Are You Conscious?

[rocketdodger]

Because unlike the Strong AI people, I don't make arbitrary claims that are justified only by a belief system. Science doesn't say anything about consciousness at present. Making confident scientific assertions about something entirely undefined scientifically is a fools game. Scientists don't do it - philosophers do.

I didn't say science said anything about consciousness specifically.

I said science tells us that if a physical process is understood then in principle it can be duplicated.

Do you disagree with that?

 

[Malerin]

I didn't say science said anything about consciousness specifically.

I said science tells us that if a physical process is understood then in principle it can be duplicated.

Do you disagree with that?

RD has a point. If Materialism is true, and you were able to replace neurons with functionally equivalent microchips, serotonin with an equivalent artificial chemical, etc., consciousness should be the end result.

 

[AkuManiMani]

Not good enough. Not nearly good enough. I've metnioned before my criteria for a legit theory of consciousness. It must, at bare minimum, be able to adequately answer these questions:

"What is it about particular neural processes that causes some sensory input to be felt as a particular sensation or experience? What physical property differentiates the quality of these experiences? How is this process expressed thru the biochemistry of neurons? What part of the system actually has the experience(s) and what are the relevant physical properties of this portion of the system that causes it to be subjectively sensible?"

Any alleged scientific model of consciousness that cannot address these questions is just handwaving bull, as far as I'm concerned.

I think your criteria set the bar way too high for being able to simulate consciousness, and I do not agree that it is necessary to understand consciousness to simulate it. We shall have to agree to disagree here, I am afraid.

Are you not reading what I'm saying? How can we even "agree to disagree" when your disagreement is with a point I'm not making? I'm not talking about criteria for simulating consciousness; I'm talking about the necessary criteria for a scientific model of consciousness that we can use to reproduce actual consciousness in artificial systems.

If the above questions are of no interest to you, thats fine. However, your personal lack of curiosity does not change the fact that those are fundamental questions that any valid scientific theory of consciousness must answer.

Yea, we all rely on your intuitions when deciding whether or not a given entity is conscious. My point is that we require a scientific means of objectively discerning consciousness if we're ever going to have a legitimate claim to producing it artificially.

Why? It certainly won't be the first or last thing we managed to do without fully understanding all the principles at play.

We don't even have the barest understanding of the principles that underly subjective sensibility, what physical conditions are necessary/sufficient for producing it, or the dynamics that govern its variation. None whatsoever.

Its not enough to create a computer simulation of the brain's IP features. We have to understand actual consciousness and how biological brains produce it.

I disagree.

Is there some logically compelling reason why you disagree or are you just being contrary for it's own sake?

Can't do that until we atleast figure out exactly what makes -us- conscious.

Why?

Because otherwise we don't know what the ***k we're doing -- thats why.

In our case, the question is: where is the physical boundary or cutoff point where unconscious processing ends and conscious processing can be said to begin?

Where does yellow turn into green?

At around the 570 nm wavelength of light.

Why should there be a physical boundary or cutoff point?

Because there is a stark qualitative difference between being conscious and being unconscious.

If we can physically identify the elementary constituents of something as ephemeral as light, I'm sure we can do the same for our own consciousness.

Why should there be some new sort of elementary constituent? The ones we have appear to be sufficient.

Who said that the constituent(s) had to be "new"? It could just as easily be based upon known physical constituent(s) that we haven't yet identified as such. In either case, the fact remains the process that physically constitutes consciousness [and it's associated qualia] is still an unknown.

Because there is clearly a physical difference between the EMF interactions of biological processes that produce consciousness, and those that don't.

I do not see that clear difference. The electromagnetic force appears to operate in exactly the same way w.r.t acting as the ground of cellular chemistry.

Of course the EMF operates in the exactly the same way. The point is to identify the kind of EMF activity that is the sufficient indicator of conscious mental activity.

Why not? IP-wise, the basic principles are the same. The only difference is that of the underlying physics of how they are carried out.

You have it exactly backwards. Chemistry remains chemistry, and the electromagnetic force continues to act as its ground. The difference is that the nervous system appears to specialize in high-speed communication using the same basic cellular signaling protocols that everything else uses, and it does so in a way that makes it very good at pattern matching and learning.

Our immune system, and many other specialized subsystems of the body, are good at pattern matching and learning. Unfortunately, this still tells us next to nothing about what consciousness is or how our bodies produce it.

Its absolutely required if we're going to solidly and unambiguously pin-down the SOB we call consciousness.

You keep asserting that understanding consciousness in terms of QED is required. You have not presented a single compelling reason why.

If you don't know what it is you're trying to physically create how on earth can you go about doing it systematically? Why is this such a radical concept to you?

Those all are very germane facts, but the problem is that that general knowledge is not nearly rigorous enough to tell us how to create subjective experiences in an artificial entity, how to specify the quality of those experiences, or even how to verify if a given entity is conscious to begin with.

Can you verify if another human is conscious or not? How? Does it have anything to do with knowing all their bits interact at the level of QED?

You have raised the bar way, way too high.

Attempting to produce synthetic consciousness, without any understanding of what consciousness is in physical terms, is like trying to conduct genetic engineering without knowledge of DNA or even the benefit of knowing the principles of Mendelian genetics. Its downright arrogant folly.

The goal should be to fit consciousness into the framework of our physical description of the world and not just be content to have it as an ad hoc conceptual shoe-in.

Stop thinking of consciousness as something fundamental, then. It is no more fundamental than respiration in terms of how the Universe works.

Its not an issue of whether or not consciousness is "fundamental". The fact of the matter is that, unlike respiration, we simply do not know what it is -- period.

So what? We can emulate electrical power generation with Turing computations but that does not mean that they are actually producing electrical power.

Dodgy metaphor.

Can you tell if you are interacting with a real computer or a perfect emulation of one if you only ever interact with it remotely? Why or why not?

Dodgy metaphor, indeed.

I just gave a clear example of the distinction between computation and physics [i.e. computer simulations of electrical generators produce no electrical power] and you immediately try to veer the conversation back into a computational box. You either missed the point entirely, or you understood the point and you're deliberately being evasive.

We have to stop thinking about consciousness just in terms of functional abstraction and appreciate it in terms of being the physical phenomena that it actually is.

So abstraction is useless, got it.

Please don't start strawmanning. You know damn well that that isn't the point I'm making.

 

[Frank Newgent]

Uncontrolled cellular growth, the invasion and destruction of adjacent tissue, the spread to other locations in the body via lymph or blood... is cancer a private behavior?

Yup, until made public by some means.

Made public... as in a diagnosis? By an oncologist or a Radical Behaviorist?

I'm not sure what you mean.

 

[nescafe]

Are you not reading what I'm saying? How can we even "agree to disagree" when your disagreement is with a point I'm not making? I'm not talking about criteria for simulating consciousness; I'm talking about the necessary criteria for a scientific model of consciousness that we can use to reproduce actual consciousness in artificial systems.

I think consciousness is an artifact of the way our nervous systems process information -- where information processing is concerned being able to simulate something with a sufficient degree of accuracy is indistinguishable from reproducing it.

We don't even have the barest understanding of the principles that underly subjective sensibility, what physical conditions are necessary/sufficient for producing it, or the dynamics that govern its variation. None whatsoever.

I do not think any new physical principles are needed, and I think that trying to simulate consciousness is a much better way to attempt to understand it than trying to figure it out from first principles.

Is there some logically compelling reason why you disagree or are you just being contrary for it's own sake?

I think your conceptual framework is bass ackwards. I suspect your opinion of mine is similar.

Because otherwise we don't know what the ***k we're doing -- thats why.

So? Until fairly recently we did not no how the ***k genetics worked, that did not stop us from using selective breeding to modify significant chunks of the ecosystem to suit our needs.

At around the 570 nm wavelength of light.

That is one correct answer. What are the others?

Because there is a stark qualitative difference between being conscious and being unconscious.

From a physical standpoint? What is it?

Of course the EMF operates in the exactly the same way.
The point is to identify the kind of EMF activity that is the sufficient indicator of conscious mental activity.

Why should any given kind of EMF activity be taken as a specific indicator of conscious mental activity?

Our immune system, and many other specialized subsystems of the body, are good at pattern matching and learning.

Not to the degree our nervous system is, I am afraid.

Unfortunately, this still tells us next to nothing about what consciousness is or how our bodies produce it.

Well, that we can perturb normal consciousness in repeatable ways by stimulating various areas of the brain and noting what types of brain damage cause what sort of perturbations in normal consciousness give us some pretty good clues about what parts of our bodies are associated with (or even produce) what aspects of consciousness, yes?

If you don't know what it is you're trying to physically create how on earth can you go about doing it systematically? Why is this such a radical concept to you?

It is not. The concept I find radical is that you insist we have a full understanding of all the principles at play while we do it. That has hardly ever been the case.

Attempting to produce synthetic consciousness, without any understanding of what consciousness is in physical terms, is like trying to conduct genetic engineering without knowledge of DNA or even the benefit of knowing the principles of Mendelian genetics. Its downright arrogant folly.

We have been breeding plants and animals to make them the way we want them for over ten thousand years without knowing anything about DNA or knowing anything about Mendelian genetics.

Its not an issue of whether or not consciousness is "fundamental". The fact of the matter is that, unlike respiration, we simply do not know what it is -- period.

So why do you insist that we have to explain it in terms of QED, instead of one of the many higher levels of abstraction that we explain darn near everything else at?

Dodgy metaphor, indeed.

I just gave a clear example of the distinction between computation and physics [i.e. computer simulations of electrical generators produce no electrical power] and you immediately try to veer the conversation back into a computational box.

Yep. I think it works better when dealing with abstractions like awareness and consciousness than mucking around with physics does. I also think that when dealing with real-world computers the boundary between simulation and non-simulation is thin and porous -- if that simulation of a powerplant is directly controlling a real powerplant, where does the boundary of the simulation end and the real world begin?

You either missed the point entirely, or you understood the point and you're deliberately being evasive.

Odd, I get the same feeling when posting in threads like these alot.

Please don't start strawmanning. You know damn well that that isn't the point I'm making.

Yeah, I sometimes get stuck on snark.

 

[westprog]

Rocks and neurons (and everything else) are composed of the exact same types of fundamental particles.

In other words, physical and chemical properties are simply the result of structural differences.

Unless you want to get even more crazy and claim that neurons have some fundamental particle that rocks do not.

Wanna make that claim?

No, they have structural differences that give them different physical and chemical properties. Aku and I are open to the possibility that different physical and chemical properties might affect the question of consciousness - since physical and chemical properties affect everything else we encounter. We don't say "Eat that coal - it has carbon in it, just like toast". We recognise that a common fundamental composition is basically irrelevant.

 

[westprog]

I didn't say science said anything about consciousness specifically.

I said science tells us that if a physical process is understood then in principle it can be duplicated.

Do you disagree with that?

It sounds plausible but I'm not sure it will be necessarily true in all cases. However, in the investigation of consciousness one should assume it to be true, attempt to find the physical process involved, and duplicate it if possible.

 

[Dancing David]

Because there is clearly a physical difference between the EMF interactions of biological processes that produce consciousness, and those that don't. I personally wanna know what that difference is and how -- or if -- we can instantiate that in an artificial system.

HI,
AMM this is one of the biggest misconceptions about neurons and neurotransmission, and it comes from popular science and bad media description of the processes in the brain. And in fact I thought we had discussed this before, but maybe not.

The transmission of signals in the brain is not 'electrical' in any way related to electrons flowing in a wire. The transmission of states between neurons is biochemical, it is done by the use of chemical carriers that are more like letters in a mailbox than pulses of electrons going through a wire. There is currently no way that the electrical phase shift in the lipid bilayer, release of neurotransmitter and opening and closing of ion channels is going to create a 'signal' transmitted by EMF that can be 'received' by a neuron.

All of the signals are biochemical in nature and always (as far as we have found) involve the use of chemical carriers. There is no evidence that neurons are sensitive to weak EMF or that they effect neural transmission in any way.

Now I know people use the words 'electrical' and the like but take axon transmission, is not an 'electrical' signal like an Ethernet cord. It is a phase shift in osmotic potential across a semi permeable membrane regulated by ion gates that allow for the passage of ions in and out of the cell. Even when cells are in direct contact with each other (I forget what it is called right now) they use biochemical signals to transfer information. Where cells do not make contact with each other they use large molecules called neurotransmitters like serotonin that lock onto receptor s on the postsynaptic cell.

So all along the line the actual transmission is through the passage of biochemicals, osmotic ion transfer and the like. There is no way for EMF to effect the biology of neural tissue or cells, there is no know mechanism for EMF to store, effect or change the way that neurons interact.

Now some birds are believed to have specific magnetic components in their brains that interact with the earth's magnetic field. But human brains do not have them.

 

[Dancing David]

Made public... as in a diagnosis? By an oncologist or a Radical Behaviorist?

I'm not sure what you mean.

As in a biopsy, ultrasound, x-ray, MRI, CT , antibody assay, any means to make unvisible states visible.

I can't answer for radical behaviorsist because I am a methdological behaviorist (or so I have been told.)

 

[Ichneumonwasp]

If the contention is that consciousness is purely a Turing issue, then that's a different contention to consciousness being Turing + something else. When Aku and I have argued that some physical element may be part of consciousness, we've been accused of mysticism and incoherence. Time dependence is precisely the kind of thing we're talking about, and it's highly significant, because it removes The Chinese Room, for example.

I think you guys are likely arguing past one another and people are sniping rather than discussing if that is the case. I offer my interaction with Aku as evidence, where I pointed out that he was misusing a word or two and he responded in a strange way, like his entire worldview was being attacked. I see the same rhetoric in the exchange with Nescafe.

First issue. I don't see how adding time dependence is an issue for anyone. If you would just say that, then I don't think people would argue.

Second issue. I think that someone somewhere in here is confusing two different aspects of the argument. There is the fact that theoretically all computable problems are solvable by Turing machines, and there is the issue that a pure Turing machine is time independent, and there is the fact that most computation is abstract, and that mental processes are computable and solvable with Turing machines, so consciousness is too.

Somehow these separate strands of argument were fused into consciousness is abstract and computable on a Turing equivalent which is time independent.

None of that follows. Each of the above is a separate issue. That Turing equivalents can compute in a time independent fashion is fine, and that they can be described in purely abstract terms is fine. But there is also nothing wrong with putting added constraints on them for particular problems. I don't see how this would change the proof that they could 'compute consciousness' , so it is wrong to conflate two different issues going on in a long discussion.

I have seen several mistakes of over-generalizing in these discussions, and they need to be pointed out.

I think both sides are missing each others' points and that old antangonisms are ruling the day rather than honest debate. It might help if everyone took a step back and tried to really understand what the other person is saying. And stop all the personal attacks.

Third issue. This actually has nothing to do with the Chinese Room argument. The missing bit in the Chinese Room argument is semantic content, not a time element or anything else. What that argument shows is not that any computation cannot know Chinese or be aware or 'understand' but that simple forms of computation that provide only simple syntax are not capable of it. So, your typical multi-line program to get a computer to do anything will get nowhere close to consciousness because it never whispers close to understanding anything.

The important bit about a 'physical argument' is that once on sees that physical systems can be computers, that neurons have computation as an intrinsic property, then another issue disappears -- this argument that computation cannot explain consciousness because it is abstract. It can be dealt with as an abstraction, but it does not follow that it *is* an abstraction. Time dependence is just a consequence of the physical nature of the process.

It is the way that information processing proceeds within the system and dealing with a particular type of frame issue that provides the other missing bits in the explanation.

We must come to understand how we get semantic content, how we are or become aware, and how we feel. That is why I have repeatedly asked the questions "what is meaning?", "what is awareness?", and "what is feeling?". We have to arrive at better definitions of these concepts so that we can see how people do it. Only then can we work out how neurons do it. Only then can we emulate that with a computer.

Unless we happen to stumble on the solution with something like the Blue Brain Project. But that is unlikely since the work space is just too large, the number of possible solutions extraordinary.

Last issue. This has nothing to do with what you said, but I see it repeated often, so I want to address it again. There is nothing special about neurotransmitters. No neurotransmitter has any special properties at all. No computer system that emulates consciousness necessarily needs anything like a neurotransmitter, but again the engineering problem to replicate what happens at a synapse is a bear. The reason why we have different neurotransmitters is to segregate different 'systems'. Dopamine doesn't cause pleasure, nor does serotonin. It is the system that does it. Those transmitters just happen to be the chemicals used in the process.

 

[westprog]

I think you guys are likely arguing past one another and people are sniping rather than discussing if that is the case. I offer my interaction with Aku as evidence, where I pointed out that he was misusing a word or two and he responded in a strange way, like his entire worldview was being attacked. I see the same rhetoric in the exchange with Nescafe.

This debate is characterised by quite a hostile tone. My participation in this iteration was initiated by my views being portrayed in an incorrect fashion.

I haven't had any problems of this kind with The Wasp, though, so I hope we can continue to disagree with some civility. I get the impression that if Aku has snapped at you, it's more due to the general tenor of the debate rather than a big personality clash.

 

[AkuManiMani]

Are you not reading what I'm saying? How can we even "agree to disagree" when your disagreement is with a point I'm not making? I'm not talking about criteria for simulating consciousness; I'm talking about the necessary criteria for a scientific model of consciousness that we can use to reproduce actual consciousness in artificial systems.

I think consciousness is an artifact of the way our nervous systems process information -- where information processing is concerned being able to simulate something with a sufficient degree of accuracy is indistinguishable from reproducing it.

Just to make sure I understand exactly where you're coming from:

What do you think "information" is and what do you think it means for a system to process it?

We don't even have the barest understanding of the principles that underly subjective sensibility, what physical conditions are necessary/sufficient for producing it, or the dynamics that govern its variation. None whatsoever.

I do not think any new physical principles are needed, and I think that trying to simulate consciousness is a much better way to attempt to understand it than trying to figure it out from first principles.

How can you simulate something if you don't even know what it is you're trying to simulate?

Is there some logically compelling reason why you disagree or are you just being contrary for it's own sake?

I think your conceptual framework is bass ackwards. I suspect your opinion of mine is similar.

Hehe. Well atleast thats something we can agree on

At around the 570 nm wavelength of light.

That is one correct answer. What are the others?

Oh, you mean the actual -perception- of the colors yellow and green? Heh, thats one of the questions I'm asking. Its questions like that that we must have a rigorous answer to if we want to make the leap from Artificial Intelligence to Synthetic Consciousness.

Because there is a stark qualitative difference between being conscious and being unconscious.

From a physical standpoint? What is it?

Exactly.

Of course the EMF operates in the exactly the same way.
The point is to identify the kind of EMF activity that is the sufficient indicator of conscious mental activity.

Why should any given kind of EMF activity be taken as a specific indicator of conscious mental activity?

Being as how thats the known physical mechanism that neurons utilize it seems like a pretty good place to start.

Our immune system, and many other specialized subsystems of the body, are good at pattern matching and learning.

Not to the degree our nervous system is, I am afraid.

And even so, most of the activity of our nervous system does not produce consciousness. Even our brains produce consciousness only for limited periods of time, and they continue to process information during unconscious states. At this point, its seems to me that the terms "information", "information processing", and "computation" are too abstract and too broad to deal with the specifics of whats actually going on here.

Unfortunately, this still tells us next to nothing about what consciousness is or how our bodies produce it.

Well, that we can perturb normal consciousness in repeatable ways by stimulating various areas of the brain and noting what types of brain damage cause what sort of perturbations in normal consciousness give us some pretty good clues about what parts of our bodies are associated with (or even produce) what aspects of consciousness, yes?

Yes, those are all good -clues- and they give us a very general ideal of which parts of the brain are associated with which aspects of our experience. However, this still does not explain experience itself nor exactly how the brain achieves this when other tissue types don't.

I know you feel that reproducing the general architecture is sufficient but, epistemically, such an approach is directly comparable to the attempts of the Cargo Cults. We need more than the superficial level of understanding we have right now.

If you don't know what it is you're trying to physically create how on earth can you go about doing it systematically? Why is this such a radical concept to you?

It is not. The concept I find radical is that you insist we have a full understanding of all the principles at play while we do it. That has hardly ever been the case.

If only it were just an issue of understanding -all- the principles of subjective sensibility; the problem is we understand -none-. We're working in the dark here.

Attempting to produce synthetic consciousness, without any understanding of what consciousness is in physical terms, is like trying to conduct genetic engineering without knowledge of DNA or even the benefit of knowing the principles of Mendelian genetics. Its downright arrogant folly.

We have been breeding plants and animals to make them the way we want them for over ten thousand years without knowing anything about DNA or knowing anything about Mendelian genetics.

The goal of many within the field of AI is to produce consciousness from scratch in an artificial system. At our current state of the art, this is akin to trying to create synthetic life with a 17th century understanding of physiology and biochemistry. Its a very laudable goal but, realistically, it amounts to nothing better than modern alchemy.

Its not an issue of whether or not consciousness is "fundamental". The fact of the matter is that, unlike respiration, we simply do not know what it is -- period.

So why do you insist that we have to explain it in terms of QED, instead of one of the many higher levels of abstraction that we explain darn near everything else at?

The point in having a scientific theory of consciousness is so that we CAN abstract it conceptually. Our theories are abstractions of concrete entities and phenomena. If we do not understand the phenomena in question, or even know what it is, we cannot achieve technical mastery of it.

Dodgy metaphor, indeed.

I just gave a clear example of the distinction between computation and physics [i.e. computer simulations of electrical generators produce no electrical power] and you immediately try to veer the conversation back into a computational box.

Yep. I think it works better when dealing with abstractions like awareness and consciousness than mucking around with physics does.

The -concept- of consciousness is an abstraction. The -phenomena- of consciousness is not.

I also think that when dealing with real-world computers the boundary between simulation and non-simulation is thin and porous -- if that simulation of a powerplant is directly controlling a real powerplant, where does the boundary of the simulation end and the real world begin?

In the -physical- powerplant that the -physical- computer is running, ofcourse.

You either missed the point entirely, or you understood the point and you're deliberately being evasive.

Odd, I get the same feeling when posting in threads like these alot.

Then you should help break the trend by not doing the same yourself.

Please don't start strawmanning. You know damn well that that isn't the point I'm making.

Yeah, I sometimes get stuck on snark.

Comes from constantly putting up with the BS thats frequently pulled in these discussions.

 

[Frank Newgent]

Uncontrolled cellular growth, the invasion and destruction of adjacent tissue, the spread to other locations in the body via lymph or blood... is cancer a private behavior?

Yup, until made public by some means.

Made public... as in a diagnosis? By an oncologist or a Radical Behaviorist?

I'm not sure what you mean.

As in a biopsy, ultrasound, x-ray, MRI, CT , antibody assay, any means to make unvisible states visible.

I can't answer for radical behaviorsist because I am a methdological behaviorist (or so I have been told.)

Why should a methodological behaviorist believe that, like thinking and feeling, cancer is a private behavior?

 

[Dancing David]

Why should a methodological behaviorist believe that, like thinking and feeling, cancer is a private behavior?

I stated that it is a private behavior, now I will qualify that it is unknown to the individual until such time as it is made known. I am not making absolute claims or anything.

If you can look at someone's skin and say 'yup there is a radial asymmetry to that mole and it appears darker than the others’, that is a description of something that can be easily seen and observed. The doctor still had to shave it off and have someone send it to the lab to confirm the possible diagnosis of melanoma. Levels of observation and data.

However I have to get my cholesterol level checked or my blood pressure, those are private behaviors made public. I know the problem is with the use of the word 'private' and its connotation, so maybe the better term would be 'not-public'.

In the case of a lymphoma that is undiagnosed it is not easily visible or known through cursory observation, but with a biopsy or blood tests a 'non-public' behavior becomes 'public'. But hey I didn't make the words, I just use them.

There are in fact components to ‘thought’ that are unknown to the individual experiencing verbal cognition, but I agree the use of ‘private’ and ‘public’ is not great and may be reworked eventually. I know people don't like the use of the word 'behavior' to decribe non-volitional functions as well.

 

[Frank Newgent]

I know people don't like the use of the word 'behavior' to decribe non-volitional functions as well.

In a nutshell.

So you are saying, now, that cancer is not a private behavior?

 

[PixyMisa]

Yep. I think it works better when dealing with abstractions like awareness and consciousness than mucking around with physics does. I also think that when dealing with real-world computers the boundary between simulation and non-simulation is thin and porous -- if that simulation of a powerplant is directly controlling a real powerplant, where does the boundary of the simulation end and the real world begin?

Indeed. AkuManiMani (and Westprog) has been raising this same red herring and has been corrected on it dozens of times already.

AkuManiMani, what is the difference between a simulated computer and a real computer?

In functional terms. No more irrelevancies.

 

[westprog]

First issue. I don't see how adding time dependence is an issue for anyone. If you would just say that, then I don't think people would argue.

Time dependence is extremely critical because it affects the fundamental contention of computationalism. If consciousness is time dependent, then it isn't computational - it's physical. That's a possibility for which I've been arguing.

If consciousness is time dependent, then, for example, Rocketdodger's scenario of eternal life in a simulation may well be impossible in principle.

Second issue. I think that someone somewhere in here is confusing two different aspects of the argument. There is the fact that theoretically all computable problems are solvable by Turing machines, and there is the issue that a pure Turing machine is time independent, and there is the fact that most computation is abstract, and that mental processes are computable and solvable with Turing machines, so consciousness is too.

Somehow these separate strands of argument were fused into consciousness is abstract and computable on a Turing equivalent which is time independent.

None of that follows. Each of the above is a separate issue. That Turing equivalents can compute in a time independent fashion is fine, and that they can be described in purely abstract terms is fine. But there is also nothing wrong with putting added constraints on them for particular problems. I don't see how this would change the proof that they could 'compute consciousness' , so it is wrong to conflate two different issues going on in a long discussion.

If consciousness is time-dependent, then it's not computable. As you've said, anything computable can be computed on a Turing machine, and Turing machines are not time dependent.

I have seen several mistakes of over-generalizing in these discussions, and they need to be pointed out.

I think both sides are missing each others' points and that old antangonisms are ruling the day rather than honest debate. It might help if everyone took a step back and tried to really understand what the other person is saying. And stop all the personal attacks.

I'd certainly prefer it if my POV wasn't being rebutted by reference to my secret agenda, or explanations of why supporters of the physicalist view were actually anti-materialists.

Third issue. This actually has nothing to do with the Chinese Room argument. The missing bit in the Chinese Room argument is semantic content, not a time element or anything else. What that argument shows is not that any computation cannot know Chinese or be aware or 'understand' but that simple forms of computation that provide only simple syntax are not capable of it. So, your typical multi-line program to get a computer to do anything will get nowhere close to consciousness because it never whispers close to understanding anything.

But if consciousness is time-dependent, then simulations such as the Chinese room, running millions of times slower than a human mind, don't even arise. They will be ruled out on grounds of being too slow.

This is quite a different issue to the physical implementation of a Turing machine, where the different components will have time dependencies in order to make the thing work. A Turing machine is not time dependent.

The important bit about a 'physical argument' is that once on sees that physical systems can be computers, that neurons have computation as an intrinsic property, then another issue disappears -- this argument that computation cannot explain consciousness because it is abstract. It can be dealt with as an abstraction, but it does not follow that it *is* an abstraction. Time dependence is just a consequence of the physical nature of the process.

It is the way that information processing proceeds within the system and dealing with a particular type of frame issue that provides the other missing bits in the explanation.

We must come to understand how we get semantic content, how we are or become aware, and how we feel. That is why I have repeatedly asked the questions "what is meaning?", "what is awareness?", and "what is feeling?". We have to arrive at better definitions of these concepts so that we can see how people do it. Only then can we work out how neurons do it. Only then can we emulate that with a computer.

Unless we happen to stumble on the solution with something like the Blue Brain Project. But that is unlikely since the work space is just too large, the number of possible solutions extraordinary.

Last issue. This has nothing to do with what you said, but I see it repeated often, so I want to address it again. There is nothing special about neurotransmitters. No neurotransmitter has any special properties at all. No computer system that emulates consciousness necessarily needs anything like a neurotransmitter, but again the engineering problem to replicate what happens at a synapse is a bear. The reason why we have different neurotransmitters is to segregate different 'systems'. Dopamine doesn't cause pleasure, nor does serotonin. It is the system that does it. Those transmitters just happen to be the chemicals used in the process.

 

[Ichneumonwasp]

Time dependence is extremely critical because it affects the fundamental contention of computationalism. If consciousness is time dependent, then it isn't computational - it's physical. That's a possibility for which I've been arguing.

I'm afraid I don't understand. I understand that when discussing computation in abstract terms that it is time independent, but if a computer adds and multiplies a list of numbers it must do so following a set of rules, and it does so over a particular amount of time. It doesn't follow each rule simultaneously however fast it carries out the steps; if t did so it wouldn't function. All physical examples of computation are time dependent. I don't see how this makes such physical examples of computation not be computation.

If consciousness is time-dependent, then it's not computable. As you've said, anything computable can be computed on a Turing machine, and Turing machines are not time dependent.

How does that follow? The time dependence is not a fundamental feature of any sort of neural processing if we look at it abstractly. It is only important for the real world and real world modelling. For neural processing, things must occur in steps, but how is that different for most information processing?

I'd certainly prefer it if my POV wasn't being rebutted by reference to my secret agenda, or explanations of why supporters of the physicalist view were actually anti-materialists.

So would I, so would I.

But if consciousness is time-dependent, then simulations such as the Chinese room, running millions of times slower than a human mind, don't even arise. They will be ruled out on grounds of being too slow.

That is only because we work the Chinese Room argument in the abstract and forget the time factor. The slowness of a person doing the sorting is not the problem. The problem it shows is that simple syntax is not sufficient in and of itself to provide semantics.

But there really is another problem -- a problem for which it is unfortunate that he chose language as his example -- there are examples probably in all languages where syntax cannot be used to determine meaning, so if the room always produces a result that is correct, that tends to imply that there is semantic content in the room, though none is supplied. The thought experiment cheats a bit.

This is quite a different issue to the physical implementation of a Turing machine, where the different components will have time dependencies in order to make the thing work. A Turing machine is not time dependent.

But we could imagine any number of situations in which information processing would only work properly if information is introduced at a particular step rather than at another step in the process -- which in the real world requires time dependence. That is the only sort of time dependence that neural processing requires. It exists in the real world, but you could potentially calculate all the bits of information independent of time as long as they occurred in the proper spatial arrangement and in the proper order, though I cannot conceptualize such a "thing".

Nothing is a Turing machine, though, is it? A computer is not. Turing machines are abstractions useful in thought experiments. They don't describe actual physical machines that exist in space or work in time. The issue here, I thought, is whether or not a computer can do what the brain does. Saying that neural processing is not a Turing machine is fine, but since neither is a computer I'm not sure what difference that makes. Turing machines are not models of computers but of the abstract notion of computation.

Perhaps it would help me if you would tell me what you are actually arguing against with your above set of statements, because this sounds again like over-generalization of the abstract to the physical world. We know computation occurs in the physical world and that it occurs as an intrinsic property of functioning neurons, so any statement that tells me that computation is necessarily abstract or time-independent is wrong, or at the very least over-generalized.

 

[PixyMisa]

Time dependence is extremely critical because it affects the fundamental contention of computationalism. If consciousness is time dependent, then it isn't computational - it's physical.

Wrong.

If consciousness is time dependent, then, for example, Rocketdodger's scenario of eternal life in a simulation may well be impossible in principle.

Wrong.

If consciousness is time-dependent, then it's not computable.

Wrong.

As you've said, anything computable can be computed on a Turing machine, and Turing machines are not time dependent.

They also don't exist.

But if consciousness is time-dependent, then simulations such as the Chinese room, running millions of times slower than a human mind, don't even arise. They will be ruled out on grounds of being too slow.

Wrong.

This is quite a different issue to the physical implementation of a Turing machine, where the different components will have time dependencies in order to make the thing work. A Turing machine is not time dependent.

This whole argument is just grasping at red herrings.

 

[westprog]

Wrong.
Wrong.
Wrong.
They also don't exist.
Wrong.
This whole argument is just grasping at red herrings.

Every now and again I look at one of Pixy's posts to see if he's actually produced anything beyond inserting "wrong" at each paragraph mark - or, in other words, demonstrated consciousness. Clearly he still hasn't got the "argument" thing.