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Comment by codeulike | Hacker News Reader

He has a book that seems to take some sort of dualist or perhaps squishy-life-forms-only approach to consciousness

The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can't Be Computed (The MIT Press) Christof Koch

Koch describes how the theory explains many facts about the neurology of consciousness and how it has been used to build a clinically useful consciousness meter. The theory predicts that many, and perhaps all, animals experience the sights and sounds of life; consciousness is much more widespread than conventionally assumed. Contrary to received wisdom, however, Koch argues that programmable computers will not have consciousness. Even a perfect software model of the brain is not conscious. Its simulation is fake consciousness. Consciousness is not a special type of computation―it is not a clever hack. Consciousness is about being

I might have to read that to see what his take is exactly.

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Why you can't program computers to "be" requires explanation. Maybe someone who has read the book can comment.

I'm sympathetic towards "consciousness is about being" idea. I don't see why consciousness requires conscious thinking, much less language. When you sip coffee in the morning looking trough window, you are just experiencing while staying alert. All decisions and cognition is unconscious, yet the level of consciousness is not diminished.

When we are just "being" we are still doing active cognitive processing and reacting, but the process is not conscious, yet the conscious awareness of being is still there.

(concepts like being, awareness, consciousness, experiencing would require better definition in this context)

"All decisions and cognition is unconscious"

I'm deeply troubled by the idea of an "unconscious". This is an idea created a century ago by Sigmund Freud; all modern psychotherapy schools seem to have inherited it, many psychologists (I mean experimental scientists) seem fine with the idea, and for the general public it's commonplace that we have "unconscious thoughts".

But how can you have an unconscious cognition? A cognition is an elementary moment of knowledge; how can such a thing be unconscious?

And how do people who treat consciousness as an emergent phenomenon deal with this "unconscious"? Is it an emergent phenomenon that is waiting to emerge? Seriously, I don't know, and I'd like to know.

Cognitive scientists sometimes use term nonconsious as instead of unconscious.

The concept of unconscious is not controversial. We simply don't observe much of our own actions or body to be aware enough to make decisions. Most of our cognitive processing is non-conscious. Toughs just pop into our consciousness seemingly from nowhere but are somehow relevant to the task. We can walk and drive around without paying attention while listening radio or podcast. Learning new tasks require more conscious processing. When we have learned stuff it can happen without us paying any attention to the details.

To me, "unconscious" encompasses all the processes in your brain that you are not aware of, which is most of them. You can become aware of the result of those processes as they emerge as a phenomenon of consciousness (such as becoming aware that you have made a decision, and possibly even being able to trace your own justification for the decision) but it is not really possible to account for everything.

Most of what we experience consciously is already heavily altered by processes that we have no control over. For example, the brain does a whole bunch of signal processing on the input of your eyes before you consciously see anything.

I bought the book. Chapter 13 deals with 'Why Computers Can't Experience'. The author has layers and layers of theory and a very detailed discussion of the mechanics of a modern processor. But the author seems to have some fundamental inability to distinguish between layers of abstraction. That even though the fundamentals of a computer circuit are very simple, such a circuit could be used to simulate a very rich model. The author sees nowhere in the circuit where experience could happen. But the 'experience' would be within the model, not within the circuit.

Its basically a book about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory apparently

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