Hacker News Reader

With infinite time and infinite space, you could do all the computations required for the nematode worm neural network with a pencil and paper rather than an electronic computer. Would you say that this pencil and paper is now conscious?

Does the speed of computation cause emergence? How?

Does building a computer out of organic particles cause consciousness? How?

"Emergence" is mostly lazy thinking and lack of understanding the hard problem of consciousness.

Roger Penrose has some plausible ideas on this, not sure if they are correct, however to me it seems that they must happen at a sub-neural network level.

> you could do all the computations required for the nematode worm neural network with a pencil and paper rather than an electronic computer.

Yes.

> Would you say that this pencil and paper is now conscious?

No. But your experiment involves "you with a pencil and a paper" where "you" is conscious.

> Does building a computer out of organic particles cause consciousness?

It's not necessary to use organic particles. We will probably soon build the electronic computer which will, from the perspective of the humans communicating with him, indeed behave "as a conscious person": soon we won't need you to write the answer you wrote, the computer will be able to make even better one.

https://www.amazon.com/Makoroni-REPLACE-SCRIPT-License-Holde...

> "Emergence" is mostly lazy thinking

Calling "emergence" lazy thinking is lazy thinking.

> and lack of understanding

... and lack of understanding of what emergence even means.

Emerging properties are everywhere and they don't have to have anything with humans or their behavior to be recognized:

http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2013/10/18/is-time-...

"Temperature and pressure didn’t stop being real once we understood them as emergent properties of an underlying atomic description."

Yes, temperature is an emergent property.

>No. But your experiment involves "you with a pencil and a paper" where "you" is conscious.

Ok if it was mechanical computer, or an electronic computer what difference would it make ?

At what point does the computer start to have an independent experience of reality ?

To be clear I should mention I am not against consciousness emerging from physics, I don't think it is very likely that it emerges from computation at the level of neural networks.

Primordial consciousness is not an intuitive thing to understand. I see a lot of hubris and arrogance from people who conflate consciousness with computation or intelligence.

Are are lots of examples of computation without consciousness. So there is not much reason to think this other than the fact that our own brains are both conscious and perform computation (and even then the vast majority of the computation happens at a sub-conscious level)

>It's not necessary to use organic particles. We will probably soon build the electronic computer which will, from the perspective of the humans communicating with him, indeed behave "as a conscious person": soon we won't need you to write the answer you wrote, the computer will be able to make even better one.

Just because humans believe something is conscious doesn't make it conscious. The hard problem of consciousness is understanding why we have any experience at all. Consciousness is the illuminating quality of our minds, computation causes permutations in the nature of this experience, however it doesn't follow that it is what creates this experience to begin with.

> We will probably soon build the electronic computer which will, from the perspective of the humans communicating with him, indeed behave "as a conscious person": soon we won't need you to write the answer you wrote, the computer will be able to make even better one.

This is wrong. We are absolutely nowhere near anything even remotely resembling this.

No. We already have a complete nematode implemented as a computer program. We already have a realistic simulation of the living creature.

Twenty years ago the current output of Google Translate was a pure science fiction, compared to what it was possible then. Today it already often translates better than a lot of humans knowing both languages. Had anyone seen the output of Google Translate of today some 20 years ago, nobody would have believed it was produced by the machine. Note I don't say that it's always good. It's not. But it can produce amazing outputs already, which can't be recognized to be produced by a computer.

Also read about AlphaZero:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaZero#Training

"AlphaZero was trained solely via self-play, using 5,000 first-generation TPUs to generate the games and 64 second-generation TPUs to train the neural networks. In parallel, the in-training AlphaZero was periodically matched against its benchmark (Stockfish, elmo, or AlphaGo Zero) in brief one-second-per-move games to determine how well the training was progressing. DeepMind judged that AlphaZero's performance exceeded the benchmark after around four hours of training for Stockfish, two hours for elmo, and eight hours for AlphaGo Zero."

Apparently, the computer learned chess better than the long developed programs by only playing the game with itself for four hours! And the programs are already better than humans there.

> We already have a complete nematode implemented as a computer program. We already have a realistic simulation of the living creature.

It is not, by any stretch of the imagination, "a complete nematode". It is very much a simple simulation that isn't at all close to the actual complexity of a living organism, even a worm. We can't even simulate a bacteria with the kind of fidelity required to claim that it approaches the complexity of a living organism.

> Twenty years ago the current output of Google Translate was a pure science fiction

I think you're giving google translate way too much credit. Compared to 20 years ago, yes, much has improved, but compared to a human native speaker it is pitiful.

> Also read about AlphaZero:

I am aware of Alpha Zero, it is an impressive but narrowly applicable use of machine learning that doesn't at all represent anything nearing the cognitive complexity of an animal. It is a complex achievement of applied statistics, not an intelligence. The "world" of Alpha go is a very strictly defined finite universe where the only possibilities are the clean and simple rules of the go board. Yes, the combinatorial explosion of potential moves is impractical to brute force, but ultimately the rules of go are so simple and discretely defined that its worthless as a comparison to a living intelligence.

>>Apparently, the computer learned chess better than the long developed programs by only playing the game with itself for four hours!

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/the-man...

Basically the machine isn't exactly thinking. It simulates a model of thinking.

There lies the biggest difference.

Congratulations, you have re-discovered Searle's Chinese Room argument.

Couldn't you argue similarly in a paper and pencil simulation that you never create electricity, atoms, DNA and that all you have is pencil scratches on the paper?

Sure, we can distinguish the difference between computation and electricity, or computation and atoms etc.

However somehow we conflate computation with consciousness.

I think this is primarily because the human brain 1) performs computations 2) is also somehow related to consciousness in a way we don't quite understand.

However we have lots of examples of computation without consciousness (mechanical compuaters, electronic computers, cellular replication, slime molds, Cellular automata etc).

So why would it follow that consciousness emerges from computation? There is really no good reason to think this other than the fact that our brains are both computational and conscious.

Consciousness is the reason that there is some experience of reality rather than no experience of reality. It is not computational in nature one way or the other.

So overall I think the emergence theory is hubris, not sound thinking. The reality is we don't currently have a good solution to the hard problem of consciousness.

> just re-hashing the unfalsifiable concept of a "soul"

Yes. It comes from religiously inclined or deeply religious philosophers and “philosophers”. Once they fix they “belief” they search for any possible way to fit the reality, which otherwise wouldn’t support their belief, with their already pre-decided goal.

Even worse, the last time I’ve checked, nautil.us was financed by the people with such goals:

https://www.templeton.org

"The Foundation takes its vision from its founding benefactor, the late Sir John Templeton, who sought to stimulate what he described as “spiritual progress.”"

And, as a more obvious parallel, if you ever wondered who produces "Ancient Aliens" on History Channel, it's also non-accidentally the guy who wants more "spirituality", in his words:

"It’s really a show about looking for God. Science would have you believe we are the result of nothing more than a chance assemblage of matter" whereas "Ancient Aliens" "offers seekers an origin story."

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/21/style/ancient-aliens.html

Yes, both behind the "conscious matter" and behind https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/158327-ancient-aliens is a "spirituality" drive.

>>If the mechanical model also does this, it it conscious too?

That's a big 'If'. You really have to arrive at something working to even ponder upon that question. Right now you are at:

    if (false) {
        is_conscious();
    }

I agree. I'd like to add that consciousness is an emergent property of the interactions between the agent and the environment. The environment is what feeds the agent with perceptions and reward signals, enabling learning to happen.

  If the mechanical model also does this, it it conscious too?

So, how would you answer your question?