4 ms·
It's not the silicon that's conscious of things, it's the model that happens to use that silicon.
by gaganyaan 2y ago
It's not the silicon that's conscious of things, it's the model that happens to use that silicon.
- godelski 2y agoAgain, at what point does the program become conscious? ```python def main(): print("Hello gaganyaan") if __name__ == '__main__': main() ``` That program is not conscious. So... The burden of proof is about what level of complexity is sufficient. Sure, no one has this answer. But also despite a few billion people believing in ghosts, including some saying a large portion of that saying they've seen ghosts, the burden of proof is to show ghosts exist, not showing ghosts don't exist. The reason being that one is falsifiable while the other isn't. Don't confuse "the absence of proof is not proof of absence" with "the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." If you do you might start a war in the middle east.
- quantadev 2y agoComputer chips don't have any brain waves. Even some theoretical computer chip able to run a "Perfect in Every Way" simulation of a brain including even simulating the physics of the actual brain waves...still has no brain waves. Nothing but 1s and 0s turning on and off, and not even turning on and off in anything resembling a wave pattern at all. 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.
- gaganyaan 2y agoWhy would a perfect simulation of a brain not have brain waves? They're not magic. I'm perfectly happy to talk about brain waves. I suspect anyone else in the "Consciousness is a Computation" camp is happy to as well, I have no idea where you got that idea from. I'd be interested in seeing any of this overwhelming evidence, but it's also not relevant, unless you're arguing that brain waves are supernatural in origin and can't be simulated. I think the crux of your argument can be boiled down to: "What's inferior about a perfect brain simulation, regardless of medium?"
- quantadev 2y agoI can write a computer program that analyzes, or even simulates, massive magnetic fields, but that program doesn't create any actual magnetic fields, right? Sometimes people say don't "Confuse the Map with the Territory" right? You get what that means surely.
- godelski 2y agoYou're correct about the magnetic fields[0]. But you can write a program to control things that do make magnetic fields. But I don't think this is a relevant analogy. It seems that you're arguing a specific form of the embodiment hypothesis; that consciousness requires a body. Surely this is a sufficient condition (and is why I think roboticists have a good chance at cracking AGI), but is it a necessary condition? I'm not sure anyone has any convincing evidence that cognition requires "a body" (is a standard computer "a body"? What about a laptop that has a camera? What body parts are necessary?) and if it does, it is unclear what constitutes the minimal necessary requirements. It is quite possible that this is all "software" (e.g. a person in a vegetative state may be completely oblivious to their surroundings but still may have conscious experiences. Most people do this every night!). I think you are erroring too far in the other direction. While I highly disagree with the person you're responding to, I do no think you are making strong arguments yourself. With so little known about what actually constitutes consciousness, I think it is difficult to make bold claims about what it is (though we've ruled out things that it isn't; e.g. a rock. Which is our typical method of doing reasoning in science; we generally disprove things, not prove. Like you said, the map is not the territory, and in this say way our models (yes, plural) of physics is not physics itself). I think the is evidence to believe that consciousness may be a "software" but that is not proof. Similarly I think we have lots of reasons to believe that embodiment is highly beneficial to creating consciousness, as not just by nature of examples, but our understanding of consciousness is in part about responding to environments and stimuli. But that's clearly not sufficient either and pinning down where this is, is quite complex (even our definition of life is ill-defined). I'm highly convinced that embodiment is the best path to pursue to achieve AGI, but I'm not convinced it is required either. [0] If we get pedantic, we should note that any simulation has to run on hardware and that creates magnetic fields but these are not in fact necessarily the fields being simulated. I don't think we need to pursue this avenue for this conversation.
- godelski 2y ago> 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....
- quantadev 2y agoDo 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?
- godelski 2y ago> 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).
- gaganyaan 2y agoMuch 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.
- quantadev 2y agoThe 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.
- gaganyaan 2y agoHow do you know that qualia is an actual Territory?