Comment by poikroequ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by poikroequ | Hacker News Reader

> computational functionalism, according to which performing the right computations is sufficient (and necessary) for consciousness.

This is akin to magic, and utter nonsense.

Think about how a computer works and all of its individual components. The CPU has registers and a little bit of L1 L2 L3 cache. There is some stuff in RAM, highly fragmented because of virtual memory. Maybe some memory is swapped to disk. Maybe some of this memory is encrypted. You may have one or more GPUs with their own computations and memory.

Am I supposed to believe that this all somehow comes together and forms a meaningful conscious experience? That would be the greatest miracle the world has ever seen.

Let's be real. The brain has evolved to produce *meaningful* conscious experience. There's so many ways it can go wrong, need I say more than psychedelics? There's tons of evidence to support the theory that the brain evolved and is purpose built for consciousness and sentience, albeit we don't know how the brain actually does it. To assume that computers miraculously have the same ability is one of the dumbest pseudodcientific theories of our time.

> Am I supposed to believe that this all somehow comes together and forms a meaningful conscious experience? That would be the greatest miracle the world has ever seen.

We already know consciousness can arise from neuronal activity. Do you think no other substrate could give rise to consciousness?

> The brain has evolved to produce meaningful conscious experience.

That strikes me as quite a leap. Another take on this might be that evolution has selected for intelligence, and that consciousness came along for the ride. It doesn't seem plausible that consciousness, let alone meaning (whatever that means here), could be selected for directly.

> We already know consciousness can arise from neuronal activity. Do you think no other substrate could give rise to consciousness?

Conjecture of another is reported by “Light Eaters” [0] which I’ve just started. Of course, materially sufficient is less than a slam dunk given plausible theory that many mental states are learned not innate [1] and consciousness is relatively recent development in humans [2].

0. https://www.amazon.com/Light-Eaters-Unseen-Intelligence-Unde...

1. https://www.amazon.com/How-Emotions-Are-Made-Secret/dp/15098...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in...

Meaningful. Sensible. Coherent. Our conscious experience is NOT random nonsense.

An analogy, tune an old analog TV to a station and you get a meaningful picture with meaningful sound. Tune it to a station that doesn't exist, and you get random static and white noise, not meaningful.

If computers are producing conscious experience, it's going to be the latter, random and incomprehensible. The underlying computation does NOT matter in this case, because computers are simply incapable of producing meaningful conscious experience.

Maybe consciousness is an inevitable consequence of neural activity, but the complex coherent consciousness we experience today is most certainly a product of natural selection. That much is no accident.

The picture and sound is a signal meaningful _to you_. The static and white noise may be meaningful signal at a level that's inherently not meaningful to you.

The pattern the static signal creates could be analogous to the 'random pattern of neurons firing in the synapse'. You flash enough patterns of that signal and a specific combination could be considered "a thought." Who knows.

But if that happens, natural selection boils down to an iterative loop of: If not dead, try ____.

This only makes sense to me in the context of the “all matter is conscious” theory, in which there’s something that it’s like to be say, an electron, just not very much.

As the theory goes, the more complexity there is in a system, the more the possibility space of potential experience grows.

It’s an interesting theory that some serious people take seriously, but like all current theories of consciousness, we’re not in a position to test it.

I find it far more plausible than computational functionalism at least.

I agree with that theory, and something I found fascinating is the etymology of animus:

"temper" (usually in a hostile sense), from Latin animus "rational soul, mind, life, mental powers, consciousness, sensibility; courage, desire," related to anima "living being, soul, mind, disposition, passion, courage, anger, spirit, feeling," from PIE root *ane- "to breathe."

For sense development in Latin, compare Old Norse andi "breath, breathing; current of air; aspiration in speech;" - https://www.etymonline.com/word/animus

If you consider a wave function as a cycle above and below a unity linel, then a full-cycle oscillation could be considered a breath. So in my opinion, taking the two into account, I'd say "if it moves, it has a consciousness." (by the definition of animus)

That's not what the abstract says. It says: IF computational functionalism is true, THEN could a conscious ANN exist?

> There's tons of evidence

There's also tons of evidence and lack of counter-evidence that the brain is simply physical and performs computable functions.

What computable functions is it performing? Can you show me the code for these computable functions?

Admittedly taken out of context, but that doesn't make what I said any less true.

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