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Consciousness is computation. Any substratum that can be interpreted as computation is capable of being conscious.

by jeremyjh 4y ago

brookst 4y ago
Are calculators conscious? GPT? Or am I misinterpreting “substratum”? I’ll admit I’m not clear on what you mean by it.
- naasking 4y ago
  Not the OP, but such systems might be conscious in some sense. Hard to say without an actual mechanistic understanding of consciousness. We can characterize a sorting algorithm by an ordering property, but we just don't know the properties of consciousness.
  - brookst 4y ago
    Fair, and of course our colloquial understanding of “consciousness” varies. But I think most of us root consciousness in something like reflection / theory of mind, and I am highly skeptical that a calculator even remotely touches on that.
    - naasking 4y ago
      "Reflection" or "theory of mind" are still incredibly vague. We need something like this to build a formal model: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2116933119 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2116933119 Some existing ML have models of attention, so they might be conscious? But maybe it's not the same kind of attention that produces consciousness? It's all still very murky.
- jeremyjh 4y ago
  I didn't say calculation is always consciousness. By substratum I just mean any physical system that can hold and transform structures to represent computation. Silicon chips apply; an abacus doesn't by itself but with a manipulator following a set of a rules even that system could be conscious , though it might take millions of years to perform enough calculation to constitute a thought.
adrianN 4y ago
Computation is similarly hard to define as consciousness. That's the road to giving rocks some degree of consciousness. Which is fine, I suppose.
- naasking 4y ago
  On the road but nowhere near it. Rocks can't learn anything and then act differently based on what they've learned. Basically, they have no identity or internal state. It's like the difference between an immutable record and an object with identity. Identity is a necessary but insufficient property for consciousness, rocks don't have a meaningful sense of identity so they're not conscious.

Consciousness is computation. Any substratum that can be interpreted as computation is capable of being conscious.

brookst 4y ago

Are calculators conscious? GPT? Or am I misinterpreting “substratum”? I’ll admit I’m not clear on what you mean by it.

naasking 4y ago
Not the OP, but such systems might be conscious in some sense. Hard to say without an actual mechanistic understanding of consciousness. We can characterize a sorting algorithm by an ordering property, but we just don't know the properties of consciousness.
- brookst 4y ago
  Fair, and of course our colloquial understanding of “consciousness” varies. But I think most of us root consciousness in something like reflection / theory of mind, and I am highly skeptical that a calculator even remotely touches on that.
  - naasking 4y ago
    "Reflection" or "theory of mind" are still incredibly vague. We need something like this to build a formal model: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2116933119 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2116933119 Some existing ML have models of attention, so they might be conscious? But maybe it's not the same kind of attention that produces consciousness? It's all still very murky.
jeremyjh 4y ago
I didn't say calculation is always consciousness. By substratum I just mean any physical system that can hold and transform structures to represent computation. Silicon chips apply; an abacus doesn't by itself but with a manipulator following a set of a rules even that system could be conscious , though it might take millions of years to perform enough calculation to constitute a thought.

adrianN 4y ago

Computation is similarly hard to define as consciousness. That's the road to giving rocks some degree of consciousness. Which is fine, I suppose.

naasking 4y ago
On the road but nowhere near it. Rocks can't learn anything and then act differently based on what they've learned. Basically, they have no identity or internal state. It's like the difference between an immutable record and an object with identity. Identity is a necessary but insufficient property for consciousness, rocks don't have a meaningful sense of identity so they're not conscious.