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>In other words, unless we are content to “bite the bullet” of panpsychism, then no machine, however complex, can ever realize phenomenal consciousness purely i

• Arjuna144 4y ago
  > Consciousness is an emergent property of your whole body, not just something attributable to parts of it. What an arrogant statement to make! All the wisdom traditions of all the ages and of all the places have always taught that consciousness is the Epiphenomenon. The first cause that has no cause. This is even a scientific statement, because there is an experiment that can be reproduced (and has been reproduced since thousands of years) If you meditate very deeply for hours upon hours (20.000 to 30.000 hours, is a rough estimate given by the tradition of kriya yoga) you will make the experience yourself. I highly recommend to look at ORCH-OR (a theory on consciousness by nobel laureat Sir Roger Penrose and Prof. Stuard Hameroff. That substructures (microtubeli) inside biological neurons are taping into the state of the universe by going into superposition and collapsing... It is too much to further elaborate but worth checking out! Better even, increase you meditations ;))
  • cogwheel 4y ago
    Appeals to tradition and authority are not arguments. Look in the mirror for arrogance.
  • aatd86 4y ago
    Why arrogant? The statement seems sensical to me until proven otherwise. What are the proofs that someone unable to perceive anything from the physical realm can be conscious? [edit] Where I would disagree perhaps is the claim that a single neuron is not conscious. It depends on the definition of consciousness. It's probably more like a spectrum. Consciousness stems from physical interaction philosophically for me. So a rock, an atom etc, would also be conscious. It just doesn't process physical domain interactions like a human would do. Just another form of consciousness.
    • IncRnd 4y ago
      It's not a sensical statement but is akin to saying that the fundamental properties of the Universe are Fire, Water, Earth, and Air. It's clearly a wrong statement to say that "Consciousness is an emergent property of your whole body". A person who has their legs and arms removed suffers no difference in their actual consciousness. They suffer a lack of motility. A person who has had their heart replaced with a pig's heart does not suddenly lack consciousness or have the consciousness of a pig. Extremely short people, such as Afshin Ghaderzadeh 2'1", don't have less consciousness than extremely tall people, such as Robert Pershing Wadlow 8'11". Stating that consciousness is not an emergent property of the whole body should be a starting point, after which further research and discussion can occur.
      • aatd86 4y ago
        You don't get what he claimed. Your body allows your perceptions which are basically stored data that initiate the construction of your consciousness. No data = no consciousness. Do you think someone who was blind, deaf, and no sense of touch from birth can be conscious (have an internal representation) of colors? Dream in colors even? The science tells that they wouldn't even dream in images. As was said in the parent comment, the issue is that people have overloaded understandings of what is meant by consciousness. First it would be wiser to expound on what is meant by consciousness by each...
        • IncRnd 4y ago
  • tcgv 4y ago
    > I highly recommend to look at ORCH-OR (...) That substructures (microtubeli) inside biological neurons are taping into the state of the universe by going into superposition and collapsing. Orch OR has been criticized both by physicists and neuroscientists who consider it to be a poor model of brain physiology. Orch OR has also been criticized for lacking explanatory power; the philosopher Patricia Churchland wrote, "Pixie dust in the synapses is about as explanatorily powerful as quantum coherence in the microtubules." [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reduction#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reducti...
    • Arjuna144 4y ago
      It has gained a lot more traction in the last couple years when they figured out, that qunatum effects DO HAPPEN in "noisy and wet" environments. Please update your research! Of course there are still criticism, this is how scientific research works. Criticism does not mean disproven, mind you! It is a "new" theory with a lot of promise, that needs a lot more work
• foldr 4y ago
  >Ok, but why are biological neurons exempted from this argument? They're not. The neurons don't realize phenomenal consciousness purely in virtue of executing a particular program, but in virtue of certain (unknown) other of their many non-computational properties, such as their physical properties. This is the claim.
• marcosdumay 4y ago
  The article just uses an uncommon and trivially verifiable definition of "panpsychism" that can be proven by the existence of computers. I don't think the author reflect on what it means for himself. (People that do this usually have the "but magic (oh, no, it's just not understood physics, trust me), souls or whatever" explanation exempting them, but this one doesn't need exceptions.
  • foldr 4y ago
    What is this unusual definition of panpsychism? The article doesn't explicitly give a definition, and appears to be using the term in the normal sense, as far as I can tell.
• matt-attack 4y ago
  No reason to say “your whole body”. I think it’s well established that if you amputate the lower half of your entire body along with your arms, shoulders, ears, eyes, and nose, you’re still just as conscious.
  • xboxnolifes 4y ago
    You may still be considered just as conscience, but I'm not convinced you would be the same consciousness as before.
    • matt-attack 4y ago
      Does trimming your nails have a similar effect?
      • xboxnolifes 4y ago
        It may. I think every sensory input, or lack there of, influences our consciousness in some way. Specifically, it's not the cutting of the nails that influence the consciousness, but existing with the now shorter nails.
  • lostmsu 4y ago
    That maybe, but what if you are stripped of the access to the Internet?
• Animats 4y ago
  > Ok, but why are biological neurons exempted from this argument? Right. That's the "humans are magic" argument. It's a rehash of the "first cause" argument from theology for the existence of a creator. ("But who created God?" "Shut up, kid.") It's pretty clear now that AI via correlation can do a lot, but it has limits. Deep neural nets seem to have a generic problem of getting the right answer most of the time, getting a really wrong answer some of the time, and not being able to detect the difference. We're still missing something. What we're missing, I point out occasionally, is "common sense", defined as getting through the next 30 seconds of life without making a big mistake. We need to get to at least the mouse/squirrel level in that area, and we're not close. There was an article on HN a few days ago about someone having discovered the neural basis of panic flight escape route planning in mice. That's an important result. It's an indication that there's common sense hardware in mammal brains, and the beginning of understanding how it works. This is a problem which is both very hard and not too rewarding, either financially or academically. Some years ago, I met Rod Brooks, back when he'd done his insect robots and was proposing Cog, a jump to human level AI which involved a human-like robot head. I asked him, why try to jump to human-level AI in one step? A robot mouse might be within reach. He said, "Because I don't want to go down in history as the man who created the world's best robot mouse." Cog was a failure, and he went down in history as the man who created the robot vacuum cleaner. It's one of those thankless enterprises like OpenWorm, which is trying to get a simulation of the simplest known organism with a nervous system, a nematode with 959 cells. After over 20 years, it still doesn't work very well. Yet someone has to do that kind of ground work.
  • foldr 4y ago
    > Right. That's the "humans are magic" argument. It's a rehash of the "first cause" argument from theology for the existence of a creator. ("But who created God?" "Shut up, kid.") I don't think that's a fair summary of the argument. The conclusion of the argument is a dilemma: either (i) humans are not conscious or (ii) humans are conscious but so are lots of other things (like rocks) that we don't usually take to be conscious. If you aren't willing to accept (i) or (ii), then you can either look for flaws in the argument that led to the unwelcome conclusion, or consider the possibility that there is more to consciousness than just executing a particular program. We know virtually nothing about consciousness, so we can't confidently eliminate the possibility that certain physical properties of neurons are a necessary prerequisite for it. Being sensibly open-minded about this possibility is not akin to a belief in magic. I would rather say that the magical thinkers are those who have an unwavering faith in the ability of computer programs to conjure up conscious experience in the absence of any known causal mechanisms.
• migf 4y ago
  This is what struck me as well. The explanation given for the rejection of panpsychism is that it's a non-scientific (unfalsifiable) theory. I think sooner or later you have to confront the fundamental mystery of how it feels to exist, and that we might not have the tools to access that mystery being trapped inside it and all. Still, even if we allow panpsychism, I think there's a lot of merit in the author's points here... It seems unlikely that any system we build will be able to develop a robust enough model of reality if it can't learn by affecting reality.
  • karmakaze 4y ago
    > develop a robust enough model of reality if it can't learn by affecting reality This seems like comparing AlphaGo with AlphaZero, with the former learning from professional games and the latter from self-play. AlphaZero is better but both understand the game well enough to bead pros. In particular most believed for quite a while that something like AlphaGo would not be possible along similar lines of reasoning about AGI. Or consider the thought experiment if the machine was given the ability to perform experiments and measurements in the real world of its own choosing. Would this make AGI more possible or still only similarly possible?
• YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
  >> Ok, but why are biological neurons exempted from this argument? Because biological neurons are not computers? I think the argument is that our current theory of computation is not enough to explain the human mind, not that human minds are magickal and special compared to other computational devices. We just happen to understand one category of computational device that does not include human minds. I think if we look hard enough we can find examples of computational systems that exist in nature and that are not Turing machines. For examples, a weighted chain forming a catenary can instantly calculate the shape of a load-bearing arch, without going through any states: it suffices to set up the computational system (the weighted chain) and the result of the computation (the shape of the arch) is immediately known. Meaning, "there are more things in heaven and earth that are dreamt of" in our computer science. Our mind is probably the biggest fucking mystery in all of existence and it is a little ridiculous to think we can understand it, and simulate it, with our primitive science and technology.
  • akkartik 4y ago
    Is the catenary example just a case of really fast computation? Using the substrate computer directly is faster than using an emulated computer atop it. A real scene renders faster than any raytracer. I'm sympathetic to the idea that we treat the mind as an analogy with the high tech of each epoch, steam electricity computation. But Turing equivalence exists. I haven't found Roger Penrose's arguments about quantum computation in mitochondrial microtubules very compelling.
    • YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
      >> Is the catenary example just a case of really fast computation? It is, but I think its speed comes from the fact that it doesn't have to go through any discrete states during the computation. There's a start state where the weights are hung off the chain, then the end state where it settles into a new shape, but what is between? An infinite number of states? You can perturb it, even, while it's settling, and it will still not change its end state, which is not something you can do to any kind of machine. The computation is also "free" as in gravity. I don't know how we could build a machine to do that and I don't think we can describe it as a Turing machine. Btw, what makes it a computational device is that the shape of the catenary matches the shape of a load-bearing arch. It's one physical system calculating another. So it's not just using the physics of one system to calculate itself. But you are right. The universe calculates its own state faster than any computer running in-universe could. Well, why? That's just one thing we don't fully understand. Maybe thinking of the universe as a computer is applying the wrong analogy, and maybe we do the same thing with minds, as you say about electricity etc. I can't say I understand Penrose's arguments very well. I'm not a phycisist. Turing equivalence exists, of course. But there is something to the fact that I don't get stuck in a loop if I think that "this sentence is false".