Does a vacuum have feelings? A cellphone? A paper plate? A billion transistors either pulled high or low? That last bit is the point, and no, there are no feelings there.
The best theory I have heard is that subjective experience is a field of some sort (the EM field, maybe?). The brain and its neurons etc. are essentially an antenna. They both modify and stabilize the field, and read off changes in the field and translate these into actions (firing motor units, etc.).
The subconscious is computation done either only in neurons (no coherent field) or in various topological pockets not directly connected to the main topological structure in the field (which is "your experience").
Since transistors etc. do not work in this same way, they are essentially entirely subconscious, with no coherent, central phenomenal experience.
This neatly solves many problems associated with experience. The topological structure determines the boundary between one person's experience and another person's experience. The texture, valence, content, etc. of the experience is the structure of the field. The evolution of the field can efficiently solve difficult optimization problems, which is why humans evolved a complex organ that recruits the field of experience (it is computationally more efficient than doing everything in subconscious).
what would be producing the field for us to pick up? That explanation sounds no more scientific than astrology.
I wouldn't claim that this theory is perfect (EM is not perfectly correlated with consciousness/experience), but there are aspects of this theory that are much more coherent than other theories.
Field-based theories of phenomenal experience have obvious ways to experiment on them, and are actively being researched. The main limitation is engineering (it is difficult to make detailed measurements inside a living human brain). Note that I would agree that the theory, as outlined above, is more of a proto-theory than a complete theory. But I think it is much more sophisticated than anything you've presented so far.
> And, if it WAS the EM field, then surely transistors (or some other fundamental component of electronics or combination thereof) would be capable of having feelings, since they operate on electromagnetic principles.
No -- if the _structure_ of the EM field was was was important, than you could have very similar computations with wildly different field structures. Transistors create very different fields than axons.
When a computer simulates a game, where does the simulation occur. I mean there is absolutely a representation of a game world in the computer somewhere. New elements can be added and removed from it. Signals saying there is or isn't "pain" can occur.
By trying to say brains use EM fields I'd say you're making your position far worse when you're talking about a potential lifeforms that only exists as EM fields
Try to visualize the structure of the EM field inside a GPU vs. one inside of a human brain. In the GPU, it is highly distributed in space and time, many stacatto digital signals, etc. This is structurally very different than what happens inside a brain, which is substantially more analog. You can simulate analog stuff using floats, but the simulation is instantiated in digital logic, not in analog logic.
If you multiply numbers with a DAC, opamp, then ADC, vs. with a ALU, you get structurally very different electromagnetic fields. Even though you might get similar numerical outputs.
The argument would be that the exact spacial structure of the EM field in the brain is the thing that determines tha nature of experience. And the spacial structure of the EM field in the human brain is radically different than that on a GPU.
This is where most mind theories do have issues, how does it stay stable. Quantum theory of the mind has a lot of the same problems, though we are finding some interesting structures that could have explanatory power.
Another thing I read recently that I found interesting is on platonic maths and complex algorithmic complexity in simple algorithms. The nice thing about math is once you choose your axioms it stays stable. But a lot of the work this group was doing is investigating is how biology executes algorithms and what second to n order effects are we missing. In many of these algorithms there are things like nearly free error correction or otherwise complex behavior that we'd consider emergent. The golden rule is a common example of this we see in nature. But the hypothesis they're working on is there are many more algorithms that life discovered over the past view billion years at higher orders via random walk and chance. We just have to pick apart these biological structures and discover the behaviors and figure out how to use them.
Yeah -- empirically EM theories of phenomenal experience are definitely not perfect.
> Another thing I read recently that I found interesting is on platonic maths and complex algorithmic complexity in simple algorithms.
> the hypothesis they're working on is there are many more algorithms that life discovered over the past view billion years at higher orders via random walk and chance. We just have to pick apart these biological structures and discover the behaviors and figure out how to use them.
This is very interesting. I think there is a lot of valuable research that will come out of trying to figure out what classical computations brains, neural nets, etc. are instantiating.
How you get from computations to phenomenal experience is still not something that I have a very clear understanding of.
IMO we're clearly nowhere near any sort of intelligence in the machines we have created, but I don't see any clear way to deny intelligence could be created in or transferred to such a substrate, I don't see why you think it differs in principle - because it is man-made or because of the materials used?
The brain is insanely complicated. The premise that we could realize equivalent or better intelligence than eons of evolutionary development is like claiming you can build an airplane just as good as a modern jet using cardboard and duct tape. It is the apex of hubris.
Our current machines are IMO nowhere near general intelligence and consciousness. However I don't think that means we can discount substrates other than neurones for intelligence in future. There is no evidence that you could not in theory build an intelligence using a different substrate than human brains.
>like claiming you can build an airplane just as good as a modern jet using cardboard and duct tape.
Like, at least make an analogy that makes sense.
"You can't build a billion dollar airplane by spending 100 billion dollars in tokens"
Because that's more of what we're doing here with AI. And when you say it my way suddenly the idea shifts from "of course that's not possible" to "well, that's a lot of tokens, maybe an evolutionary algorithm could".
Neurobiology has to be complex because we have to keep meat alive, breeding, and evolving in the environment it lives in. This said absolutely nothing about the minimum viable requirements for intelligence or consciousness (or if being conscious is even necessary for a higher intelligence agent).