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ArgentStonecutter t1_j33erb2 wrote

It is not clear that ChatGPT has any of those attributes. It doesn't model anything, let alone itself, it just transforms its training corpus.

It's also parroting the philosophic dualist nonsense that subjective experience implies some kind of supernatural processes beyond "mere" computations.

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williamfwm t1_j35an7m wrote

Sorry to hear that you might be a zombie, but at least for me, I definitely have a kind of subjective experience that transcends all possible external description; even having a total accounting of the state of my brain, all 100T synapses at a particular nanosecond, wouldn't allow you to penetrate into my experiences. Consciousness - real consciousness, Hard Problem consciousness - is a first-person phenomenon, and words are a third-person tool. It's just a logical impossibility (it's nonsensically incoherent) for this third-person thing to pierce into the first-person, so a satisfactory third-person description can never be given, but suffice to say, seeing actually looks like something (it's not merely informational, it's not merely knowledge I get access to when I see), and hearing actually sounds like something, and pain actually hurts, and if you don't experience it yourself, then you'll just never know what I mean by those seemingly hopelessly ineloquent statements

(and lest you think I'm some kind of wishy-washy woo-woo lover.....nope! I'm a diehard atheist with a list of "supernatural" things a mile long I don't believe in. But consciousness is....just there. I can't shake it even if I want to....except, perhaps, by dying. But maybe not even then)


It's actually computationalism that is "nonsense". To suggest that computation can give rise to consciousness is to suggest that you can "hop off the number line". Because computation means "thing you can implement on a Turing machine", and a Turning machine is an imaginary infinite tape, which can be thought of as one big number (if you like - and, in fact, always an integer, if you make that interpretive choice), so any time you do a computation, you are simply transitioning from one (usually very, very large) number into another. Proposing that computation gives rise to consciousness is proposing that certain integers are privileged, and cause internal experience disjoint from the Turing machine. Certain integers are conscious. And if there are infinitely many distinct conscious experience, then there are infinitely many conscious integers. But when are the integers conscious, and for how long? Integers are just ideas....are they conscious all the time, within the abstract integer realm? Or do they have a kind of Platonic "real" existence, where they are conscious? If I utter a long integer, does consciousness happen? Does it happen when I finish uttering the whole integer, or is the conscious experience spread ever-so-slowly over the entire utterance

And most importantly how does the Universe know where to put the consciousness?. When I utter integers, I'm using a whole system that's only relative to others, who understand certain sounds as certain symbols, etc. Language is a whole, mostly-arbitrary construction of mutual agreement. How does the universe objectively know that those are integers, and they're computation-integers, and consciousness should go along with them?

But maybe you think all the above is too abstract and you want to stick to talking about transistors (I mean, you're wrong to think that, since computation as understood by the Church-Turing thesis is abstract and transistors are in no way privileged, but fine, I'll humor you)

Again, how does the Universe know where to put the consciousness. How many silicon atoms does the Universe recognize as a proper transistor? And you may be aware of "Universal Gates" - NAND and NOR - which are the only gates you need to build a UTM that can do all conceivable computations. How does the Universe know when I've built a gate? I can build it by so many different chunks of atoms of different sizes - Moore's Law, ongoing miniaturization, etc - and the thing that makes it a gate is its function within the circuit, its relation to what I've defined as the inputs and the outputs. How does the Universe know it should honor my intentions? And what about if I build gates out of other materials - water (fluidic computing is a real field), dominos, legos, etc? How does the Universe peer into the molecules of plastic or porcelain, etc etc, and know that it's looking at a gate constructed out of such material, and place consciousness inside?

(as an aside: How does it know to put consciousness in neurons, for that matter? For that reason, I'm sympathetic to Lucas-Penrose, and neurons may indeed be non-privileged too, but that's derailing too much....)


If you're an eliminativist, this all means nothing. It's a non-challenge. Consciousness is just a high-level label for a physical process, a word like "concert" or "government".

But I'm sorry to inform you that consciousness is a real thing all its own, and if you don't believe in it, you may not be in the club

And, it being a real thing, computationalism is an incoherent non-answer that doesn't explain anything

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ArgentStonecutter t1_j35fp5p wrote

The universe doesn't know anything, it doesn't put the consciousness anywhere. There's no reason to assume consciousness is anything but the result of a computational system modelling itself in the world to a high enough degree of accuracy. Talking about where it's "put" just means you're starting from fundamentally broken assumptions.

Your argument about "conscious integers" is utter nonsense. Integers don't interact with themselves, other integers, or the physical world. They don't model anything. They may be at most match a Gödelized snapshot of a complex system at a certain point in time, but they still don't DO anything.

Consciousness isn't a state, it's a process. There is no "hard problem" of consciousness, because the "problem" is based on assumptions that are not even wrong... they have no explanatory value in any realm.

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