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> But according to solipsism you can't be sure my brain actually exists at all, right? Right but my belief is I live in a universe with regular processes depen
by GPerson 1mo ago
> But according to solipsism you can't be sure my brain actually exists at all, right?
Right but my belief is I live in a universe with regular processes depending on regular arrangements. It seems like a relatively weak axiom to hold and precludes the version of solipsism you mention.
> They're both made of the same protons and electrons, right?
They have different arrangements. A MOSFET is just a block of polysilicon sitting on top of another layer of silicon which has been doped to contain some arsenic or boron atoms (+ some other details). I can put some legos together which correspond conceptually to this, but they will have functional differences. The actual substrate is what causes the mosfet to have the function of a transistor. Of course the neurons in the brain are far more complex and have different physical properties.
To me trying to explain how protons and electrons put together results in consciousness feels the same as the pre-Newtonians trying to explain gravity with their mechanical philosophy. The only thing I know is my brain is conscious, and your brain is physically similar to mine. Substrate non-independence is actually the weaker of the two assumptions in a sense because it makes a positive statement about fewer systems.
> That feels like a reach for a theory that wants to find a certain conclusion.
The problem with this kind of thinking is one can impugn the beliefs of either side with underhanded motives. Maybe people self-identify as being moral and ethical and elevating the talking computer gives them status in their circle. Maybe the personhood for AI researcher has a big ego and wants their work to be extremely important today.
I honestly do not find it plausible that we cannot build a consciousness-free intelligent computer system. A computer system can be made out of marbles, or pulleys, or pen and paper. All of these are having an experience if you put the symbols or objects in the right order? It just seems absurd to me.
> Right. But that's circular, isn't it? Consciousness is what I feel like consciousness is.
A priori why must real concepts be reducible in the way you want? Gravity is the thing that makes stuff fall, actually it’s the curvature tensor of the spacetime metric? What is the spacetime metric actually? Maybe something in string theory? Eventually you get to irreducible primitives that simply correspond to something we observe. Why isn’t consciousness just this with fewer steps?
- qarl 1mo ago> It just seems absurd to me. But this is just the "consciousness is based on information, not substrate" position, right? It seems absurd? I understand that it troubles you that real computation can be done with marbles... but... it can. So you must believe that consciousness is entirely uncomputable? Do you have any other examples of physical processes that are beyond computation? > A priori why must real concepts be reducible in the way you want? Because everything we do in science is like this? Do you think consciousness is beyond the ability for science to study it? > Gravity is the thing that makes stuff fall... I agree that gravity is akin to an axiom handed down from on-high. But it's an extremely simple axiom. And it's possibly explained by yet undiscovered simpler axioms. I see no such axiom for the theory of conciousness, despite our extensive understanding of the physical mechanisms involved. Given its absence, it seems to me like the most reasonable explanation is the one we already have - rather than insisting it still must be undiscovered. And... I'm sorry but your argument feels exactly like vitalism. Given the repeating pattern of man insisting he has a special place in God's universe and then fighting for it stubbornly but then being proved otherwise... I think it's likely this instance will fall the same way all the others have.
- GPerson 1mo ago> I understand that it troubles you that real computation can be done with marbles... but... it can. I don’t understand what you’re saying here. It doesn’t trouble me at all. I’m actually quite confident I could design a simple computer from scratch in a substrate of marbles and an electric motor to bring them back up. Maybe we should separate these threads otherwise it’ll be too hard to keep branching out.
- qarl 1mo agoI must have misunderstood where you were drawing the line of absurdity. I'm comfortable going slower - although the site won't let me reply as quickly as it let's you. So I take it that you disbelieve that consciousness/qualia can be created by computation. But you do believe, I suspect, that consciousness/qualia are a physical process. So I'm wondering, is this the only example of non-computable physical process you know of?
- GPerson 1mo agoLet me apologize for having to discontinue now, or my girlfriend will dump me for being more interested in talking to you than her tonight. Another time!
- GPerson 1mo agoI’ll just leave this comment to start a thread to ask you about your position and then figure out how I’d like to address your question later. Your position seems to have non-trivial difficulties if its own. I take it you don’t believe that a sequence of unique rock states or wall states is conscious, which means consciousness is not merely caused by an abstract mapping to some sequence of information states. I.e., I gather you must believe there is something about the organization or causal structure of the processing necessary for consciousness. Before continuing I’ll share another thought experiment just to suggest why this must be. Put two supposed conscious AIs into conversation for a day. Take a long time writing down the states line by line in a (very!) big notebook. Then cover up each line with other sheets who paper, revealing them line by line in a sequence. From our perspective the same conversation must be getting expressed by the two AIs, but surely we don’t think this results in a new conscious experience for the two AIs modeled by the states. Okay then my challenge to your position (and mine of course, but this is why I’m led to my beliefs ultimately) is it must explain (1) which kinds of casual and organizational structures count here and (2) how these result in conscious experience. It seems to me that even though I also cannot meaningfully answer these, believing there is some special physics going on which is yet to be discovered seems necessary. I.e. the how part is that it’s just a feature of that physical process. The which kinds are “the physical ones of the right kind inherently have consciousness”. And I will point out that there has rarely been a time in the last 2000 years when we as humans did not think we were nearly at the end of understanding physics.