What does consciousness have to do with AGI or the point(s) the article is trying to make? This is a distraction imo.
I am suspect that the world is modeled linearly. That physical reality is non-linear is also more logically sound, so why is there such a clear straight line from compute to consciousness?
This can mean one of 50 different physicalist frameworks. And only 55% of philosophers of mind accept or lean towards physicalism
https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/4874?aos=16
> rainbows, their ends, and pots of gold at them are not
It's an analogy. Someone sees a rainbow and assumes there might be a pot of gold at the end of it, so they think if there were more rainbows, there would be more likelihood of pot of gold (or more pots of gold).
Someone sees computing, assuming consciousness is at the end of it, so they think fi there were more computing, there would be more likelihood of consciousness.
But just like the pot of gold, that might be a false assumption. After all, even under physicalism, there is a variety of ideas, some of which would say more computing will not yield consciousness.
Personally, I think even if computing as we know can't yield consciousness, that would just result in changing "computing as we know" and end up with attempts to make computers with wetware, literal neurons (which I think is already an attempt)
> It's an analogy.
And I pointed out why it's an invalid one -- that was the whole point of my comment.
> But just like the pot of gold, that might be a false assumption.
But it's not at all "just like the pot of gold". Rainbows are perceptual phenomena, their perceived location changes when the observer moves, they don't have "ends", and there certainly aren't any pots of gold associated with them--we know for a fact that these are "false assumptions"--assumptions that no one makes except perhaps young children. This is radically different from consciousness and computation, even if it were the case that somehow one could not get consciousness from computation. Equating or analogizing them this way is grossly intellectually dishonest.
> Someone sees computing, assuming consciousness is at the end of it, so they think fi there were more computing, there would be more likelihood of consciousness.
Utter nonsense.
Ok, so are LLMs conscious? And if not, what’s the difference between them and a human brain - what distinguishes a non-conscious machine from a conscious entity? And if the consciousness is a consequence of computation, what causes the qualitative change from blind, machine like execution of instructions? How would such a shift in the fundamental nature of mechanical computation even be possible?
No neuroscientist currently knows the answer to this, and neither do you. That’s a direct manifestation of the hard problem of consciousness.
> I've partied with David Chalmers
Sadly, not at an intellectual level.