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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 co
by 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 agoStephen 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 agoA 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 agoYou 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).
- jwalton 4y ago> Since an iron bar over some time period has a finite number of states Citation needed.
- ivalm 4y agoHe defined these states through spin flips and I assume we sample slower than decoherence. This is a semi classical system without complicated qm effects. But even if we didn’t restrict ourselves log(# of states)~entropy and there is a maximum (and finite) amount of entropy you can have in a finite volume (actually it scales with surface area) before you get a black hole.
- antognini 4y ago(Author here.) > Do you believe that a hot bar of iron is a computer? This is the crux of it. The main objection to the triviality argument is that we've just used far too broad a definition of a "computer." If we're thinking that a hot iron bar is a computer, then this should suggest to us that it's the definition that's wrong. You are correct in saying that if the definition we use is wrong, the whole triviality argument falls apart. But for me, the problem with this objection is that I've never seen any workable alternative definition for a computer besides the standard definition. (Namely that a computer is a mapping from physical states to Turing machine states.) Any alternative seems to introduce some measure of subjectivity. The hot iron bar doesn't seem like a computer to us because it requires a random mapping and is not repeatable. But a requirement that the mapping be "simple" or "low entropy" is not easy to rigorously define, nor is it easy to find a principled way to determine how "repeatable" or "deterministic" a computer's behavior should be.
- Imnimo 4y agoIs empty space also a computer, because while we might naively interpret it as "all zeros", with the proper location and time-dependent mapping, it can be seen to be running Doom?
- jamesrom 4y agoExactly this. You can encode a computer anywhere, given your own definition of "computer". Getting your computer to compute, there's the rub.
- 3g4o53g4o5 4y agoWell, there is still random quantum behavior in a complete vacuum a.k.a. empty space according to quantum field theory's findings. So yes, empty space is a computer as long as you notice that physics law is doing math all the time.
- dqpb 4y agoLet's say you can initialize the first N bits of the hot iron to the initial state of your program. By what process does the hot iron use that information to compute the next state of your program?