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Pretty dense article for what seems to be a really daffy definition of consciousness, so maybe someone can summarize? It seems to just be the difference betwee

Pretty dense article for what seems to be a really daffy definition of consciousness, so maybe someone can summarize? It seems to just be the difference between systems thinking and reductionism, but why would any irreducible concept be evidence of consciousness? Why on earth would that idea make any more sense than, say, a math problem that is too hard for a 4th-grader being evidence of consciousness? Or a locked machine, or a patented process, etc? There's nothing intrinsically special about an irreducible process other than it being irreducible - it's not like it's mystical or anything.

gone35 12y ago
Close. Aaronson's most devastating argument (he offers two more) is that Tonini's \Phi or "integrated information" of an input-output system (function), under a reasonable operationalization as a measure of how correlated subsets of inputs are with subsets of outputs, is just not good measure of "consciousness" because, as it happens, large families of rather mundane systems that one wouldn't think as "conscious" in fact have provably large "integrated information" or \Phi by design --such as Reed-Solomon codes, for instance. Put in another way, if Tonini were right then your (say) portable DVD player ought to be "conscious" because, surprisingly, the amount of "integrated information" achieved by the scratch- and skip-tolerant error-correcting code it uses internally has to be huge in order for it to work. But that is prima facie ridiculous; so either we are wrong and the DVD player is in fact "conscious" or, more likely, Tononi's proposed definition of consciousness is lacking. Again as I said Aaronson makes two other points, but I think this one alone is the most conclusive.
- logicallee 12y ago
  It's not prima facie ridiculous that the DVD player might be conscious, as let's assume it is prima facie ridiculous - then it would be prima facie ridiculuos in 1969 with a tape player, in 1979 with a VCR, in 1989 with a CD-ROM drive, 1999 with a DVD-ROM drive, in 2009 with a Blu-RAY drive, in 2019 with x, in 2029 with y, and there is no reason it shouldn't still be prima facie ridiculous even if at some point along the way the thing happens to be conscious as a side-effect, without this being necessarily visible in its outputs. So you can't just call it prima facie ridiculous and be done with it - you need some other argument.

gone35 12y ago

Close. Aaronson's most devastating argument (he offers two more) is that Tonini's \Phi or "integrated information" of an input-output system (function), under a reasonable operationalization as a measure of how correlated subsets of inputs are with subsets of outputs, is just not good measure of "consciousness" because, as it happens, large families of rather mundane systems that one wouldn't think as "conscious" in fact have provably large "integrated information" or \Phi by design --such as Reed-Solomon codes, for instance. Put in another way, if Tonini were right then your (say) portable DVD player ought to be "conscious" because, surprisingly, the amount of "integrated information" achieved by the scratch- and skip-tolerant error-correcting code it uses internally has to be huge in order for it to work. But that is prima facie ridiculous; so either we are wrong and the DVD player is in fact "conscious" or, more likely, Tononi's proposed definition of consciousness is lacking. Again as I said Aaronson makes two other points, but I think this one alone is the most conclusive.

logicallee 12y ago
It's not prima facie ridiculous that the DVD player might be conscious, as let's assume it is prima facie ridiculous - then it would be prima facie ridiculuos in 1969 with a tape player, in 1979 with a VCR, in 1989 with a CD-ROM drive, 1999 with a DVD-ROM drive, in 2009 with a Blu-RAY drive, in 2019 with x, in 2029 with y, and there is no reason it shouldn't still be prima facie ridiculous even if at some point along the way the thing happens to be conscious as a side-effect, without this being necessarily visible in its outputs. So you can't just call it prima facie ridiculous and be done with it - you need some other argument.