness does, it’s just something it observes.
• gfodor 4y ago
  One facet to the computational theory of consciousness that is worth considering is the experience of qualia may be latency-coupled, because the universe itself isn't scale invariant in terms of physical forces, etc. So it may be consistent to run a slow mind on rocks or a fast mind on transistors, but only the latter would be conscious due to the state transitions occuring quickly enough. (for example) This doesn't answer why it's the case, but this degree of freedom would allow for a description of reality where a large pile of rocks being flipped around cannot experience qualia, which would be very surprising if it wasn't the case.
• porkbrain 4y ago
  > Supporters of the Strong AI Hypothesis insisted that consciousness was a property of certain algorithms – a result of information being processed in certain ways, regardless of what machine, or organ, was used to perform the task. A computer model which manipulated data about itself and its ‘surroundings’ in essentially the same way as an organic brain would have to possess essentially the same mental states. ‘Simulated consciousness’ was as oxymoronic as ‘simulated addition’. \ Opponents replied that when you modelled a hurricane, nobody got wet. When you modelled a fusion power plant, no energy was produced. When you modelled digestion and metabolism, no nutrients were consumed – no real digestion took place. So, when you modelled the human brain, why should you expect real thought to occur? \ — Permutation City by Greg Egan
  • simonh 4y ago
    I posted this elsewhere here earlier, but when I imagine standing in the rain nothing gets wet. So is my imagination of the rain more like a rainstorm, or more like a simulation of one?
• intrasight 4y ago
  I'll borrow from Justice Potter Stewart and say that "I'll know it when I am it"
• deleted 4y ago
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• neosat 4y ago
  One core issue that the author struggles with (like almost all of these theories) is a crisp definition of consciousness, that allows you to create a falsifiable hypothesis of what is "*not* consciousness". Till you cannot crisply define consciousness crisply, you cannot create a scientific falsifiable hypothesis to test it, and hence all you are debating and persuading around is philosophy or semantics.
• akimball 4y ago
  The author has never heard of an analog computer?! If he had, I would question his honesty.
• sitkack 4y ago
  > purely physical processes Everything in the universe is a "purely physical process". Everything in the universe is an arrangement of matter and energy. Biological systems are extremely mechanistic, even if highly complex. These arguments that consciousness can only arise in a biological brain all seem to hinge on us being special in some undetermined way. Biological life is wonderful, but how does it specifically have a monopoly on something?
• otikik 4y ago
  Pick three rocks and make a line with them. Does the line “exist”? Well, yes, in a way. But also very much no, only the rocks exist (let’s ignore the fact that the three imaginary rocks that you have pictured in your mind while reading the previous phrase also don’t exist). Qualia, and consciousness, exist in the same way that line exists but also doesn’t. The universe will happily give non-conclusive answers like that and keep on working while we struggle to figure it all out. So I reject the first axiom of this reasoning. Well I sorta reject it. Kinda. If I was forced to be precise, I would say that trying to find a binary answer (is it computation, or not?) is asking the wrong type of question. The right question has higher bit count, and maybe even some qbits as well.
  • 3pt14159 4y ago
    A lot of conversations around the term consciousness mix up a couple of things. First, there is the term consciousness which is a word given to something that humans observe. It encapsulates an idea, and we know[0] that it's a shared experience because the term arose in other languages as well. The concept of consciousness may be not limited to humans, for example an alien race may have also discovered this concept and given their own symbolic representation of it that they use to communicate between each other, but the frame of this whole debate needs to keep in mind that we are the ones that needed a term for this. So we are the ones that are the best judges of what consciousness is and isn't to the best of our knowledge, leaving spirituality aside. The encoding of consciousness into states of heat or rocks in the beach is a flawed example because the mapping of encoding is a non-arbitrary decision. Any length can encode any number, for example, the meaning is in the parameters set by the agent, not the other way around. The example falls on its face anyway because it seeks to compress the evaluate the heated iron in a static state. Real consciousness amongst humans has varying states. For example, if one were to evaluate the heated iron and then ask it to evaluate a new situation, it wouldn't. It would simply keep being heated iron. Real AI wouldn't pass a consciousness test without demonstrating real reasoning about a completely novel situation. For example, I would expect to ask it to evaluate a design for a solution to an as-yet-unsolved problem and have it reliably communicate drawbacks. Current AI does nothing of the sort. [0] As much as anything can be known, anyway.
• _gabe_ 4y ago
  > in the late 1800s there were heated philosophical debates about whether life required a mysterious “vital force” or if it could be produced through ordinary physical interactions. As biochemists learned more about the chemistry of life they found that it was the latter and before long everyone forgot that this was even a question that had ever been debated. I wasn't aware that we figured out how to manufacture life? Afaik, there is no reliable experiment that can reliably construct a living organism using a combination of non-living material. Did I miss some fundamental experiment that proved otherwise?
• xianshou 4y ago
  This argument is a pretty egregious example of strawmanning. A sketch of the author's reasoning: 1. Consciousness is observer-independent, so if one person observes consciousness, then everyone must acknowledge it. 2. If there are infinite observers of a given computation, each with a distinct interpretation scheme (e.g. observer i flips every i-th bit), at least one will interpret that computation as conscious. 3. (1) and (2) imply all computations are conscious. 4. This is absurd. 5. Therefore, computation cannot equate to consciousness. No one would claim that pi (the constant) is conscious because some sub-sequence will parse as Shakespeare, nor would they argue that an excerpt of Proust is conscious because it required intelligence to produce. Let's agree on some sensible preconditions for consciousness (entity recognition and some notion of memory, among others) before we start trying to argue by reductio.
• vidarh 4y ago
  He makes any number of unsupported leaps. E.g "consciousness is observer independent". It seems likely, but it's not at all clear it needs to be the case. E.g. let's say the universe is a simulation for your benefit which optimises away everything that does not directly impact your experience. Maybe my consciousness is just a side effect of currently having an impact on your experience. I have no way of telling whether I blink out of existence the moment I'm not conjured up in order to write this to generate the page you're now reading. It may sound far fetched, but the point is that there is an infinite number of possible observer-dependent universes. As such just ruling it out by default is a gap in his argument. With respect to his definition of computers, he's glossing over just how little it takes to end up with something which computes. The simplest possible turing machine is ridiculously simple, requiring only 6 rules T(2,3) [1]. While I agree with his argument that such things arising out of nothing by chance is unlikely, it's not at all clear that it's unlikely enough to rule out an infinite number of such devices running mostly "junk" programs that'll crash. But we also know that it doesn't need to be entirely random - such computation can provide mechanisms for the propagation of life. While cells themselves are not universal turing machines (they have limited "tape"), any number of living things are conceptually universal turing machines (humans being the obvious example), in that they/we can process "tape" without any inherent limitations on length (though practical limitations, certainly). He then goes on to use his claim that consciousness must be observer independent to claim that even if we have such a computational process, we can't just pick encoding to make a claim of consciousness. But this stretches the claim of observer independence further, and rather than strengthen it, to me it weakens it. Since we don't know what consciousness is, it's not clear that consciousness could not arise from a subjective observation of a process. It's not even clear that this isn't the very core of consciousness. That hypothesis is as supported (in other words: it's not) as the argument he's making. It may be a very weak possibility, but he's not even considered it and given any justification for ruling it out. I stopped reading there. This is typical of a whole lot of philosophy that makes a whole lot of embedded assumptions that are glossed over because the writer see them as so obvious that they fail to consider that they are assumptions at all. Most of it descends into sophistry without even realising it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfram%27s_2-state_3-symbol_Turing_machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfram%27s_2-state_3-symbol_T...
• simne 4y ago
  So what? This remembers me slightly fictitious history, how medieval Japanese adopted guns. First they thought, that it is non-right weapon, mean will not accept by gods, because too spectacular and too simple. But then pragmatism won, got conclusion, that practice is more important than ideology, and Japanese gun masters got huge number of orders. Returning to our world, I think, right definitions: 1. computer is mechanism, to store and to processing of information, nothing more, nothing less; 2. Consciousness is reaction of mechanism (sorry), to some external information input (yes, it is big and not simple question, what consider just mechanical reaction, like automatic valve in wc tank, but what is more, and some other trick strategies, which are also not Consciousness); 3. really consequence of 2: Consciousness mechanism should have some level of situational awareness of what happen around (by sensors), to know current context, and should have some memory of previous events and some examples of similar contexts. So in conclusion, computer will become Consciousness, when it will have big enough database on environment and second, database of itself (database's) look on how it related to environment (some obvious reasons, like why it here, what is it's goal), and when input data will processed against these database fast enough. BTW, Consciousness is not about omniscience, we, people are Consciousness, but we make decisions in environment with information incompleteness. This is especially strong seen at war. And my answer, yes, looks like Consciousness is product of war - it is don't need when not in concurrent environment with high stakes.
• journey_16162 4y ago
  Could we rely prove that anything is conscious, beyond ourselves? I mean, if in the future humans manage to run a full human brain simulation and put a person in a computer, how could we ever be confident that this simulated person experiences consciousness in the same way we do and is not just a blob of computations that mimic it? Imagine a sci-fi doomsday scenario where virtual words are created and they are awesome, so people "move" there from their physical body but it turns out that no one is really alive, it's one giant conscious-less computation going around that appears 100% real.
  • sebringj 4y ago
    that is a good premise for a sci-fi movie
• MarquesMa 4y ago
  > A simulation of a brain cannot produce consciousness any more than a simulation of the weather can produce rain. What's wrong with the rain though? A perfect simulation of rain is perfect rain. It's not rain in the outside world but it's perfect rain nonetheless. A perfect simulation of brain is a brain. It has consciousness, it can think, it can suffer, and you can exchange information with it if you want.
• rbanffy 4y ago
  First step is to have a hard definition of what consciousness is. Then we can say what it is not. We are not there yet.
• markjspivey 4y ago
  How does the article and the HN comments not mention Stephen Wolfram and his Physics Project … ?
• stagas 4y ago
  - "Consciousness is observer independent" - "Consciousness does not require an external observer to exist." Can you please elaborate on how you arrived at the knowledge of those "observers"? - "Physical system" Can you explain what a "physical system" is and how you came to have knowledge about it? The above are huge leaps in logic that are thrown as axioms as there's no explanation on how you arrive at them -given what you have access to- which is your own qualia. The whole argument is baseless without explaining these. Of course if you setup the world to match the argument, the argument will appear logical. But there are no grounds to support it.
• stared 4y ago
  Once again - and what is wrong with panpsychism? Just because something sounds weird is not an argument that something is incorrect.
• stevenalowe 4y ago
  Descartes disagrees
• jwalton 4y ago
  > Imagine a native English speaker who knows no Chinese locked in a room full of boxes of Chinese symbols (a data base) together with a book of instructions for manipulating the symbols (the program). Imagine that people outside the room send in other Chinese symbols which, unknown to the person in the room, are questions in Chinese (the input). And imagine that by following the instructions in the program the man in the room is able to pass out Chinese symbols which are correct answers to the questions (the output). The program enables the person in the room to pass the Turing Test for understanding Chinese but he does not understand a word of Chinese. This strikes me as somewhat of a circular argument. If you actually tried this experiment with current computers, you would completely fail to convince anyone outside the room there was a Chinese speaker in the room. You would definitely not pass the Turing Test. After a few sentences, it's pretty easy to figure out that a computer program isn't a human, even with today's best artificial intelligence. AI programs generally don't even "remember" what the previous question you asked was, yet alone hold opinions or beliefs. If some future comptuer were able to convince someone that there was a Chinese speaker in the room, then I would argue that there would in fact be a Chinese speaker in the room - the computer program itself. > The point of the argument is this: if the man in the room does not understand Chinese on the basis of implementing the appropriate program for understanding Chinese then neither does any other digital computer solely on that basis because no computer, qua computer, has anything the man does not have. The man isn't the program. The man is just executing the program. It's the program that has (or doesn't have) conciousness, not the man. This is like saying a brain is made of axons, and an axon can't possibly be concious because it just transmits an action potential, therefore people can't possibly be concious.
  • deleted 4y ago
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  • celeritascelery 4y ago
    > The man isn't the program. The man is just executing the program. That is the whole point. The external observers don’t know if there is a machine in the room. They just see Chinese characters coming under the door. How do they tell if the man knows Chinese or not? Or if he is just emulating a machine that does? Likewise if we see a computer that is producing “consciousness looking” responses, how do you know if it is the computer that is conscious or just the people who created the content for the training data? Since the computer is modeling them.
• TheCoreh 4y ago
  The iron bar example is a long way of saying that since the encoding of internal states is arbitrary, you can't rely on internal states to verify consciousness, since you could always construct an encoding that would produce a conscious internal state. This seems like a valid point until you consider the entropy implications of "describing" such an arbitrary encoding. Yes, you can create a cherry-picked algorithm that “compresses” a specific 10TB file to a single bit, but this algorithm itself must contain the 10TB of information. (Or some lower bound of entropy contained in the 10TB file) I think the same applies here: It's not the iron bar that becomes conscious by being scanned with the specific encoding, it's the encoding itself that would already be conscious, and coming up with such an encoding at random would be essentially the same as a Boltzmann Brain popping into existence.
• archibaldJ 4y ago
  Here is how I’d argue that consciousness is (hugely likely) not computation: First we still don’t understand how time crystals work. There are some nice recent advancements though https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31766804 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31766804 For those who are not familiar with time crystals and weird time related things like Delayed-Choice Quantum Eraser, here is a nice Sean Carroll's article https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2019/09/21/the-notorious-delayed-choice-quantum-eraser/ https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2019/09/21/the-not... The Delayed-Choice Quantum Eraser (and other weird time related things) always reinforce the many-world interpretation, the most mathematically minimal of all. As strange as it is, even if it is true, many-world is only scratching the surface of our reality. We need a new mathematical framework that goes beyond spacetime and amplituhedron https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amplituhedron https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amplituhedron (from which more re-interpretations can happen, especially ones that can encapsulate consciousness more than just “an observer” (or worst leading to absurdity like the quantum suicide experiment https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide_and_immortal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide_and_immortal... ) There could be a huge connection between time crystals and “consciousness” in ways we don’t understand. In that case “consciousness” would be related to quantum computation. Or likely going beyond that as we reformulate our understanding of physics. Also, there are also so much about computation we need to advance our understanding in (like what does the Curry-Howard correspondence implies about our universe? And why is the current formulation makes it so difficult or almost impossible to prove p =? np ?). There are so many work to be done in these two fields. And we still don’t understand how meditation work and why practising mindfulness can help us to be more productive at work
• jtsiskin 4y ago
  Aw man. The author is going to be pretty sad when they learn that the brain is made of atoms.
  • 3g4o53g4o5 4y ago
• l33tman 4y ago
  He solves it himself in the article: "So the proposition that consciousness is computation leads quite inevitably to an extreme panpsychism. Even if we could stomach a traditional conception of panpsychism that posits that all things are conscious in some primitive way, this goes far beyond that. We are forced to conclude that all things aren’t just vaguely conscious, but they contain all consciousnesses, including our own!" Yes, so why can't panpsychism be correct? It's far more intuitive than postulating some magical qualia substance that permeates the universe (or however that's supposed to work).
• Mageek 4y ago
  The Chinese room argument is claimed to show how consciousness cannot be based on computation. I totally disagree - it merely shows that as an external observer we cannot verify consciousness.
  • pieter_mj 4y ago
    Both can be right. The possible unverifiability and non-computational base of consciousness does not exclude its explainability either.
• cannabis_sam 4y ago
  These kinds of analyses frustrate me to no end, because there’s an implicit metaphysical assumption that consciousness is somehow independent of our interaction with the world. Now, I don’t necessarily believe that we will be able to reconstruct what took the universe, physics, chemistry and evolution literally billions of years. However, I have yet to encounter an argument against the wider understanding of computation as systems with inputs resulting in outputs affected by mutable states, which then corresponds to what plants, animals and humans are on a fundamental level. To me it seems like the burden of proof is on the people who claim that consciousness is somehow metaphysically independent from the physical matter that makes up a human, animal, plant or computer. I guess we currently draw certain lines between these four things, especially between humans and the other three. But I guess I struggle to identify that difference as something metaphysical. Although I don’t feel like I know enough to claim that this is anything more than a superficial idea…
• jerednel 4y ago
  A lot of people quick to try to reduce consciousness to what we can observe about brain functions. While this explains what happens in the brain as things happen it doesn’t explain why it is like something to be you which is the core of the hard problem of consciousness. The thought experiment of a philosophical zombie that has all of the same cause-effect reactions to externalities as myself seems to require that it isn’t pure information processing giving rise to consciousness. I quite like the idea of certain panpsychism arguments that consciousness is itself a thing existing on a continuum inherent across the universe. At a certain point, “what it’s like” to be a certain thing becomes difficult to demarcate. And from the moment of the Big Bang the particles necessary for the construction of conscious beings expanded outward in one giant entanglement. The particles that make us up are the same as everything else in existence however it feels like something to be a person, a deer, possibly a plant, etc.
• fedeb95 4y ago
  I think I got the author point and agreeing with those premises I could even share the conclusion. However it seems to me that the argument only works in concluding something about existing consciousnesses, it doesn't say anything about "a" consciousness (one that doesn't already exist) and even less about a "possible" consciousness. The conclusion is really dependent on which definition of consciousness we adopt, and even more about life: for it is obvious (to me) that being conscious implies being alive. So first we must understand when an hardware capable of computation can become alive. My answer is: when it reproduces itself. Our consciousness hardware is not the brain, it is the world, and life plus consciousness reproduces on the "hardware" called world. So if a computer hardware can support other programs reproducing themselves and by natural selection generate a self-aware program (whichever this definition may be) you can have a conscious program. On one thing I agree: computation itself isn't sufficient to get consciousness.
• scoofy 4y ago
  >My consciousness is of my entire self. It is not of half of myself, nor is it some superposition of you and me. I know this post is from 18 hours ago, but I'm actually quite skeptical of this statement. My most pressing question about consciousness is actually the limited nature of the self. My consciousness does not extend fully into sleep, it does not extend in to making my heart muscle contract. It seems to elude me when i cannot remember something. It seems my consciousness is not, in fact, stable, ad varies through time.
• gxt 4y ago
  Consciousness is a computation. It's pattern matching self. Can you identify what represents your self? And can you serialize it to memory? And can you find your representation in memory? Then I would argue that's all there is as requirements for it.
• geysersam 4y ago
  Is it always possible to find a mapping under which the iron bar seems to run the program consciousness.exe? That is not obvious. Let's say the Turing machine has states T, and the iron bar has states B. The program consciousness.exe is a dynamical system on T, called t: T->T, and the iron bar is a dynamical system on B, called b: B->B. Both of those functions/dynamical systems are given, because we observe them. What the triviality argument says is that for a large class of "obviously non-concious b" there exists a (bijective) mapping F: T -> B such that t = F^-1 o b o F no matter what t is. Is this true? Consider the cardinality of the set of functions/programs on T. It is |T|^|T|. What is the cardinality of the set of bijective mappings between T and B? It is min(|T|!, |B|!). Much smaller! Therefore it is not at all obvious that Alice, Bob or Claire or any of their friends will find such a mapping, even if the methodically try all of them. This seems to me an issue with the presented argument. Although personally I still think consciousness is a physical phenomenon we just have not mapped out yet. Like magnetism or radioactivity before they were properly explained.
• jacknews 4y ago
  IMHO Consciousness is a pattern in space-time, with the ability to represent itself. I don't find a strong argument to the contrary here.
• ajuc 4y ago
  There's no definition and no consensus if it's even real. But we declare autoratively that this thing we can't define can't be computational. About as productive as declaring universe is made of water :)
• Paedor 4y ago
  Wow, it's uncanny how well this post mirrored my own thoughts, down to the phrase "consciousness is observer independent". I ended up rejecting the conclusion though, for the roughly same reason Maxwell's demon doesn't actually reduce entropy. Normally I wouldn't expose people to my armchair philosophy, but here goes: 1. Consciousness, if present, should depend on dynamics. E.g. frozen snapshots of a conscious being probably shouldn't be conscious themselves. 2. (Building on 1) Because a full definition of consciousness requires dynamics, a measurement of consciousness can't just give one "conscious" snapshot. It needs to dynamically continue to measure consciousness, which is much stricter than Joe's original requirement. 3. If measurements of an iron bar are dynamically changing in order to find consciousness in random spins in the iron bar, then picking the correct measurements actually requires immense computation. In fact, it would require simulating a conscious being, while also simulating the dynamics of the iron bar. I'd argue the consciousness you're measuring is then real, but not a property of the iron bar at all.
• rep_movsd 4y ago
  A mapping of atomic states onto consciouness.exe would usually have more bits than consciousness.exe itself. This argument is similar to the one where you can have a specialized trivial program to generate any sequence of data - for example "PI compression" - since PI has all possible sequences, you can compress any data by just specifying where that sequence starts in PI The trouble is that the index will probably have more bits than the sequence you want to compress (given that you could somehow find it) You have 2 choices 1) Consciousness is software, Turing computable, and you are a physicalist/materialist 2) Consciousness is subjective, outside the realm of all objective measurement, and you believe that the universe has more than matter/energy - dualism
• deltaonefour 4y ago
  >My purpose in this blog post is to outline another argument against the idea that consciousness can be reduced to computation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Brain_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Brain_Project Started in 2005 the goal of the blue brain project is to simulate the brain in the computer. They currently have a complete working simulation of the neocortex of the rat brain.
  • danachow 4y ago
    • deltaonefour 4y ago
• yellowapple 4y ago
  Notwithstanding the problems pointed out with specific thought experiments, the author doesn't seem to realize that all things are computation. Every biological, chemical, and physical process is, at the end of the day, itself a product of the computation of various mathematical principles. Invoking XKCD as the author does, it's the classic "$X is just applied $Y" chain, with mathematics being the final $Y. Given this, consciousness must be computation, because everything else is computation. The author rejects this not because his definition of computation is too broad (as he asserts to be the principal objection to the viewpoint he describes), but because it's too narrow.