Comment by godelski | Hacker News Reader

Comment by godelski | Hacker News Reader

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  > This is why people who believe the "Consciousness is a Computation" view never want to discuss brain waves, despite the overwhelming evidence that brain waves is precisely the thing out of which consciousness is composed.

Fwiw, I do actually believe that the brain is a computer. What I don't like about "consciousness is a computation" is it's utterly meaningless. Everything is a computation because computation is a fairly abstracted concept (same with simulation. Yes, we live in "a simulation" but that doesn't mean entities on the "outside" programming it. A ball rolling down a hill is also a simulation...)

But I really disagree with your argument. The difference doesn't come down to analogue vs digital and that seems like quite a bold assumption, especially considering 1) digital can get quite approximate to continuous signals and it can represent continuous signals 2) the brain doesn't function entirely continuously. Neuron signals are quite spikey. The neuromorphic people drew their inspiration from these and other aspects of the brain. But the brain is not operating on just continuous signals. There's a lot going on in there.

But if your true complaint is about how few ML people and far fewer ML enthusiasts will passionately discuss these subjects but also refuse to read literature from neuroscience, mathematical logic & reasoning, and other domains, then yeah, I also have that complaint. When you're a hammer I guess....

Do you think a computer simulation of an EMF wave is an actual EMF wave? If everything, according to you, is just a computation aren't you also claiming that actual EMF waves are "just computations"? Also does the substrate for the computation matter? What if I'm moving beads on billions of abacuses (as a thought experiment), are those abacuses therefore identical to an EMF wave if they're calculating wave mechanics? How does this abacus know I'm doing EMF wave calculations instead of, say, quantum probability wave calculations?

  > Do you think a computer simulation of an EMF wave is an actual EMF wave?

Of course not. I'm pretty sure we've also established this.

  > aren't you also claiming that actual EMF waves are "just computations"?

No. But actual real world EMF waves perform computation.

You are confusing what simulation means, which is why I explicitly put it in quotes. There's a dumb "simulation hypothesis" (the likes of which people like Elon Musk discuss) and there's a "yeah the terms are broad enough so it can be viewed as a simulation - simulation hypothesis". The latter isn't really contested because it also isn't very meaningful in the first place. But it does matter here for what you're talking about and why we brought up that a rock has "memory" since we can store information in the atomic structure. You're missing the abstraction of the stuff and how we're just talking about entropy.

Look at it this way, how does nand flash store memory? You trap electrons in states, right? This is to say you isolate charge to one side of a transistor gate from another. You can also do this with magnetic storage. There's plenty of people who build macro computers with things like water, and in those you're separating buckets of water. Physicists love to build computers out of things, and there are even thermal computers, using heat flow for computation.

That's the thing, computation is just about differentials in entropic states. So literally everything is a computer and everything is computing. Thanks emergence (another extremely misinterpreted word that people believe holds much more meaning than it does). But this does not mean there's some programmer, god, or any of that. It just means that information exists... You're making the same mistake these Musk like people talking about "living in a simulation" make, conflating the computer you're sitting in front of now that you control and have power over with just information flowing (obviously you can affect things in the physical world, and that's why experiments are physical simulations -- since they are controlled and limited settings -- but good luck programming "the universe" -- whatever the fuck that means. You're going to need more energy that it's got...)

So view physics as the instruction set of the universal computer or whatever. We're dealing with huge levels of abstraction so you can't go about understanding these things with reference to how we normally operate (this is why physics is so fucking hard and why advanced math -- well beyond calculus -- gets so crazy). Just like you can't work with high dimensional data by trying to relate to things in 2 or 3d, because the rules are very different at those abstraction levels (for example, the concept of a distance measure becomes useless. This is the curse of dimensionality that people very often misinterpret due to looking at it in a limited scope).

I think this field of discussion needs a new word for a new type of fallacy I'll name "Appeal to Base Reality" (ABR).

When someone makes a conjecture about physical reality like "Consciousness is made of EMF Waves, not Computations" (like I did) and then someone else tries to refute that with an appeal to the Simulation Theory (like you did) then that's called "Appeal to Base Reality".

Even if we're living in a simulation we still should consider EMF waves a very different phenomena than computations. Computations are not a phenomena of physics. Computations can be done on an abacus.

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