6 ms·

As someone who spends a lot of time on this subject, and disagrees with this person passionately: great article, and a fascinating addition to the field! The cr

• keybored 2y ago
  Interesting that you mention Chomsky. Is my feeling correct that Skinner and people like him represented the modern feeling—and at that time too apparently—that we only needed to find mechanisms of association and then would be able to mechanically simulate the interesting parts of the human mind? Btw from the Chomsky book you linked: > > The technological advances of the 1940s simply reinforced the general euphoria. Computers were on the horizon, and their imminent availability reinforced the belief that it would suffice to gain a theoretical understanding of only the simplest and most superficially obvious of phenomena – everything else would merely prove to be “more of the same,” an apparent complexity that would be disentangled by the electronic marvels
• foobarian 2y ago
  One simple question I'm dying to know the answer to - does the consciousness found in biological brains rely on some hitherto unknown physical mechanism (e.g. some QD effect) or can it be recreated purely through interconnectivity of a data structure/algorithm?
  • bbor 2y ago
    It’s a bigger question than one can get into in a forum comment (I recommend typing some key words into https://plato.stanford.edu https://plato.stanford.edu for more!), but to share what I feel are the closest to empirical truths we have on the matter: There is, as of yet, no scientific justification for thinking that humans are different from computers in some fundamental physical sense. We can talk about differences in architectonic structure like this article does (densely connected neurons v sparsely connected transistors), but ultimately each neuron is a machine, and at this point they’re machines we understand pretty darn well. Like all other machines bigger than 0.0001nm or whatever, there’s not really a clear mechanism by which they could be meaningfully “controlled” or “influenced” by quantum interactions. In this light, the answer is simple: human brains are incredibly complex machines. Some of the main counter arguments are: 1. It “feels” like “something” to be “you”, which is a whole field science lacks the terminology/framework to study. This is the position taken by this author, more or less 2. All conscious beings so far (animals included) have been biological, so simple parsimony could argue that we need a counterexample first. 3. Humans are able to communicate with each other telepathically by tapping into an unknown physical field. Obviously won’t win a lot of fans on this forum, but it’s an interesting piece of trivia that this final point was the only one Alan Turing found plausible in his famous 1950 paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence. See page 17: https://courses.cs.umbc.edu/471/papers/turing.pdf https://courses.cs.umbc.edu/471/papers/turing.pdf
    • foobarian 2y ago
      > There is, as of yet, no scientific justification for thinking that humans are different from computers in some fundamental physical sense This is similar to the question of, can we simulate a brain? Even if we can't build one using a LLM-type construct, it seems at the very least we could model atomic interactions in detail and brute-force a simulation that way. However I think this requires that there is a lower limit to the level of detail of physical reality; otherwise the non-determinism such as what you see with the uncertainty principle becomes intractable. As a result it's not clear to me at all that humans are not different from computers in a physical sense.
  • poikroequ 2y ago
    It depends who you ask, but I personally lean strongly towards the "unknown physical mechanism". It seems insane to me to believe that simulating neutral activity in software will magically result in real consciousness.
    • seba_dos1 2y ago
      Why?
      • poikroequ 2y ago
        I use the word "magic" a lot. If you really stop to consider how a computer works, multiple sticks of ram, registers, L1/L2/L3 cache, LRU cache, memory swapped to disk, GPU memory, virtual memory, encrypted/compressed memory, x86/arm instructions, Unicode, and computation can span multiple computers. It seems insane to me to believe that consciousness can emerge from this mess, simply because "you performed the right computations", regardless of cpu architecture or operating system or programming language or whatever. If consciousness really could emerge from all this, interpret the CPU instruction set, parse virtual memory tables, dereference pointers, decrypt and uncompress memory, parse Unicode text, assemble all of the necessary information scattered all about in the system, then consciousness is magic, a miracle. Or, we could simply assume there's some unknown physical mechanism/process/activity in the brain that leads to conscious experience. Almost everything else in the universe is the result of a physical process, magnetic fields, a nuclear bomb exploding, even quantum entanglement. Why should consciousness be an exception?
        • The5thElephant 2y ago
          I'm struggling to understand this argument. Our brain is just hardware. Even if there is a quantum effect we haven't discovered that is necessary for it, that effect is still running on regular old atoms and molecules. There is no inherent reason we couldn't just add that effect to our metal and silicon computers. Those atoms and molecules may just be bits of information themselves in some higher order computer. But there is nothing inherently "magical" about consciousness other than its uniqueness. Heck there are fairly convincing arguments for pan-consciousness where it is a fundamental part of any set of information and is simply as complex as that information system. If you have a highly complex, self referential information system like our brains, then the complexity of consciousness is equivalent to our experience. The chinese box would have its LLM-like consciousness, which we would not recognize as our own, but could still a qualitative experience born from objective information states. Think more about your last paragraph, it undermines your argument from the previous two. If everything is the result of a physical process, then how is that an argument for consciousness being somehow fundamentally different or exceptional in our ability to recreate or simulate it?