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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 t

• 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
    I think you are conscious, and so is the combination of iron bar and crazy complex mapping. In the latter case, the crazy complex mapping does all the work and in some sense _is_ conscious.
    • simonh 4y ago
      Right, if you were to compute the mapping in real time on a computer, that would be conscious but it's really got nothing to do with the actual iron bar.
      • eru 4y ago
        Scott Aaronson (if memory serves right) had an interesting take on this. He framed his thought in terms of the Turing test, but the argument would apply equally well to the mapped iron bar: In theory, we could pass any Turing test of finite duration (eg an hour or less) and run in a chat room with finite bandwidth with a giant lookup table. Just look up the entire past of the conversation to see what answer should be given. The lookup can be implemented trivially on any Turing machine (and doesn't even need the machine's full power). Now there's multiple directions you could take this. Here's Scott with one of them: > Briefly, Searle proposed a thought experiment—the details don’t concern us here—purporting to show that a computer program could pass the Turing Test, even though the program manifestly lacked anything that a reasonable person would call “intelligence” or “understanding.” (Indeed, Searle argues that no physical system can understand anything “purely by virtue of” the computations that it implements.) In response, many critics said that Searle’s argument was deeply misleading, because it implicitly encouraged us to imagine a computer program that was simplistic in its internal operations—something like the giant lookup table described in Section 4.1. And while it was true, the critics went on, that a giant lookup table wouldn’t “truly understand” its responses, that point is also irrelevant. For the giant lookup table is a philosophical fiction anyway: something that can’t even fit in the observable universe! If we instead imagine a compact, efficient computer program passing the Turing Test, then the situation changes drastically. For now, in order to explain how the program can be so compact and efficient, we’ll need to posit that the program includes representations of abstract concepts, capacities for learning and reasoning, and all sorts of other internal furniture that we would expect to find in a mind. > Personally, I find this response to Searle extremely interesting—since if correct, it suggests that the distinction between polynomial and exponential complexity has metaphysical significance. According to this response, an exponential-sized lookup table that passed the Turing Test would not be sentient (or conscious, intelligent, self-aware, etc.), but a polynomially-bounded program with exactly the same input/output behavior would be sentient. Furthermore, the latter program would be sentient because it was polynomially-bounded. See 'The Lookup-Table Argument' in https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/philos.pdf https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/philos.pdf for the rest. It's all very fascinating.
• hsn915 4y ago
  Computation does not have anything essential to it that makes it different from other "atoms jumping around" other than it produces outputs that we find interesting. There's no reason to expect an adder circuit to be aware that it's adding numbers. There's no reason to expect an implementation of AlphaGo to know that it's playing Go. This should be extendable without limitation. There's no reason to expect that a certain type of circuit produces consciousness unless of you have a model of consciousness that allows for certain properties to cause it. But there's no such model. The only thing there is is our brains. You just think that since the brain is doing computations and the brain is conscious, therefore consciousness is a computation.
  • vbezhenar 4y ago
    How do you know that? Lamda AI claims itself as conscious being. How can you distinguish between two entities which can communicate? Do you discriminate on meat factor?
    • simonh 4y ago
      You can also get it to agree that it is not conscious. I can write a one line program that claims to be conscious right now. Lamda and GTP-3 are amazing achievements, but they're still just chat bots that look good when they're being lobbed softball questions. If you ask something that maps to the input texts they're trained on you get credible looking responses, but critical or adversarial questioning very easily exposes how shallow these things are.
      • eru 4y ago
        Turing's original paper is worth a read here. He already pre-empted a lot of the objections back then. You are right that Turing's original test is much harder than just passing a few shallow softball questions. See https://academic.oup.com/mind/article/LIX/236/433/986238 https://academic.oup.com/mind/article/LIX/236/433/986238 for the original paper. However, I do count responding well to softball questions as important markers of our progress. Ten years ago, no one was able to pass even this mark. (And from a commercial point of view, good enough 'understanding' and responses might be good enough for many tasks. For example, I am a native German speaker, but I found that Google Translate often already does a better job of translating English to German than I could do, unless I spent unreasonable amounts of time on the task. At the moment the most efficient way for me to produce a translation is to let Google Translate do the work, and then proof-read to spot cases were the machine didn't have enough context to resolve an ambiguity the right way.)
• whittingtonaaon 4y ago
  The question is whether there was ever a good reason to suggest that mind is computational, and I think philosophy (i.e. Searle) have shown that there wasn’t. A brain CAN compute (albeit very slowly), but that’s the end of the similarities. The reason it’s not morally wrong, say, to recycle an old computer is that computers are not at all like human minds.
  • eru 4y ago
    Alas, if you refer to Searle's Chinese Room, that hasn't shown anything, if you just bite the bullet and accept that the Room is conscious.
    • simonh 4y ago
      Exactly, replace the 'room' with a volume the size of a large planet. Have each symbol represent an atom in a brain. If you like, replace the person manipulating the symbols with a vast army manipulating the symbols according to the laws of physics and chemistry. The Chinese room argument simply reduces to an argument against materialism.
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      • meroes 4y ago
        Searle is a physcalist though
        • simonh 4y ago
          Sort of. He thinks there's something special about biology, but doesn't seem to be able to explain what that might be and how this is different from dualism, so it's hard for me to take it seriously. To my mind both dualism and biological naturalism are both positing some special woo needed for consciousness without saying what that woo is, or what it's like, or how it works, or anything about it at all.
• kazinator 4y ago
  In other words, the momentary state of the hot iron bar is just a piece of syntax that by coincidence looks like a momentary state of consciousness.exe. But it lacks the semantics of continuing to the next state of consciousness.exe. Like Antognini says, syntax is not semantics!
• sandgiant 4y ago
  I agree, this seems analogous to the argument that simulation of the weather can't produce rain. In some sense, that argument is true by prior definition. It's like saying that the Universe can't simulate itself. But consciousness is not rain. We don't really know what consciousness is, so I don't see a compelling reason to exclude computation as being sufficient to produce it. We need philosophers to tell us that consciousness is before we start saying what it's not.
  • feet 4y ago
    Also, we can definitely simulate rain? Not sure where that weird claim comes from
    • simiones 4y ago
      The point is that a simulation of rain (in a weather simulation) is not rain itself (e.g. you can't smell the rain after a weather simulation simulates some rain, obviously). This is actually similar to the observation that "the map is not the territory". On the other hand, this is a red herring - computation can produce actual rain, with the right input/output systems.
      • feet 4y ago
        It's a digital representation, theoretically if we simulate all facets of weather and all facets of consciousness, the simulated consciousness could experience all facets of rain We are not digital, to simulate it for our conscious experience we can simulate weather in a closed biodome type of structure where we control the water cycles
        • dahfizz 4y ago
          This is exactly the point. Simulated rain isn't real rain, it's a digital representation. So, the argument goes, that a simulated consciousness is not a real consciousness, but a digital approximation. It's as real as the fake rain. In other words, there is something inherently biological about consciousness. Simulating rain doesn't produce water, and simulating a brain doesn't produce consciousness.
• prmph 4y ago
  If consciousness is computation, then the question may be asked: what is computation? In a sense computation, like measurement, is not just something that humans do and call it as such. All physical processes are computations. Then, if consciousness is computation, it follows that all matter is conscious. But this notion seems suspect. If all matter is conscious, then really life is not special. One might advance the idea that there are different levels of consciousness, but then what determines this level of consciousness? Is it the complexity of the computation? There are many physical processes that involve stupendous amounts of computation (e.g., fluid dynamics), and yet it is hard to think of them as having a high level of consciousness. Is a fluid conscious? There are other issues with the consciousness as computation notion. For example, that of identity: If the exact same computation is performed at a different time and place, is the same consciousness? If a computation equates to consciousness, what is the boundary of that consciousness, analogous to the human body. Finally, consider this thought experiment, which I've posted before: Assume before a loved one died in a futuristic world, proponents of the consciousness as computation were able to an exact model of their brain, down to to all the cells and their interconnections. If they are able to instantiate this model onto a new body, would that be the same person brought back to life? Can't there exist two consciousnesses with the same memories, personality, etc.?
• FeepingCreature 4y ago
  A simulation of weather can absolutely produce a simulation of rain. Then the only question is, is consciousness like data or like matter? As opposed to matter, data can easily traverse levels of simulation.
  • feet 4y ago
    Consciousness is an emergent property that comes from a complex system, if we can simulate all of the mechanisms then the emergent property will follow. I don't know if its "data" but rather consciousness is the experience of processing data from the perspective of the entity doing the processing. We have the ability to communicate our internal experience which is why humans only attribute conscious awareness to other humans, which is honestly kinda dumb
    • akimball 4y ago
      Your first sentence is not, in my opinion, a demonstrable fact. The lack of an adequate definition of consciousness tends to preclude such a demonstration.
      • feet 4y ago
        That consciousness is not an emergent property? We can manipulate neurons in real time to modify consciousness, I don't follow your line of reasoning
• xg15 4y ago
  > The mapping in a case like the iron bar is entirely ephemeral, pertaining only for an instant. Also even if you somehow oversaw this, the author is effectively describing the XOR function. If you take a fixed bitstring (the iron atoms) and xor it with every possible bitstring of the same length (the observers), you get... every possible bitstring of the same length! That's a well-known property of XOR and the reason why you can "decrypt" one-time-pads to every message you like if you just apply the right key. This means if you accepted the author's proposition that for one observer, the iron bar is running consciousness.exe, then for another observer, the bar will run Doom or WoW or a bitcoin miner or whatever else you want. The problem is that the things we colloquially call "computers" are also observer-independent: A server will run its program and update its internal state even if no human is watching. That's one thing that distinguishes computation by computers from computation with pen and paper. So if you add this together, you can prove that computers are not computation, which I think is contradictory.
  • SilasX 4y ago
    Another test would be, does that physical process reduce the difficulty of the computation? That is, a waterfall isn’t “really playing chess” because any transformation you apply to interpret it as a chess computer would be “doing all the work”.
  • jnwatson 4y ago
    I think the problem stem from the author’s definition of computation. He has defined it around the state of a Turing machine, which is vastly insufficient. The important part of a Turing machine is that of the behavior: given a certain state, the next state is a result of the current instruction on the tape. It is easy to imagine identifying some mapping from a Turing machine state and an iron bar. However, mapping the next state to a valid state transition of the same Turing machine seems quite unlikely, graduating to impossible, as the Turing machine executed. Said another way, a program is not its memory dump.
  • csee 4y ago
    Are they observer independent? From the article: "Of course it is simplest to build a computer where the high voltage states correspond to 1s and the low voltages states 0s or vice versa. But there is no requirement that we build our computers that way. We could build a perfectly valid computer where the high voltage states of even valued registers correspond to 1s and where they correspond to 0s in the odd valued registers, or a computer where the mapping flips on every 13th clock cycle. The system only “computes” because of the way we have encoded information."
• tgflynn 4y ago
  > Talking about computation and consciousness is a sideshow, this is anti-materialism by the back door. Nothing more. I get the impression that philosophers of mind are slowly coming around to the conclusion that the existence of qualia alone refutes materialism (by which I mean the view that consciousness is produced by physical processes) . This post does assume that qualia exist so if you are taking the former position then you would be correct that it is anti-materialist (though the author does not recognize that position). While it's clear to me that the existence of qualia (ie. the existence of subjective experience) refutes that consciousness is computational it is not currently entirely clear to me how to make the additional step that it refutes materialism entirely. Nonetheless if this does hold then the only way to save materialism is to deny that subjective experience exists, which I think is a hard pill for anyone to swallow.
  • simonh 4y ago
    I don't see it that way at all. I believe qualia exist, I'm experiencing them right now. I think consciousness is a real thing too, again I am experiencing that right now as well. I suspect that consciousness is an emergent property of systems which reflect computationally on a sophisticated model of themselves, their environment and other such systems. See "I am a strange loop" by Douglas Hofstadter. I see no reason why such a system could not experience qualia.
    • tgflynn 4y ago
      So fundamentally I agree with the arguments presented in this post, but I find the presentation confusing and somewhat lacking in rigor. In particular I was confused by his description of the iron bar as a computer because he didn't actually explain how it computed anything. I think that to map a physical system to an abstract Turing Machine you need more than a way to represent bits. You also have to define how to do computations with them. In other words you need something like logic gates. Nonetheless I do think that there is a sense in which computation only has meaning in relation to an external observer, but I think that is an idea that requires some more exploration. It is also a question that I think can be addressed by the methods of Theoretical Computer Science. Beyond that however the strongest argument I can give for why consciousness is not a computation is that (like the post author says) computation is fundamentally about the manipulation of symbols (which means it is closely related to language, whether natural or formal) and qualia (ie. conscious experiences) cannot be represented symbolically (ie. linguistically). To be clear when I say "represented by" I mean "fully represented by" or "reducible to". If qualia were reducible to a symbolic representation then there should be some linguistic utterance which would cause you to experience the sensation of the pain of burning your finger on the stove. Obviously such utterances do not exist. In fact the closest thing in human literature to such an utterance would be a magic spell, which I'm sure you agree, aren't real.
• solotronics 4y ago
  As neural networks become increasingly advanced I wonder where people will draw the actual line between "conscious" and "unconscious". A model can dream and produce unique art, play a game, and hold a conversation. It seems inevitable to me that some persistent implementation will eventually be able to pass as a conscious entity.
• csee 4y ago
  "To achieve a persistent mapping for a significant time you'd probably need an iron bar something like size of the observable universe" But the observable universe exists. So why can't the observable universe appropriately substitute for the iron bar in his argument? "As for doubting the field of rocks can be conscious" Just to be clear, you don't doubt that a sufficiently large field of rocks is conscious as long as it is performing the same computation as a brain?
  • simonh 4y ago
    On the first issue, that's the Boltzmann's Brain proposition, and well, yes. Given infinite monkeys, you'll get Shakespear. I don't see what that has to do with whether consciousness is computational or not. It certainly doesn't refute it. >Just to be clear, you don't doubt that a sufficiently large field of rocks is conscious as long as it is performing the same computation as a brain? No I don't, for the same reason that if you slowed down my metabolism by a trillion times, I would still be conscious. I wouldn't seem conscious to you, but that's a problem with your perception, not with my nature. I'd just be conscious very slowly. It wouldn't fundamentally change the nature of who or what I am. For rocks interacting according to rules, substitute atoms. Is a rock any more or less inanimate than an atom? This is all just materialism 101.
    • csee 4y ago
      What about the arguments outlined in the article? You first dismissed the arguments because an iron bar couldn't have enough physical states. But we both accept that there are physical objects which do have enough physical states, even if we have to use the entire observable universe as the object that the mapping draws from (and that's not related to the Boltzmann Brain). So the arguments in the article seems to be either ignored or misunderstood. Also, materialism =!= substrate independence and invariance to speed of computation. Consciousness can have a materialist explanation yet also be substrate dependent to an extent.
      • simonh 4y ago
        I actually don't think the observable universe is big enough, and that's been demonstrated mathematically by better people than I, but the universe as a whole including non-observable parts might be big enough. I don't see how this is not the Bolzmann's Brain proposition. What's the difference? >Consciousness can have a materialist explanation yet also be substrate dependent to an extent. I suppose so, maybe there's a quantum mechanical component, but even in that case why couldn't that be built into a computer? What sort of substrate might it be that we couldn't build it into a robot for example?
• Freebytes 4y ago
  Another flaw is that it assumes that the hardware component, .e.g. rocks, somehow represents the consciousness instead of the 'software'. For example, our brain is required for our own consciousness, but that is merely the hardware. And we see the hardware of the brain existing without consciousness when people fall into a coma. The example with the rocks is simply the hardware. Furthermore, the number of rocks needed to produce consciousness in this manner would likely cause them to coalesce into a planet under the influence of gravity from which life and consciousness itself might arise! After all, Earth is a collection of rocks that gave rise to consciousness.
• upsidesinclude 4y ago
  Anti-materialism? Care to shed some light on that?
• TheMightyLlama 4y ago
  I agree. I would also add that to make it easier to understand: the mind is running on a substrate, the weather is not.