Your argument is the same as saying that a hurricane could never form because air molecules do not contain wind, and water molecules do not contain rain.
Any other explanation would have to rely on the property being explained existing all the way down to electrons and quarks.
Atoms aren’t a liquid, but room temperature water is. At some point, the property of being a liquid emerges through the combined behavior of collections of atoms.
We know that people are intelligent, we know that atoms are not. At some point, the property of being intelligent must arise from the combined action of their constituent parts. We have theories about how that happens, but no way to reproduce it as of yet using computers — it may not be possible. But there is no reason in principle that just because computers are comprised of non intelligent components, that they cannot give rise to an intelligent system. Humans are one example where such a thing has happened— I don’t think anyone would suggest that neurons have intelligence and even if you believed that, one certainly can’t believe that electrons and quarks do.
Of course one could posit a non physical entity or force which somehow exists in people and does not in machines which gives rise to intelligence, but to say the least that requires a great deal more evidence than we currently have for that before I would accept that as an explanation.
I'm not knowledgeable about AI, but from some of of the game-playing AI research I've read about, it seems like we provide in exhaustive detail the rules and objectives and the AI figures out (though a very resource-hungry process) an "algorithm" (e.g. encoded as a neural network) to play the game well.
I'm not saying that's close to human thought, but it seems far beyond having to "specify in exhausting detail the thought processes that the AI should execute in carefully constructed algorithms."
The simulation of a thing is not the thing itself. Perfectly simulating an apple falling from a tree only generates information about the thing, but the simulation hasn't caused an actual apple to fall from an actual tree. Computers are merely symbol manipulators, and symbols are nothing more than the material used to make them(ink on paper, electrons in a computer, etc...). I suspect that consciousness must follow the same logic -- We should be able to simulate something that looks exactly like creative thought(and probably is, technically), but if that same symbol manipulation results in an actual consciousness being produced in the actual world, then the universe has to be a much stranger place than we already know it to be...
But a brain is also just a symbol manipulator, in essence. All it does is shift electrical current from one place to another.
As a thought experiment, would it be possible to create consciousness using pen and paper calculation? Perform the same calculations by hand, multithread it by using billions of people performing the same symbol manipulation we would have otherwise performed on the computer. I argue all that project would produce is a large stack of paper and ink. I would argue that it's not the act of manipulating symbols that gives rise to consciousness(since it's the only thing the computer and paper methods have in common), rather that something qualitatively different is happening in the brain.
A late reply, perhaps, but:
- Does the physicality matter all that much here? For sake of argument, let's assume that I have an infinitely powerful computer, which simulates a brain perfectly, down to the last atom. Would the thing inside my simulation not be conscious, and if so, why not?
> As a thought experiment, would it be possible to create consciousness using pen and paper calculation? Perform the same calculations by hand, multithread it by using billions of people performing the same symbol manipulation we would have otherwise performed on the computer.
I don't see why not, to be honest. That is: given enough computing power and enough knowledge on how it works.
> I would argue that it's not the act of manipulating symbols that gives rise to consciousness(since it's the only thing the computer and paper methods have in common), rather that something qualitatively different is happening in the brain.
I must admit: I'm a Hofstadterian in this; I agree with his conclusions that consciousness, as we describe it, is an emergent property caused by the act of manipulating symbols representing ideas and concepts in a self/circularly referencing manner.