TBH, I don't really know what you're driving at with brain waves. They're not magic. I think you're trying to use "consciousness" to mean "high level brain activity", as opposed to something like the lizard brain? To which I say that you're making a distinction that isn't there. Your lizard brain is perfectly conscious of many things. It's just conscious of fewer things than your prefrontal cortex.
I mention "unconscious" only to help disambiguate an overloaded word. It's used for both "this model includes something in its representation" as well as "this model is currently executing".
> This is why people who believe the "Consciousness is a Computation" view never want to discuss brain waves, despite the overwhelming evidence that brain waves is precisely the thing out of which consciousness is composed.
Fwiw, I do actually believe that the brain is a computer. What I don't like about "consciousness is a computation" is it's utterly meaningless. Everything is a computation because computation is a fairly abstracted concept (same with simulation. Yes, we live in "a simulation" but that doesn't mean entities on the "outside" programming it. A ball rolling down a hill is also a simulation...)
But I really disagree with your argument. The difference doesn't come down to analogue vs digital and that seems like quite a bold assumption, especially considering 1) digital can get quite approximate to continuous signals and it can represent continuous signals 2) the brain doesn't function entirely continuously. Neuron signals are quite spikey. The neuromorphic people drew their inspiration from these and other aspects of the brain. But the brain is not operating on just continuous signals. There's a lot going on in there.
But if your true complaint is about how few ML people and far fewer ML enthusiasts will passionately discuss these subjects but also refuse to read literature from neuroscience, mathematical logic & reasoning, and other domains, then yeah, I also have that complaint. When you're a hammer I guess....
Do you think a computer simulation of an EMF wave is an actual EMF wave? If everything, according to you, is just a computation aren't you also claiming that actual EMF waves are "just computations"? Also does the substrate for the computation matter? What if I'm moving beads on billions of abacuses (as a thought experiment), are those abacuses therefore identical to an EMF wave if they're calculating wave mechanics? How does this abacus know I'm doing EMF wave calculations instead of, say, quantum probability wave calculations?
> Do you think a computer simulation of an EMF wave is an actual EMF wave?
Of course not. I'm pretty sure we've also established this.
> aren't you also claiming that actual EMF waves are "just computations"?
No. But actual real world EMF waves perform computation.
You are confusing what simulation means, which is why I explicitly put it in quotes. There's a dumb "simulation hypothesis" (the likes of which people like Elon Musk discuss) and there's a "yeah the terms are broad enough so it can be viewed as a simulation - simulation hypothesis". The latter isn't really contested because it also isn't very meaningful in the first place. But it does matter here for what you're talking about and why we brought up that a rock has "memory" since we can store information in the atomic structure. You're missing the abstraction of the stuff and how we're just talking about entropy.
Look at it this way, how does nand flash store memory? You trap electrons in states, right? This is to say you isolate charge to one side of a transistor gate from another. You can also do this with magnetic storage. There's plenty of people who build macro computers with things like water, and in those you're separating buckets of water. Physicists love to build computers out of things, and there are even thermal computers, using heat flow for computation.
That's the thing, computation is just about differentials in entropic states. So literally everything is a computer and everything is computing. Thanks emergence (another extremely misinterpreted word that people believe holds much more meaning than it does). But this does not mean there's some programmer, god, or any of that. It just means that information exists... You're making the same mistake these Musk like people talking about "living in a simulation" make, conflating the computer you're sitting in front of now that you control and have power over with just information flowing (obviously you can affect things in the physical world, and that's why experiments are physical simulations -- since they are controlled and limited settings -- but good luck programming "the universe" -- whatever the fuck that means. You're going to need more energy that it's got...)
So view physics as the instruction set of the universal computer or whatever. We're dealing with huge levels of abstraction so you can't go about understanding these things with reference to how we normally operate (this is why physics is so fucking hard and why advanced math -- well beyond calculus -- gets so crazy). Just like you can't work with high dimensional data by trying to relate to things in 2 or 3d, because the rules are very different at those abstraction levels (for example, the concept of a distance measure becomes useless. This is the curse of dimensionality that people very often misinterpret due to looking at it in a limited scope).
I think this field of discussion needs a new word for a new type of fallacy I'll name "Appeal to Base Reality" (ABR).
When someone makes a conjecture about physical reality like "Consciousness is made of EMF Waves, not Computations" (like I did) and then someone else tries to refute that with an appeal to the Simulation Theory (like you did) then that's called "Appeal to Base Reality".
Even if we're living in a simulation we still should consider EMF waves a very different phenomena than computations. Computations are not a phenomena of physics. Computations can be done on an abacus.
Much of the confusion here is from terms that you use like "become conscious", which binarizes it.
When run, that program will have a very simple model that includes only a few things like stdout. More complex programs will have models that represent more things. A game of tic tac toe written in Python is conscious of the state of the board, because it models it.
It's not "when does it become conscious.", it's "how much is it conscious of?". Asking the prior question is like asking "When does someone become rich?" or "When is the apple ripe?"
This isn't about ghosts. This is exactly a way of looking at it that provides a concrete, falsifiable definition, because far too many people are talking right past each other whenever "consciousness" comes up. This is trying to get past the magic words, and get at something useful.
The Map is not the Territory. In all your posts you seem to believe a map of data equals consciousness/qualia experience of said data. Computer 0s and 1s make Maps. Qualia is an actual Territory. There is nothing you can do with maps that equals a territory.
> like "become conscious", which binarizes it.
Only if you pigeonhole me.
There are countless things where we recognize they are on a spectrum yet we use shortcuts in language to specify a sufficient threshold. If you don't believe me, may I introduce to you the color blue. Or any other color for that matter.
There is still the aspect that even when we consider consciousness to lie upon a continuum this does not mean that the function yields a non-zero result (or even approximately) prior to some threshold. In this case there is no ambiguity of "becomes conscious" as you can interpret this in the most weak form of consciousness. If you believe that the consciousness is only zero at the domain minimum then please state so, as I believe you are smart enough to not misinterpret my meaning and we can actually have a productive conversation. If you believe in that and also that it is a very slow growing function until a certain point, well... if you're going to be fucking pedantic then be fucking pedantic. In either case, you don't have to force this conversation into an argument and reconstruct it so that you're smart and I'm dumb. Who knows that relationship and such definitions are typically obtuse anyways.
So please, engage with at least a little good faith here.
> This isn't about ghosts.
If you want to purposefully misinterpret me, okay. We're done.
Don't talk about people "talking past one another" when you are egregiously misinterpreting. In any conversation you have to make sure that you are correctly decoding the other person's words. At least if you do indeed want to "get at something useful."
I realize you're using ghosts as an analogy. I'm saying this isn't about anything mystical. I'm exactly trying to avoid any woo, by introducing more concrete definitions.
I'm not trying to pigeonhole you. I do believe that consciousness is only zero at the domain minimum and it's a slowly growing function, but I disagree that there's any sort of "certain point". Humans are "more conscious" than cats (and better terminology is that they are conscious of more things than cats, or their world model encompasses more than cats, or something like that), but that doesn't mean humans are conscious and cats aren't.
My entire point is that "consciousness" is entirely unlike "blue". You can ask the question "is this blue?" and have a coherent answer. You can't ask the question "is this conscious?". You need to ask the question "what is this conscious of?".
> I realize you're using ghosts as an analogy
I think you are missing the point. The analogy is about why burden of proof is in a certain direction and the error you're making in logic is the exact same those that argue for ghosts make. It is also a call to "Ghost in the machine"
> I'm saying this isn't about anything mystical.
You may think this, but you are relying on mysticism. But don't think this is me calling you dumb. It's so fucking easy to accidentally invent ghosts. There's a reason it takes so long to invent new knowledge, why it took humans so long to get to this point. Because we keep unintentionally inventing ghosts along the way. In the same advice I gave to the other person you're arguing with, stop trying to do it all on your own. Maybe you are smarter than the millions of people who have tried to figure it out before you, but certainly you have to recognize that leveraging the works of others will greatly increase your chances of success, right? You didn't try to invent calculus from scratch, so why this?
> I'm not trying to pigeonhole you.
I don't believe you are trying to, but there's plenty of things I try not to do and fail at. I am frustrated, but not angry. Like what makes you think I don't think humans are more conscious than cats? I've explicitly stated we're in agreement in a continuum. But you do seem to still have ignored the part of semantics with regards to thresholds and come on, if you understand don't argue something you know I'm not arguing. If you think the semantic difference is critical, then be fucking pedantic, not continue to talk at such a high level. But maybe you think our fictitious conscious function is linearly growing. I would highly doubt that. There's quite a large gap between many creatures. Not to mention that even in a single person we see consciousness rapidly develop during childhood. So I don't know why you're harping on this point, because I haven't seen any single person in the comments contend with this argument.
> You can ask the question "is this blue?" and have a coherent answer.
But this is wrong! This is demonstrably false. We don't even have to look at people with colorblindness nor people from history[0] (I specifically used blue because the history part makes this far more apparent), optical illusions[1], nor other (mother) languages[2]. While everyone is going to agree that #0000ff is blue, people are not going to agree on #7B68EE, which plenty will call purple. Here's a literal example[3]. This is the point with this example. It is easy to think that these are discrete terms but concepts like blue (or any other color) are categorical representations, not discrete. They also have multi-dimensional boundaries and there's a continuum of disagreement by people when you move from one category to another. It helps to create subcategories, but Turquoise is still a blue that many people will call green[4]. Worse, the same person can disagree with themselves, and no way is that coherent. Fwiw, I score 0 on this test[5], so if you want to see if we disagree you can check (I've also been tested in person).
> You need to ask the question "what is this conscious of?".
Whatever answer anyone gives, is almost certainly wrong.
The thing is, everything is fuzzy. Embrace the chaos, because if we're going to talk about brains and consciousness and abstractions, well you're not going to be able to work with things that are concrete. But, this too is fuzzy and I think you're likely to misinterpret. Just because everything is fuzzy doesn't mean there aren't things that are more wrong than others. It's more that you can't have infinite precision. So stop trying to deal in absolute answers, especially when we're in topics that people are have been unable to solve for thousands of years.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue#History
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_color_naming_debate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_...
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/colors/comments/1ao2osm/is_this_color_blue_or_purple/ https://www.reddit.com/r/colors/comments/1ao2osm/is_this_col...
[4] https://www.color-meanings.com/shades-of-blue-color-names-html-hex-rgb-codes/ https://www.color-meanings.com/shades-of-blue-color-names-ht...
[5] https://www.xrite.com/hue-test https://www.xrite.com/hue-test