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Comment by measurablefunc | Hacker News Reader

Entirely different categories so the default position should be that living beings have properties computers don't & consciousness is one of those things. Similarly, I can't do 1B arithmetic operations per second but I don't think of myself as a lesser calculator. Computer perform arithmetic operations, if you're looking for consciousness in arithmetic then the burden of proof is on you to explain how exactly an abacus acquires consciousness at sufficient scale. The alternative position is equivalent to idealistic monism & everything ends up being conscious b/c the monic substance is conscious (which is a position some people hold but it's not very popular).

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This is why I said anyone who doesn't at least know some basics of Turing computability, thermodynamics, information theory and probability should not comment on consciousness.

You seem to be not aware but you are claimning there is something non-mechanistic in the human brain. Current physics as far as is known is all turing computable, the human brain is a physical system.

Most people who talk about AI consciousness don't even know what monism or dualism mean.

Most people are also religious which, well, tends to cloud thinking on consciousness.

It's not, quantum mechanics is not Turing computable b/c wave function collapse can not be explained mechanistically/computably.

I searched around and a basic query says wave function collapse is turing computable. I would rather ask a physicist this question and by default trust this answer than yours.

> However, the selection of the outcome is probabilistic (via Born rule), and randomness is not strictly Turing-computable unless you assume access to a random oracle.

I have thought about this a lot more than you have so good luck. I've already spent enough time in this thread.

If the randomness is truly proven in physics, I don't know if it is, then its also not a problem as it can be harvested and used in our program. Moreover, it appears probabilistic turing computers are no more powerful than normal turing computers. Sorry, no hypercomputation for you.

>access to a random oracle.

So, Monte-Carlo method.

I looked up this claim about wavefunction collapses and it leads to bounded randomness which does not still go beyond standard Turing computers. I would listen to physicists rather than randoms making unverified claims.

The randomness thing doesn't really match reality, because it's known to be incomplete: it only describes what happens to particles observed in a lab, everything else is out of scope. That's its area of applicability. That's why there's a problem of interpretation of quantum mechanics: what complete theory it approximates.

Another ambiguity here is is it theory or reality that should be computable.

Physics is computable in the probabilistic/simulation sense , not in terms of ability to predict, though.

The takeaway is to not go by the false idea that "just math" is insufficient to describe a AI or a human.

Maybe yes, maybe no. Dualism, or panpsychism aren't totally dead, I think.

Panpsychism seems it can be self consistent and make physical sense at least. I cannot dismiss it at hand.

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