Randomness created consciousness from a single cell...why would that be the most efficient solution?
Like no one thinks that humans visiting Pluto is impossible, it’s just not something we can feasibly do right now.
As an alternative, imagine that consciousness is primary. After all, any evidence that you have about the material world happens as an appearance within consciousness. (See “brain in a vat” and related thought experiments for the legitimacy of this idea).
In this alternative model, the concept of replicating consciousness with material processes doesn’t make any sense because consciousness is primary.
To be clear I’m not making any assertions about which model is correct. Instead I’m suggesting that the model you choose is axiomatic - taken as given as opposed to inferred from evidence. And starting with the latter model means artificial replication of consciousness isn’t even a logical proposition.
The brain is the seat of consciousness and the brain is material, therefore consciousness is emergent from material. My evidence that the brain is the seat of consciousness is that when my head hurts it impairs my thoughts, and that my eyes are connected to by brain.
Stated a bit differently:
All events must have a cause, therefore consciousness must have a cause. The brain is the most likely candidate for the cause of consciousness. The brain is material, therefore consciousness is emergent from material.
What role do you think the brain plays in consciousness? Do you believe that events must have causes?
This is true from the standpoint of materialism but not necessarily fundamentally true.
How do you know you have a brain? As you explore this question, you’ll realize that the knowledge that you have a brain only manifests as appearances within consciousness.
It’s not necessary true that these appearances are giving you a window into an objective material universe. Instead it might be possible that your consciousness is a product of a simulation where your entire subjectivity - including the observation that you have a brain - is a manifestation of another mechanism that is outside of observability.
The point is that we simply don’t know what’s at rock bottom - an objective universe, a simulation, or an alien’s dream. Therefore the “arrow” of causality might flow from consciousness towards material as opposed to the other way around.
Ok, well in that simulation materialism is true and I can make an AI with emergent consciousness ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The arrow of causality flows from simulation to consciousness and there might be no mechanism to artificially create consciousness from within consciousness.
My point was that however the subjective reality I perceive came about, the laws of it still seem to allow for the creation of new non-biological conscious agents.
So, to make this so strange to say: while we can procreate organic agents, we cannot yet build them with our hands.
Thus I think we are a bit far away from creating consciousness. Whatever that is.
Ok. But that is equally true for any observation. For example, I don't really know that the computer I'm using to write this post actually exists under that proposition, as perhaps by brain is imagining it. So you are really rejecting observations in general here. My point is that given that observations in general are correct, then it is clear that the brain is the cause of consciousness.
However, I am rejecting the idea that observations necessarily imply the existence of a material universe.
Actually rather than “rejecting”, I’m suggesting that it’s logically possible to take the “reverse” position: that consciousness is primary and we are experiencing what appears to be a material universe within that conscious experience. In this model it doesn’t make logical sense to be able to replicate consciousness with materials because materials seem to exist within consciousness as opposed to the other way around.
My overarching point is that most people here seem to believe that we’ll obviously replicate consciousness with more understanding of biology and I think that’s a bold claim because it’s not obvious that materialism is the “correct” framework to describe existence.
In any case, these frameworks are in the realm of non-falsifiability (axiomatic) so you can’t really claim either is fundamentally correct.
Write a new book without understanding the language? No way - not one that makes any sense. Not unless you're going with the "million monkeys" approach (and if you did try that approach, you wouldn't live long enough to succeed in writing one actual coherent book in the foreign language).
So, we could think about trying to simulate a human brain, neuron by neuron. That's the "making a photocopy" approach. But that's not the approach we're pursuing. We're trying to write a new book (create a new, non-human intelligence) in a language we don't understand (that is, not knowing what intelligence/consciousness actually is).
(Side topic: What would happen if you asked GPT-4 to write a full-length novel? Or even a story as long as the token limit? Would you get anything coherent?)
It feels like it should be theoretically possible, but I doubt it's ever been tried.
Maybe something like understanding aincent languages from limited, fragmented sources is the closest natural experiment we have in practice to have tested it, but it's hardly the same as a full, substantial text in a consistent style.
The Chinese room thought experiment is flawed; this is exactly how we learn languages!
we don't understand what consciousness is or how it is achieved, so discussing how to recreate it isn't really a conversation we can have - we can only discuss how to create a simulacrum.
Do they mean memory? Attention? Awareness? Self awareness? The inner voice? Qualia? All of these can be explained somewhat, but they keep moving the goalpost
I suspect that a lot of the complexity is legacy code and/or incidental to the implementation. Cells have to do a lot of things just to continue living. Likewise, a lot of what the brain does is just control the very complex biochemical reactor that it lives in. ie: whales have big brains relative to humans (though they are a much smaller % of their body).
We don't need to know how to simulate consciousness. We only need to simulate atoms. The rest will fall out. Maybe there's a shortcut. Maybe we only need to simulate molecules. Maybe only cells. But one way or another, we can skip the understanding consciousness part.
In case of consciousness, we lack both types of knowledge: - What consciousness is - To use your example we don't know what bread is - How to create conciousness - To use your example we don't know a recipe for bread
To make this a bit more like a story, imagine we all got to a new place and tasted a thing called bread. We are not even sure we all tasted the same thing, nor can we agree on how to describe it, except we call it the same "bread." we don't have any recipe for it or know its ingredients. To make this even stranger we are not even sure bread is something that we are supposed to eat or it is something that we wear. Maybe it was some kind of cloth that as a strange experiment it was given for us to taste.
And now we are trying to create it. It could be that taking enough time and energy and people that are trying to create this thing called bread, we might, in the end, arrive at something that, when tasted by everyone, we can agree it is bread, but that seems less probable until we agree on a description of it.
I expect it may be the same for consciousness. We'll put the ingredients together (either simulate all the atoms of a brain, or all the molecules, or all the cells, or something higher level) and we'll get consciousness in the simulation.
Like gunpower, we won't know why these ingredients produce consciousness but we'll know they do and maybe later we'll figure out why.
Turns out that if you get the structure right you can mimic the effect. Mimic the brain structure in silicon and you will get a similar effect. Just like how birds and airplanes are similar but different.
And no there is no proof that quantum effects play a significant role.
Turns out, consciousness/experience/qualia is an unexpected side effect of this process. We can "feel" the intelligence happening.
Where we humans get lost is believing that it has any meaning, or that we are somehow in control. We're not; the feeling of free will is just a other trick of qualia.
Philosophical zombies react to external events in exactly the same way as normal people, including internally, but we are told they lack conscious experience. Thus the thought experiment is set up from the start to find that conscious experience is something non-physical - or else the p-zombies don't really do what they're claimed to do, which is to react identically to everyone else.
There's a dubious implication that conscious experience is completely cryptic, with no effect on the outside world (such as a person speaking the words "I consciously experienced that"), or at least that all such effects are shallow enough that they can be perfectly faked. If this is true, we ought to question why it's such a big deal. What's so great about consciousness? Why associate it with rights?
The Knowledge Argument is about a scientist who learns "everything" about colors intellectually but doesn't see them until years later, and seeing a red tomato is a revelatory experience even after all that book-learning, so it implies that experiences are beyond knowledge, or beyond physics, or beyond tomatoes or something. But really all it shows is that intellectual learning is dry and dusty and limited. Like with the p-zombies, the premise is wrong. The scientist didn't really learn everything before having the experience, but could have done in principle but for the limits of communication, description, and simulation as we know those things presently. (And then the real experience would not have had any surprising or revelatory quale about it.)
The point is that if you accept that p-zombies are possible, then you accept that consciousness is not necessarily physical. If it's not necessarily physical, then physicalism is false.
> really all it shows is that intellectual learning is dry and dusty and limited.
What it's attempting to show is the limit of factual knowledge. If physicalism is true, then everything that can be observed must reduce to objective third person facts. But, Mary has all of the objective third person facts. So if you find it implausible that Mary would be able to infer the experience of red before actually observing a rose, even with all of those facts, then you're admitting the existence of first person subjective facts, which cannot be reduced to objective third person facts, not even in theory.
Daniel Dennett has some great responses to these challenges.
You are erroneously equating "physicalism" with "reductive physicalism". It's clear to many of us that qualia are something subjective and non-physical yet emerge from physical processes.
Of course consciousness seems more mysterious because we don't have the explanation yet. Looking down at the levels we supervene doesn't have the same mystique, though they would be just as inscrutable if trying to look up.
Going from quantum field theory to Newtonian mechanics is just as weird a departure as the reverse. And does Newtonian mechanics prepare you for the existence of Bayesian statistics? Biological agents bouncing around randomly? The gestalt of an ecosystem?
There's no reason to assert that we can't one day have the math for describing consciousness too.
It's not a value judgment to point out that objective third person facts can logically entail other objective third person facts, but cannot logically entail subjective first person facts as with qualia. That's the whole point of the hard problem. All forms of ontological emergence we've actually seen are the first sort of entailment, but to accept and explain qualia with ontological emergence, you need to accept the second kind of emergence, which is a whole new thing we've never seen and we're supposed to accept it only for consciousness because we have such a hard time accepting that our perceptions on this could be flawed. It's simply more plausible that we're mistaken about subjective first person facts IMO.
Mary doesn't have all of the objective third person facts, only the ones that can be conveyed to her academically.
If you want to sweep this aside with a magic gesture, and assert that she does somehow have all the facts (alright, all the objective third person facts), you are also making the science, communication, imaginative simulation, verbal learning process, all that kind of stuff, into something magical. Because what you're saying is that it now somehow has the power to be exactly like the real experience, which in this magical scenario will thus come as no revelatory surprise to her. We only expect it to be a surprise because of realism about the limits of book-learning as we know it, because she can only learn all that is explicitly known about colors that way, which is not all there is to know about them, and is not even all that is commonly known.
You could respond that even though computability theory tell us it's possible to describe in language, the description would be far too long and complicated for Mary to understand. But I think that misses the thrust of the thought experiment. Even if we imagine Mary being so smart that she could understand and absorb the full written description of the color red, it still doesn't seem like that should be the same as experiencing seeing red. Most people's intuition would be that internal experiences are categorically different than facts.
And also, intuitively, the experience of the color red doesn't seem complex. The dumbest person on Earth can easily experience it, as can a newborn baby with no knowledge to draw on (I guess assuming newborns are sentient). Even a honey bee may be able to experience it. It's such a simple thing that it seems weird to think it's theoretically possible to describe with language, but the description is too complex for humans to understand.
It fundamentally feels weird to think that any combinations of words could ever be the same as experiencing the color.
Yes, it may do. I wonder what that feeling means. All this stuff about "Mary" doesn't clarify the source of the feeling. Often a weird feeling points to a misconception.
I think language could technically fully describe the experience, but it would be an unimaginable language, and that's why the idea feels weird: it's too difficult to imagine. Also as you say a pre-verbal child can get the idea just by seeing the color (though we might speculate that the inner significance and feeling of red evolves over a lifetime). So conveying it in language is a dumb-ass way to go about conveying it.
So various experiences convey complex ideas. How? We don't absorb ideas directly from the world through our pores and palps, we create them through interaction with an existing body of ideas in our minds. How much of that is gifted to us in DNA, a kind of natural set of default ideas about the world? IDK, some, like how the brain contains a body map and the eye does movement detection (which is repurposed as edge detection via a kludge involving tiny eye movements). The brain anticipate salient features of the world being a certain way, like residing in a monkey-shaped creature on a surface with gravity where objects have edges and move around. But some ideas are conveyed, through culture, non-verbally. This may include a lot of the early significance and feeling of seeing that something is red. What is that thing? Perhaps a toy, a shoe, a flower? It's probably a special thing requesting focus, anyway, so the cultural environment is already telling you things about it, and people around you will probably encourage your focussing on it, and that's how communication of the feeling of red begins, I reckon.
"feels weird" means "seems unlikely" in this context. At the end of the day, that's the most anyone can say on either side of the argument. You can't demonstrate perception works the way you think it works. You're relying on your intuition.
There are some things we can state definitively though.
> I think language could technically fully describe the experience, but it would be an unimaginable language
If it can't be described in normal English, then the brain is doing something beyond what a Turing machine can do. That means it's doing something beyond our current understanding of physics and quantum mechanics. I would call that non-physicalist. You have to choose: either perception can be fully described in English, or the brain is doing something non-physical. Neither option is intuitive, but that's the consequence of the Church-Turing thesis we must live with.
The premise of the argument is that Mary has all of the facts, and you can even imagine that she has a super powerful computer accessible to her to perform any calculations needed. The goal is to point out that it still seems implausible that Mary could infer knowledge of the experience of redness despite having an unbounded set of dry facts about physics and biology, because to most people, qualitative experience seems like knowledge of a different kind.
That said, you're sort of on the path towards Dennett's response.
Yes and no. The point is to actually test your intuitions around the premise and the conclusion that must follow, to clarify your own thinking around the intuitive plausibility of the conclusions and premises, hence why these are called intuition pumps. They don't prove anything definitively unless you have intuitions around consciousness that agree/disagree with the premises, but you don't necessarily fully understand your own intuitions until you think about this problem.
Physicalism implies that things we wouldn't intuitively think of as conscious can perfectly mimic all such effects.
Imagine there's a person, John, and you take a precise scan of every neuron of his brain (or every particle if you prefer). You also record all the sensory input signals from his neurons to his brain. You write all this information down in a giant stack of papers. Then you go about simulating the brain with pencil and paper, computing its thoughts and actions (in this thought experiment people have deciphered exactly how neurons work). Maybe it takes you a trillion years to simulate one day of John's life, but you diligently do it.
Physicalism tells us that you can simulate John perfectly this way. You could perfectly predict every word is said, and every muscle he moved. You could feed the motor neuron outputs of your simulation into a robot replica of John, and it would act indistinguishably from the original John.
Is this pencil and paper simulation of John a p-zombie?
We either have to accept that this pencil and paper simulation of John is conscious, or that it's a p-zombie.
This is the multiple relizability argument and it only discounts certain types of physicalism that aren't popular anymore.
I consider myself a physicalism and answer that the simulation of John is conscious.
I was replying to a commenter who doubted that a non-conscious entity could mimic a person accurately. I'm pointing out the implication that without p-zombies, just by writing a bunch of stuff on paper, you created a conscious being. I'm not arguing that's false; just that intuitively it's a tough pill to swallow and if you don't want to accept that, p-zombies are the alternative.
Evolution states nowhere that humans are concious.