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Has consciousness been fully explained?

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quixotecoyote said:
Well ok. First you light the strawman on fire and watch it burn. Then you do something useful.
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Well, you're either going to back up your contention that we can get behavior with no physical cause, or you aren't.
 
Drachasor said:
the simulation will perfectly capture that interaction and will be conscious
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What you're saying here is that a machine which runs a digital simulation of a physical system will itself begin behaving like that physical system.

Which isn't true. It can't, because then it will stop being an apparatus that can run simulations, which will then end the process you claim allows it to behave like the simulated system.

In order to run the simulation, the apparatus must be an apparatus that runs simulations.

So if that's what it's doing, then that's what it's doing.
 
quixotecoyote said:
When a calculator adds 2+2, does it spit out 4 objects?
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No, which is exactly my point.

Because the calculator doesn't actually add two and two to get four.

Simulations are abstractions and require interpretation.

If you don't understand the symbol system, then you have no idea that the calculator is supposed to have "added" two and two to get four. All you have is an array of lights or a pattern of ink on paper.
 
Piggy said:
What you're saying here is that a machine which runs a digital simulation of a physical system will itself begin behaving like that physical system.
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He said the simulation would be conscious. The rest is your addition.
 
Piggy said:
No, which is exactly my point.

Because the calculator doesn't actually add two and two to get four.

Simulations are abstractions and require interpretation.


If you don't understand the symbol system, then you have no idea that the calculator is supposed to have "added" two and two to get four. All you have is an array of lights or a pattern of ink on paper.
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And when you run a program that has the ability to interpret, what happens?

eta: It's also worth pointing out that people don't 'actually' add two and two to get four under this logic:

A person adding doesn't 'actually' add two and two to get four. There are no objects in the person's head being grouped together. The symbols 2 + 2 are run through abstract information processing in the brain which yields the result of four. But if the observer doesn't understand what's going in the persons brain, all you have is a array of neurons or a pattern of electricity.
 
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quixotecoyote said:
If you want to play word games, I'm up for scrabble.
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I enjoy Scrabble. If you're at TAM, maybe we can play a game.

In the meantime, let's concentrate on the claims being made here.

We have a human body which behaves like a human body.

We have a machine that runs digital simulations which behaves like a machine that runs digital simulations.

No matter how detailed the sim, the machine continues to behave only like a machine that runs sims.

If it's built to be conscious, then it is conscious, regardless of the sim it's running -- a human body, a hurricane, a racecar, whatever.

If it's not built to be conscious, then it's not conscious, regardless of the sim it's running.

No matter how accurate the sim, even a sim of a human body, it's still an abstraction. It never slops over into objective physical reality.

That's pretty simple.

If you want to claim that running a sim which you and I interpret (in our imaginations) to be a human body somehow changes what the machine is doing physically so that it, too, exhibits the behavior of a human body, please, provide an explanation of how that occurs.
 
quixotecoyote said:
And when you run a program that has the ability to interpret, what happens?

eta: It's also worth pointing out that people don't 'actually' add two and two to get four under this logic:

A person adding doesn't 'actually' add two and two to get four. There are no objects in the person's head being grouped together. The symbols on paper are run through abstract information processing in the brain which yields the result of four. But if the observer doesn't understand what's going in the persons brain, all you have is a array of neurons or a pattern of electricity.
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Now you're starting to understand.
 
Piggy said:
Then you hold an indefensible position.

Consciousness is something the body does.

It doesn't matter if anyone is able to produce something which fools you into thinking it's conscious when it's not.

I mean, really... this is flawed thinking at the most basic level.

You might as well say that the test for whether or not someone's being honest with me is if they can convince me that they're being honest.

Or that the test for how fast an object is traveling is how fast it makes me think it's traveling.
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There's a school of thought that maintains that consciousness consists entirely of the external behaviour of consciousness. This seems to me to be absurd. The very concept of consciousness is something that is experienced. External behaviour is secondary to this. If we design something merely to imitate the external behaviour, we might duplicate the internal experience, but there's no reason to be sure that we do, until we fully understand how the internal experience is produced.

We can't assume that an electric car produces the same emissions as an internal combustion engine, just because it looks the same.
 
Earthborn said:
If one were to hook up a computer to a robot body, (or theoretically even a human body) all that is needed to produce conscious behaviour is the right programming.
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Which is to say that we can create conscious machines in theory, and there's no reason why those machines can't utilize computers.

I totally agree with that, and always have.
 
Piggy said:
I enjoy Scrabble. If you're at TAM, maybe we can play a game.

In the meantime, let's concentrate on the claims being made here.

We have a human body which behaves like a human body.

We have a machine that runs digital simulations which behaves like a machine that runs digital simulations.

No matter how detailed the sim, the machine continues to behave only like a machine that runs sims.

If it's built to be conscious, then it is conscious, regardless of the sim it's running -- a human body, a hurricane, a racecar, whatever.

If it's not built to be conscious, then it's not conscious, regardless of the sim it's running.

No matter how accurate the sim, even a sim of a human body, it's still an abstraction. It never slops over into objective physical reality.

That's pretty simple.

If you want to claim that running a sim which you and I interpret (in our imaginations) to be a human body somehow changes what the machine is doing physically so that it, too, exhibits the behavior of a human body, please, provide an explanation of how that occurs.
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Given that the focus on the machine running the sim rather than the sim itself seems to be your creation rather than mine, I'm not sure how to answer this.

My brain is running the computations and information processing that result in (or "is", depending on semantics) my consciousness. It's fed power and input from my body, but nothing in my body is generating my consciousness.

If you want to say that my body is not conscious, then that's fine. If that's how you want to use the language, I'll agree the machine running the sim is not conscious. That's how I'd use it myself.

eta: you could also use the analogy brain->machine, brain activity->sim, consciousness->consciousness.
 
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cornsail said:
We can't model things just with math if model means "recreate".
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Exactly. And that's what's at issue.

I recently heard about a military program to model terrorist networks. Their simulations retain the real-world relationships and are mathematically analogous to the real thing.

Yet no one would accuse these folks of actually creating a terrorist network, or attempt to lock up the computers in Gitmo and put them on trial.
 
Piggy said:
Exactly. And that's what's at issue.

I recently heard about a military program to model terrorist networks. Their simulations retain the real-world relationships and are mathematically analogous to the real thing.

Yet no one would accuse these folks of actually creating a terrorist network, or attempt to lock up the computers in Gitmo and put them on trial.
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However, one might suggest that terrorist networks involve more than abstract patterns of information processing.
 
quixotecoyote said:
Alright, I'll bite. In what way does it matter that the physical interaction in a brain is very different from the physical interaction in a simulator?
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Because you're claiming that running the sim makes the simulator itself behave like a physical brain.

Either that, or you're saying that there can be real behavior (i.e. a human body doing what it does when it's conscious) with no physical cause.
 
quixotecoyote said:
How do you imagine your machine gaining consciousness?
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No one yet knows how the brain does it, so we don't know how a machine would do it either, but we assume that since an organic machine (our bodies) can do it, then in theory a non-organic machine could do it as well.
 
quixotecoyote said:
He said the simulation would be conscious. The rest is your addition.
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If you mean "the simulation would be conscious" in the same sense that you mean "the simulation just destroyed the planet earth" then you're fine.

All that happens in imaginary space. We look at the output and we imagine a conscious entity or a destroyed planet when none really exists.

On the other hand, if you want to claim that some real instance of conscious awareness is created, that's an entirely different proposition.
 
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