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Comment by philipkglass | Hacker News Reader

In Koch’s picture, then, the Turing Test is irrelevant to diagnosing inner life. What’s more, it implies that the transhumanist dream of downloading one’s mind into an (immortal) computer circuit is a fantasy. At best, such circuits would simulate the inputs and outputs of a brain while having absolutely no experience at all. It will be “nothing but clever programming… fake consciousness—pretending by imitating people at the biophysical level.” For that, he thinks, is all AI can be. These systems might beat us at chess and Go, and deceive us into thinking they are alive. But those will always be hollow victories, for the machine will never enjoy them.

This is really damning humans with faint praise. "Machines may eventually do every job better than we can, and be immortal, but I promise that humans will remain superior in some completely undetectable way."

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Koch believes “that consciousness is a fundamental, elementary property of living matter.”

Consciousness is “magic” then.

Even if we build machines to mimic a real brain, “it’ll be like a golem stumbling about,” he writes: adept at the Turing Test perhaps, but a zombie.

This guy created a whole moat of unfalsifiability around his views.

Your second quote sounds like a fairly straightforward description of P-zombies to me: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

However, to add to the criticism you have of this article about this book, your two quotes taken together appear to be contradictory: if consciousness is a fundamental element of living matter, then given that we can make new living matter, why should there be any reason we can’t make a conscious artificial machine?

P-zombies are magical nonsense.

Magic has nothing to do with it. P-zombies are a philosophical thought experiment against physicalism. The point of the argument is to demonstrate that a purely physical description leaves out conscious experience. Nagel made the same point regarding bat sonar consciousness and science’s view from nowhere.

No more magic than anything else fundamental. I don’t know whether consciousness is fundamental, but magical has nothing to do with being fundamental, unless existence itself is magical.

Consciousness is “magic” then.

That doesn't follow at all.

They're in the camp that since you can't measure subjective experience its magic.

Well, they're here reading this, since they cant measure their experience they must not exist. /s

How would Koch see a mechanism where neurons or other cells in a human brain are sequentially replaced over time with synthetic components that simulate their function, is the consciousness lost along the way? Is there consciousness as long as there is at least one biological cell left?

I wonder if an intelligence higher than ours were to figure out exactly how our brain worked. Every neuron, every synapse, every hormone and neurotransmitter.. How memories were made, stored and retrieved. Would we appear to them to merely be "simulating" consciousness through the use of these mechanisms.

You should write a book, "The Cyborg of Theseus" :)

I am a "panpsychist," or whatever, and I don't really see the silver lining in any of this, either. I really don't care if DeepMind or Stockfish are enjoying how much they can drag me through the mud, because I already don't. It's a huge non sequitur to respond to such things with "it doesn't matter, it's just fake thought." And it is one the most embarassing things to see people going down that lane, alongside that other road, of "but can machines make art?"

I think the author is being a bit fast and loose with Koch's quotes. Koch is not postulating that computers can never be conscious, he's generally saying current approaches to making computer systems are not based on feedback hence can't be conscious because IIT requires feedback.

This paraphrase "Koch believes the theory establishes that machines built along the lines of our current silicon-chip technology can never become conscious, no matter what awesome degree of processing power they possess." would seem to come from this statement: "Whether or not a network has this property of influencing itself depends on its architecture. If information is merely “fed forward” to convert inputs to outputs, as in digital computers, then IIT insists it can only generate zombie intelligence."

However all IIT (and presumably therefore Koch) requires we do to solve this is use a different architecture (i.e. some kind of self-modifying feedback approach in the computer). "In Koch’s words, consciousness is “a system’s ability to be acted upon by its own state in the past and to influence its own future.”"

In this case, Koch really needs to read Daniel Dennett's "Consciousness Explained". Even though it does not explains consciousness, it takes it seriously to dispel myths and magical thinking about consciousness.

He makes the point that there’s no magic, but the tell is that he’s not able to explain it. His religion is that it’s explainable.

I've never understood why people feel that way. As far as I can tell, there is no evidence that consciousness is not able to be emulated by a machine.

“Consciousness” is too poorly defined to have a proper discussion about what is required to have it. We can only be somewhat sure about certain things altering or removing consciousness, but even then I’m sure you can have a very long argument about whether or not a dream is a state of consciousness. Or if consciousness is a continuous variable, where perhaps a newborn has less than an adult, or a dog has less than a human.

Emulation is fine, is whether machines are able to achieve "consciousness" that is at stake. I don't know if anyone feels strongly on the matter either, at least on the academic level. But it's the same as with other odd philosophical position: people run into problems with other alternatives, go like "why not..." and suddenly they have an odd belief.

Personally, I don't see the difference.

The difference is that a physical process makes specific physical state changes to the physical world while an emulation does not. A computer simulation of an ice cube melting does not and cannot make state changes to the physical world as a physical ice cube can. For example, if you wanted to chill your beverage, dropping an ice-cubed sized computer running the algorithmic emulation of an of an ice cube melting will not chill your drink no matter how perfect your emulation is, while a physical ice cube can perform that physical state change of your drink.

Is consciousness a physical phenomenon? If it's not physical, then what is it? Is it an algorithm? Well, for one, there is no precedent. Nothing else in the material world is purely an algorithm...except maybe a computer running an algorithm...

>For example, if you wanted to chill your beverage, dropping an ice-cubed sized computer running the algorithmic emulation of an of an ice cube melting will not chill your drink no matter how perfect your emulation is, while a physical ice cube can perform that physical state change of your drink.

Interestingly enough, this may not be entirely true. There are some fundamental relationships between computation, information, and entropy, that, in the limit of computational and representational perfection, probably would require exactly the amount of input energy as the ice-cube itself would to melt.

Now, you might argue that this is a pedantic attack on your argument. It's not though. The real point is that the laws of physics often seem to have grander symmetries and transformation laws than observable at first glance, and the universe has very clever ways of enforcing these symmetries in what appear to be very different contexts, but are indicative of less intuitive symmetry laws.

"If it's not physical, then what is it? Is it an algorithm? Well, for one, there is no precedent. Nothing else in the material world is purely an algorithm...except maybe a computer running an algorithm..."

I don't see the distinction you're making. I think I want to say "ok, so nothing is purely an algorithm". A computer relies on the rest of the universe just like your brain and I guess it's therefore a "physical phenomenon"?

In order to draw a distinction, perhaps one could say that a "pure algorithm" is something that can run on "many" substrates, so the difference between a "pure algorithm" and a "physical phenomenon" is about the variance in the substrates maybe? But everything is physical. Statements about abstractions are statements about patterns of physical things.

There is no evidence either for or against, because evidence is objective, while consciousness is subjective. Instead there are arguments for and against, depending on what people think the nature of subjectivity is, and therefore whether a machine could be conscious.

A machine could emulate consciousness in the sense that we could probably in principle build a machine that acted, viewed from the outside, as if it were conscious. But we have no way to measure whether something is conscious or not so we would never really know if the machine actually was conscious, had interiority, had qualia, etc. (three different ways of saying the same thing).

There is no good reason to believe that consciousness is reducible to physical phenomena. I think that intelligence is almost certainly reducible to physical phenomena, but consciousness? No. Consciousness is a mystery that quite likely will forever be beyond the reach of physical investigation.

>A machine could emulate consciousness in the sense that we could probably in principle build a machine that acted, viewed from the outside, as if it were conscious. But we have no way to measure whether something is conscious or not so we would never really know if the machine actually was conscious, had interiority, had qualia, etc. (three different ways of saying the same thing).

You could ask try asking it? You can ask clever questions that would prove things like persistence of thought in between questions, and ability to reason about things. If it's able to reason about it's own processes, it's basically conscious by any measure that matters.

>There is no good reason to believe that consciousness is reducible to physical phenomena.

Lol, what? Other than the fact that we have millennia of scientific progress that have, in every single area of exploration developed predictive models of reality that have been tested, confirmed, retested and refined over time, and every single one of those successful models is not based on some invisible unmeasurable magic nonsense. What on earth could possibly make you think that consciousness is somehow the sole outlier that doesn't obey the laws of physics and is therefore reducible to physical phenomena?

By the same argument I'll never know if other humans are conscious.

This is clearly the case today, pending some new discovery or intellectual leap surrounding consciousness. For all I know, you are unconscious, and your purpose was to type that comment so as to trigger my realization I am the only conscious being in existence :)

(Not a good way to live your live, but a theory consistent with the evidence.)

And that’s why solipsism is not entirely defeasible. You can’t be certain other people are conscious. But it’s reasonable to think they are. It gets harder with other animals, and even worse with machines. See Ned Block’s paper on The Harder Problem and Commander Data.

Because if you don't subscribe to a branch of philosophy that's ok with being just a Newtonian thinking machine, it's kind of a scary concept.

Not really.

That's like saying spiders aren't scary. It's a little subjective.

There is also no evidence that consciousness can be emulated on machines. Before we don’t even understand how the brain functions and creates consciousness, we aren’t really smarter than fifty years ago. Until then we just created machines that can find optimized patterns in highly abstracted actions of humans. Yes, Stockfisch can beat you at chess, but you can’t ask it what the difference between poker and backgammon is. Currently there doesn’t exist a general artificial intelligence.

If consciousness is a special state of matter, it should be analysable and detectable, right? Can't we apply scientific methods to the hypothesis that "there exist a special state of matter"?

I don’t think we can replicate this state solely with current electric components. What is way more interesting would be the connection of human nerve tissue and computers.

You think we get to know, or at least we can know, everything we want to know. Why? Is it faith? Or has your brain tricked you?

No, I don't think. I assume, and bring arguments, and can listen to others.

Hell, we don’t even know if the brain is the causal creator of consciousness. It’s a contrarian view to think otherwise, but it can’t be proven false.

It can be proven false to any reasonable degree of certainty. With experiment, you'd increasingly be looking at an overwhelming probability that it is, or that the universe is actively conspiring against you to fool you on that notion. Which is, frankly, a bad argument.

If something is possible, but has measure zero in the probability space, it's really not worth considering.

Is there some proof that we can never detect consciousness?

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