The idea that you cannot get to consciousness from computation requires accepting on faith alone that consciousness is magic. It’s fundamentally a religious-like bias.
It’s not magic, I’m afraid.
It’s not magic, I’m afraid.
The burden of proof is on the claim that you can get there through computation, not otherwise.
We do not understand the fundamental reality of consciousness, this does not mean that consciousness is magic. The assertion that you cannot get there from computation implies there is a currently non understood yet essential piece of physics(I assume, but I do not know) which doesn't fall under "computation". A laymans initial thoughts point this towards the quantum realm.
That this idea “intuitively feels weird” or “intuitively feels wrong”, and that we love to think we are special and have a unique place in the universe, is probably a more serious bias.
Animal calls have no syntax - each call has some meaning, but they do not compose in any way. The order in which an animal performs its calls is arbitrary, and an animal hearing said calls doesn't pay attention to it. Even basic modifiers like "no" don't exist in animal communication - if a call means "food", and another call means "no", then an animal hearing the call for "no" and the call for "food" will behave as if they heard there is food somewhere.
The exception to this seem to be dolphins (orcas, in particular), where it seems they have been quite successfully trained to follow a series a short commands in order, in a sign language (so you can sign "jump, swim, splash" and they will follow this; and then sign "swim, splash, jump" and they will do it in the new order). This can't be done with dogs, and it's even questionable if it has been successfully done with chimps.
In all other animals where this had been extensively studied (except orcas and maybe chimps), syntax has proven to be absent in natural calls, and also impossible to teach artificially. There are sometimes apparent breakthroughs, but it later turns out that the animal figured out a way to interpret "a", "b", "a then b", and "b then a" as four separate calls, without any deeper understanding. This is evident when you then teach it "c", and find out that it sees no difference between "c then a" and "a then c", and it takes just as long to teach it to distinguish these three calls; and then again just as long to teach it the difference between "b than c" and "c then b".
Have we tested each possible animal this way? No, of course not - but we have tested all the most likely candidates, and orcas and chimps were the only successes (and even here there is some debate). Crows, parrots, dogs, cats, gorillas, elephants, horses - none of these show any understanding of syntax.
> Dolphin can understand sign language but dog dont. So ALL OF THEM do not speak.
Do you mean this? It is the same as saying that you dont understand Japanese and conclud that human can not speak.
Correct me if I am wrong. Or correct yourself.
So, perhaps you can say that dolphins speak, and maybe chimps speak, and then we can even contemplate that bonobos speak (since they are very similar to chimps, but haven't been studied as much).
But dogs definitely don't speak, and neither do any other mammals that we've tried to test in this way.
Not to mention, there is another characteristic of human language that 0 animals can be taught, as far as we've tried - more complex structure, like "not (c and d)"
I will freely admit that it actually refutes some of my claims - that's are actual example of simple syntax identified in several species.
Still, I believe it matches my broader point: there are a fundamental, measurable differences between human language and animal calls, with the latter at best showing only very basic structure, if any.
[0] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2019.006...
@toshitaka_szk in twitter. A Japanese dude can translate languages of birds and successfully did some experiences on it. And he is kind of famous.
And needless to say Hunger the dog[1]. Did this clear your humancentric brain?
[1] https://nypost.com/2021/05/01/this-speech-therapist-taught-h...
> 0 animals can be taught, as far as we've tried - more complex structure
Also this applies to limited intelligence human infant and mathematic immature dudes. So by your logic, those underintelligence human do not have consciousness. QED.
The Japanese research is much more interesting, and in a related comment I also cited a published article that proved that my claims, while fundamentally ok, are wrong in the details - animal calls are fundamentally simpler than human language, but some do show simple syntax.
> Also this applies to limited intelligence human infant and mathematic immature dudes. So by your logic, those underintelligence human do not have consciousness. QED.
I never claimed dogs aren't conscious, I only claimed they don't have language in the sense humans do. Infants also don't have language, but they learn it natively. All humans learn complex structures, even the mathematically illiterate, no idea where that came from. The only exceptions are people with serious brain disorders, and those people, indeed, don't "speak".
That, again, doesn't mean that they are not conscious beings.
This is not necessarily true. If you drop a ball it's impossible to calculate how long it takes before it hits need ground. We can calculate an approximation by creating a model, but there is no way to know if that model matches reality.
What you're describing is humans' attempt at modelling this computation using simple formulas.
Thus, the burned of proof is in fact on the the claim that you cannot get their through computation, because deterministic physics processes are all that we have observed in the brain, thus the default assumption must be that all the properties of the brain are also deterministic.
Maybe I'm missing something.
I use vast swathes of computational resources every day for various tasks, the operation of which I understand even less. They still seem to accomplish those tasks without issue.
Sometimes those computational resources run ML workloads. Very very few people on this planet can honestly claim to understand how neural networks work, and in many cases, the minutiae are inscrutable to all of us. They still seem to work fine.
I most certainly do not understand how my own brain works, yet here it is, shitposting on hackernews.
We have yet to find a single shred of evidence that the human brain makes use of quantum principles in aggregate to do its thing, and have even specifically excluded a few such explanations. And even if consciousness strictly requires quantum hardware...we'll get there eventually.
Although you're certainly right about one thing, most laypeople would have a real tough time accepting a world where consciousness is synthetically reproducible, and instead tend to reach for comforting thoughts of "maybe quantum is required", "maybe consciousness is magic" or "maybe consciousness can only be created by a deity".
Non-laypeople know that at normal temperatures and pressures, quantum effects don't really extend into the macroscopic realm.
Isn't a random generator for a neural network act as its "inception"? If so, it's exactly quantum principles in aggregate.
You are also making a baseless assertion that consciousness requires randomness of any kind, let alone quantum-based true random number generation.
Furthermore, not all sources of noise/randomness arise from quantum measurement (the only part of QM which can be interpreted to have randomness at all). Classical chaotic systems are also random if you were unable to measure the initial conditions to cosmic precision.
In fact, it's unclear at the moment how QM can actually give rise to randomness. In principle, in QM a perfectly isolated system of any complexity would behave entirely linearly with no randomness or even any chaos involved.
Not being able to rule out consciousness through computation is a far more cautious claim than 'consciousness is computation'.
This conflates "computation" with "physics". I think even the OP doesn't do that, since it allows for the possibility that non-computational physical processes could lead to consciousness, even derived from computational efforts.
To me this is the crux of the problem with that argument, though. The definition of "computation" here seems to be designed to get to this answer. It includes all physical processes that are not like consciousness and excludes all physical processes that are like consciousness, and on top of that presumes that humans consciousness isn't "deterministic", which to me is a difficult proposition to prove since human brains are never not being bombarded with stimuli, so creating two "runs" of the same brain is essentially impossible.
Like trying to add 1+1 on a computer that's sitting in a big burst of cosmic rays twice.
Right now in physics and the materials sciences materialism is thoroughly uncontroversial. There is no evidence for any kind of dualism, it only rears it's nebulous and poorly defined head when we talk about consciousness, and there is zero experimental evidence for it. Therefore no, I think the burden of proof is on the dualist / non-computational consciousness side.
I find this very similar to alchemy in the 15th century. The idea was “gold is heavy, malleable, lustery metal, and so is lead. We have observed substances can be converted others. Therefore with the right chemical process we can convert lead to gold”. The implicit assumption is that since the two things are similar, they can be made to exhibit the same properties with the right science. I.e. lead can become gold.
This is the same as the “meat brain/silicon brain” line of reasoning. But as we learned with more advanced chemistry, lead cannot be turned into gold (at least not in the chemical way they were expecting).
So the burden of proof does lie with those making the assertion that: “meat computer has consciousness”, therefore “silicon computer could have consciousness”. Lots of people assume this is just a given without any evidence. Just as alchemists assumed from the similarities between gold and lead meant they could be chemically converted. I would postulate chemistry is much simpler then consciousness.
Also, "the meat computer has consciousness" independently requires proof. Every meat computer thinks it has consciousness, and we just take their word for it, based on our own experience as a meat computer.
If the thing making the same claim is not a meat computer, then we don't believe it in the same way: "I know meat computers are conscious because I am one; you say you are conscious but you are not a meat computer, therefore I don't believe you".
In the same way, we could deny that an extraterrestrial life form is conscious, if it's not made of anything resembling meat.
So the lead to gold analogy doesn’t hold. It would be as if scientists had proved that any element can be transformed into any other element. Well, if that was true, then yes it follows that lead could be turned into gold, in a universe where that had been proved.
So is consciousness actually a computation? Of course that’s a matter of opinion. All I’m saying is, I think so yes, I think I have coherent reasons for believing so, and none of the counter arguments persuade me otherwise so far. I can’t prove it to you though, we’re just talking.
What I can say is, this or that argument seems to me to have this or that flaw, or lead to this or that consequence or conclusion that I find unlikely or absurd. Dualism is such a conclusion I find absurd, and I think most of the actual arguments against computational consciousness seem to at least reduce to attempted refutations of materialism, or out and out dualism.
Absolutely agree. But that is the assumption that I would liken to alchemists comparing lead and gold. We know almost nothing about the brain. We know almost nothing about consciousness. But yet some people assume that consciousness is computable just because we don't know anything else it could be (just as alchemists assumed gold and lead could be transform because they were both chrysopoeic base metals. They hadn't discovered atomic theory yet). When all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.
We know that the vast majority of numbers are uncomputable[1]. We also have proved that computation is incomplete[2] and can be undecidable[3]. It seems perfectly logical that consciousness is not computable. Or it could be computable, I obviously don't know. If someone makes the claim that consciousness is computable, then the burden of lies with them. We can't accept that on blind faith. At this point it is all opinion and speculation (as you said) because we still can't even define consciousness in a rigorous way. (and I don't think we will ever create artificial consciousness until we can define it, but that is an orthogonal issue).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computability_theory [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undecidable_problem
If anyone says that they think it is either this or that, it’s reasonable to ask them to justify that belief. There’s no reason to resort to using language like assume, blind faith, etc.
What kind of complex computation simulates the subjective experiences of wet, warm, and mushy?
EDIT: my account appears to be rate limited, so i am unable to post a reply until idk when....
By "subjective" I am referring to my conscious inner life, that there is something it is like to be me. I am an experiencer because I can experience things. My experiences are subjective and qualitative.
When I see something red, there actually is no "red" in reality, there is just an electromagnetic wave vibrating at a certain frequency. But I still have a "red" experience. In the same way, I can also have a wet, warm, or mushy experience. How do the subjective qualities of my experience arise from quantities like spin, charge, mass, etc?
Be careful with the term “subjective”, because it’s a can of worms: it doesn’t imply chaos and lack of information. Your subjective experiences are merely called “subjective” because they aren’t computed the exact same way as other brains. It doesn’t mean they’re not the product of computation, or that they have magic properties!
I know it would be ideal if there was a simple, short answer, but this question is nearly the equivalent of "please explain all the core ideas of neuroscience/neurology/neuropsychology to me". It's a good question, but it's a big question. This is why in the other thread [1] I've tried to point you in the direction where you will find the answers you are looking for: the answers exist and are for the most part known, but you have a lot of reading ahead of you, and there's no way around that.
>the answers exist and are for the most part known
I deeply disagree with this. I am not afraid of doing some reading, but I challenge you to find a single study that demonstrates how a certain combination of neurons firing leads to the experience of tasting vanilla.
But we understand really well the substrate from which those experiences arise. Imagine it this way. Imagine that mathematicians are trying to solve some problem, they don't even know if the problem is computable or not. Some genius comes around with a computer that given the necessary input, provides the solution. He refuses to explain how the program works and the program itself is gigabytes of incomprehensible spaghetti code. So they are no closer to understanding the problem, but now they do know that it's computable.
Bernardo Kastrup on phenomenal consciousness:
>Our phenomenal consciousness is eminently qualitative, not quantitative. There is something it feels like to see the colour red, which is not captured by merely noting the frequency of red light. If we were to tell Helen Keller that red is an oscillation of approximately 4.3^1014 cycles per second, she would still not know what it feels like to see red. Analogously, what it feels like to listen to a Vivaldi sonata cannot be conveyed to a person born deaf, even if we show to the person the sonata’s complete power spectrum. Experiences are felt qualities — which philosophers and neuroscientists call ‘qualia’ — not fully describable by abstract quantities.
>Some genius comes around with a computer that given the necessary input, provides the solution...but now they do know that it's computable.
Can you give me a concrete example of input/output and how we would validate any output? You are suggesting the that the brain is the program, the physical world is the necessary input, and consciousness is the output (correct me if I'm wrong). But if I wrote a program to make a perfectly accurate simulation of a kidney, would you expect it to pee on my desk? Of course you wouldn't, so I'm not sure why we would expect that of the brain and consciousness.
Going back to your example, which I like, even if we had access to the code, the code is not the actual reality. It is an abstraction. We can dig through the code all we want, but we will never reach electricity and transistors, the true reality of the program. I think this is analogous to our own reality, where we can dig into spacetime at smaller and smaller distances, but never find "true reality". A hint that this is the case is the lack of operational meaning to distances < 10^-33cm and times < 10^43 sec (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uz-Ve_1LX8w); the amount of energy required to probe those sizes creates a black hole. So something </i>must* be underlying spacetime. I think that something is phenomenal consciousness, mind-at-large, pure subjectivity, call it what you like. Spacetime is the source code, and phenomenal consciousness is the electricity and transistors.
(Also just to reiterate, my HN account is rate limited, so I may not be able to reply in a timely manner to any subsequent comments).
Even though you don't understand the program, don't know how it works, etc, you know that the solution to the problem is one that's computable, because you can see that a solution can be provided by something that is limited by computability. You might be totally incredulous that the problem could be solved by computation alone, but all you need is a single counter example.
So, instead of the physicalist paradigm of
Physics -> Chemistry -> Biology -> Psychology -> Consciousness
it is the idealist paradigm of
Consciousness -> Physics -> Chemistry -> Biology -> Psychology
They question remains. Can you provide a direct answer? If we measured all the particles in the brain, would they be operating in a way not compatible with the currently known laws of physics?
Their operation would be perfectly compatible with the known laws of physics. But their operation is _not_ thinking itself, it's what thinking looks like when observed across a dissociative boundary. If I am sad, and you look at my face and see tears, you would never think that the tears were my sadness itself; they are a representation, an image, of the sadness. Tears are what sadness looks like from across that boundary. I experience sadness from a first-person perspective, you see my tears from a second-person perspective, across a dissociative boundary. So, you can measure electrical activity in your brain when you are thinking thoughts, but that activity is not your thoughts, in the same way that flames are the image of fire but they are not fire itself. Neuronal activity is the image of thought, it is what your thoughts look like from across a dissociative boundary.
Imagine you are programming an AI simulation. You could train a detector to associate a certain wavelength with a certain color. When shown a red light, the AI could say "that is red", because it correctly identified the wavelength. But it would never know what it feels like to see red, right? This is similar to how a blind person cannot know what it feels like to see red, but they can intellectually understand that it is an oscillation of 4.3*10^14 cycles per second.
A different example: you could train an AI to recognize 10,000 songs. It would listen to the frequencies and patterns, and make an identification.
In both of these cases, we have quantity as the input and output.
If after training, you asked the AI to identify the first song it was trained on, would the AI experience nostalgia? Would there be a way the AI "feels" about the song? We can probably both agree that the answer would be no. For the same reasons, the answer to your question is also no.
(edited for clarity)
But what I can do is imagine creating a physics simulation. There's no gaps in our knowledge there. So again, I'll ask. We create a physics simulation of a human brain. Can the brain write a novel? Answer questions about what it's like to perceive the color red? This is just a yes or no question.
I don't think there is a shortcoming in your knowledge. Your metaphysics intuition is correctly tuned: simulations cannot feel.
>We create a physics simulation of a human brain. Can the brain write a novel? Answer questions about what it's like to perceive the color red? This is just a yes or no question.
GPT-3 can do both of these things. Is it conscious? If you need a direct answer, it is yes. But when we reword your second question as "can a simulated brain experience the color red?" the answer becomes more clear; the simulation can identify a wavelength and know it is called "red". But the experiential part is akin to explaining color to a blind person.
A simulated brain could identify molecular patterns of cocoa and sugar, but can it know what it is like to taste chocolate? Think about what it means to taste chocolate. Is it purely quantitative, like the balance of ingredients, or is there something else going on that is qualitative? Something abstract, something with meaning, something more close to the metal? We can probably agree that it feels like there is. What we are describing is subjectivity — your private conscious inner life. I suggest it is this that is fundamental and cannot be simulated. This is the layer where experience "happens". From this layer emerges meta-consciousness.
Here is an article by Bernardo Kastrup on meta-consciousness: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5590537/
Why then would evolution produce beings with internal conscious experience?
This would also mean that our internal conscious experience has no effect on what decisions we make, on whether we cry, smile, what memories we form, etc.
Well, I'm arguing it's the other way around. But to address what I think is the spirit of your question: if reality is only mind, if consciousness is truly fundamental, then why can't you read my thoughts? Why do we feel like individuals? Why do we have obviously separate private conscious inner lives?
When you are asleep and dreaming, your "alter" generally does not know they are dreaming. Your dream self has dissociated from your waking self, but it is only after you wake up that you realize you were dreaming (if you even remember). Another example of this phenomenon is Dissociative Identity Disorder, where one mind splits into many alters, each unaware the others exist. I'm glossing over a significant amount in order to get to my point, but here are a couple links that go into great detail:
- https://www.google.com/books/edition/_/JCdbmFCHYB0C?hl=en&gb... (chapter 5)
- https://www.mdpi.com/2409-9287/2/2/10/htm#sec4-philosophies-... (search for "Yet, we know empirically that living people have separate, private experiences (Fact 6)")
My point is, our private conscious inner lives are dissociations, alters, from a "mind-at-large" fundamental consciousness. And the boundaries of these dissociations, the "containers" of individual private conscious inner life, (again glossing over so much, like panpsychism's combination problem) are metabolizing organisms. Metabolizing organisms are what alters _look like_ from the outside. Kastrup:
"Since we only have intrinsic access to ourselves, we are the only structures known to have dissociated streams of inner experiences. We also have good empirical reasons to conclude that normal metabolism is essential for the maintenance of this dissociation, for when it slows down or stops the dissociation seems to reduce or end. These observations alone suggest strongly that metabolizing life is the structure corresponding to alters of [fundamental consciousness]
But there is more: insofar as it resembles our own, the extrinsic behavior of all metabolizing organisms is also suggestive of their having dissociated streams of inner experiences analogous to ours in some sense" (from the mdpi link)
>This would also mean that our internal conscious experience has no effect on what decisions we make, on whether we cry, smile, what memories we form, etc.
Don't your thoughts and feelings influence your behavior?
No, this is not the spirit of my question at all. I feel like the spirit of my question is completely being missed. I realize you've thought very deeply on how and why the world arrives from consciousness itself and you've been working very hard to get this concept across. I get the general gist of your theory and there's lots of detail and thought behind it.
I'm not sure how I can set my question out more clearly than I already have. But I'll try. Rather than trying to explain your own theory in greater detail, can you try to work with me on getting a mutual understanding of my line of reasoning?
We have a very excellent predictive model of particles and fields. So much so we are building experiments worth billions upon billions of dollars to attempt to find places where reality differs even to the slightest degree of that model.
The human brain, the warm squishy stuff in your head, can be viewed as being composed of particles and fields. Particles and fields may just be some manifestation of some pan psychic reality, but we can still use our model of particles and fields to predict the behavior of those particles and fields.
So the first question. Can we use our model of particles and fields to predict the behavior of the particles and fields within the human brain? You've already appeared to answer this question in the affirmative "Their operation would be perfectly compatible with the known laws of physics."
From this it follows that I can create a computer model of a human brain, complete with all the cells, proteins, neurons, etc, and that human brain will be capable of any action (eg, the signals sent by neurons out of the brain) a real human brain is. There would be no way to discern between a real flesh and blood human brain and the simulated one by talking to it. Since a real human brain tells you that it's conscious and has internal experience, the simulated one must tell you the same.
While the simulated human brain will tell you that it's conscious, it is of course not proof that it is. But this leads to your next question:
> Don't your thoughts and feelings influence your behavior?
If thoughts and feelings are a thing that don't pass the computability test, but a simulated human brain doesn't have external behavior that differs from a flesh and blood human brain, then no, thoughts and feelings have no effect or even influence on your behavior. In such a case they are a mere passenger. Any effect they have would necessitate that the particles and fields within the brain suddenly behave in a way that violates our model of particles and fields.
> From this it follows that I can create a computer model of a human brain, complete with all the cells, proteins, neurons, etc, and that human brain will be capable of any action (eg, the signals sent by neurons out of the brain) a real human brain is. There would be no way to discern between a real flesh and blood human brain and the simulated one by talking to it. Since a real human brain tells you that it's conscious and has internal experience, the simulated one must tell you the same.
> While the simulated human brain will tell you that it's conscious, it is of course not proof that it is.
I still agree with all of this. A simulated brain could give the appearance of consciousness while not being conscious. It would not have a private conscious inner life, but it could say things that make it look like it did.
> If thoughts and feelings are a thing that don't pass the computability test, but a simulated human brain doesn't have external behavior that differs from a flesh and blood human brain, then no, thoughts and feelings have no effect or even influence on your behavior. In such a case they are a mere passenger. Any effect they have would necessitate that the particles and fields within the brain suddenly behave in a way that violates our model of particles and fields.
I am struggling to follow your point here. Thoughts and feelings are internal experiences which correlate with phenomenal consciousness and are absent in a simulation. Could you give me an example of the effect you are describing and how that would violate our current models?
Therefore by your definition of internal experience, internal experience has no effect on our behavior.
It would just need to _look like_ it has an effect on the simulated brain, right? If you ask me a question and I pause, say "hmm", and put my hand to my chin, can you know that I am actually thinking and formulating a response? If the entirety of your observations are external, of course you can't. There is no way to tell if my response is a random choice from an array of preset answers, or a group of concepts activating each other.
That's because brain activity is part of what our inner, first-person experience looks like from a second-person perspective (ie, an external observer). Tears are not sadness, they are what sadness looks like, they are an external description of an internal state. Sadness can only be experienced by the person experiencing it. Tears are a description of sadness. But can't tears be faked?
So when we see the same neuronal activity in both brains, we have no way of knowing whether inner experience actually gave rise to the activity, or it just looks like it did.
This is a false dichotomy. Saying that consciousness is not fundamentally a computational process does not mean that it then has to be magic.
We could say the same thing about life. Life is not a computational phenomenon. But it is also not magic. It is, fundamentally, a particular kind of chemical process. Perhaps the same is true of consciousness, or maybe it is some other kind of physical process. I don't believe that saying that it is not computation means that we need to throw up our hands and resort to magic, though.
For clarity: when I say "computation", I refer to any physical process ("physics") which involves information.
For instance, sorting a list is a computational process. It doesn't matter what kind of computer I run a sorting algorithm on, if I follow the algorithm, I end up with a sorted list. If I use quicksort, it takes me on average O(n log n) steps. It doesn't matter if I'm doing this on a Lego computer or if I'm simulating a Lego computer on a virtual computer. I always end up with a sorted list in an average of O(n log n) steps.
By contrast, if I construct a collection of chemicals that matches the positions of those of a real bacterium, I have created a new bacterium. However, if I simulate the activity of those chemicals on a computer, I have not created a bacterium. I have just created a simulation of a bacterium. I haven't created a living thing.
My argument is that the same is true of consciousness. If you create a perfect simulation of a brain in a computer, you have not created a new consciousness. You just have a simulation of a brain.
None of this to say that a computational paradigm cannot sometimes be useful in understanding what is going on in life or consciousness. Just that it is not fundamentally a computational process, it's a physical process.
I suspect the same, but I think there is tremendous value in taking a cosmic step back and seeing everything through the lens of information. It's the most reductionist neutral approach to the universe I can conceive us at this point in my life.
> By contrast, if I construct a collection of chemicals that matches the positions of those of a real bacterium, I have created a new bacterium. However, if I simulate the activity of those chemicals on a computer, I have not created a bacterium. I have just created a simulation of a bacterium. I haven't created a living thing.
I agree, but I think the context matters: you may not have created a bacteria, but that's because you've emulated a bacteria in a totally different environment. The bacteria makes no sense as a computational engine if you separate it from its environment, which is chemical in nature: this chemical environment must also be emulated inside the computer. So if we're going to take the idea of life as a computation seriously and to the extreme, we need to conceive of it as it exists within its environment and in the context within which it evolved. Otherwise what you've created, grossly speaking, is a function that is never called, which of course is much less interesting.
Similarly for the brain, it must also be embodied, and you must also simulate its afferent inputs, and you must also give it an environment with which to interact and within which to exhibit features of agency. If you emulate the embodied brain with its environment, I contend that it doesn't matter what the substrate is: the brain you will have created will "feel" just as real to itself. It will perceive itself as being "conscious" just as well as you and I.
Note that for this to make any sense in a relatable way to a human, it's not enough to just throw large numbers of neurons together, as I understand is common practice in AI work even today: a long-learned lesson in both neuro and biochem is that function follows structure, so you must emulate the gross organizational structure of the human brain in order to observe the same sorts of features that make up human-flavoured consciousness.
If you compute consciousness, there will be zero distinction between how the computation feels real to itself, and how you and I feel to ourselves. That "magic" feeling we get where we have the impression that we're "someone", with a personal identity, that we're real, that we're alive, that we're aware, that we can make our own decisions... All of that stuff, your emulated consciousness will also experience. It won't be just bits turning on and off from its point of view: it will feel alive.
What is your definition of "information"? I view the concept of computation so deeply entwined with consciousness that I fail to see how it can be meaningfully applied to physically phenomena that would be completely independent of a subject that can determine something to be a computation (i.e. the mathematical intuitionistic understanding),so I'm interested in what you mean by information and computation.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_information_paradox
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(information_theory)
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructor_theory
The purely materialist argument is that "information" is just a pattern in the signal processing apparatus of carbon based lifeforms (i.e. it's a representation of the universe in our neurons, not the universe) which very loosely maps to physical processes. Very loosely is important here too: humans can identify equivalent patterns in things as dissimilar as the LCD output of a pocket calculator and beads on an abacus and act accordingly, but I'm not sure the constituent atoms of the calculator and abacus have any view on the matter.
There's no neuroanatomic basis for a "soul", but there is at least some extremely fuzzy mapping from neuroanatomy to the concept of "consciousness". It's a bad mapping, but it means more than nothing at all.
---
And I reject the idea that taking the perspective of information is taking a dualist perspective. I am advocating for the opposite: taking "information" seriously as some sort of low-level quantum substrate of the universe. It's a purely materialist view, where the material is literal information.
An extreme version of this, which I find quite intellectually useful, is the mathematical universe. [1]
Note that in your examples of information, you are pointing to higher-level information, which emerges in complex systems. It's not an incompatible view!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothes...
By the way I find it hilarious how confident you (and other philosophers) are about your conclusions despite them basically being thought experiments with zero evidence. Imagine if scientists did that!
Actually I guess string theory is an example of that.
Anyway OP is pretty clearly wrong, or at best proposing something very wild with no evidence.
BTW thanks for the article, it's a very clear and well reasoned explanation of your position, even though I happen to disagree.
Taking the naturalistic position is to accept that matter is all there is. Consciousness is not divorced from the stuff it is made out of, and cannot be abstracted into some cloud of computation. It is a sort enlightenment era rationalism gone wrong which is also why it's so popular among folks in this industry. It actually comes with its own theology while we're at it. (Immortality, raising the dead, final judgement, and so on).
A person computes consciousness no more than a falling pen computes gravity. Even a literal computer does not 'compute' anything other than in the sense that human observers impose meaning on a bunch of electrons buzzing around, and the language makes sense to explain how it works.
I think it was Sean Carroll that said something like "don't trust any way of thinking that allows you to discover truths about the universe from the comfort of your armchair".
No, not necessarily. It just means that water/computation is not the only ingredient you need.
If I knew what it was, I'd be waiting for my Nobel prize now :)
It's kind of as Newton's physics was missing the secret ingredient of special relativity. It was still physical, not magical, but not discovered yet.
The issue is that we know very very well that “consciousness” is not “one thing”, but rather a collection of features, all (or most) of which can exist in isolation, and all of which can have a whole spectrum of both pathological and “normal” forms or states.
Generally speaking, different features emerge at different scales, so there is no particular reason to think that all of the things that make up “consciousness” would emerge at the same scale, at the same level of organization, or even at the same physical location in the brain. We can assume that interesting features emerge at the “group of neurons” level or at the tissue level, but that’s a pretty wide scale.
Crude illustration: “consciousness” is much more like a network of microservices than it is a monolith… And it has fuzzy borders and is not even well encapsulated from its environment.
It’s also possible you’re less interested in the brain per se, and more interested in “emergence” in the abstract. If that’s the case, there is no shortage of good books and resources you can turn to.
Look up “emergence science” and “complexity science” and go from there: it’s not an easy topic, it’s very cross-disciplinary, and to really understand it requires a fair amount of maths (imo).
The belief in my uniqueness is instrumental in my belief that I am a conscious being.