Even if you believe in panpsychism, there are good reasons to doubt a computer has anything beyond micro-experiences. You can't solve the binding-problem (for example, your left and right visual fields are unified as a coherent whole) with discrete parts.
Why would we need to 'feel' anything from the inside? We could operate perfectly well as 'machines' without having this 'feeling'. Also, consciousness isn't a feeling. It is what makes it possible at all to have a subjective experience of feelings in the first place. And that is mind-blowing the more you think of it.
How do you know that what you say about consciousness isn’t just a language game you play where you define words in terms of other words that are hardly connected to anything?
“What it is like to be a bat”
“What it is like to experience something”
After having seen descriptions of all the physical components of experience:
“It is Qualia! What it is like to see red”
Having been described all the differences between sensing red and green, and people who can’t tell the difference, and the suggestion that maybe what you call consciousness is the collection of abilities to distinguish various things...
“No, it is something more”.
What is it? How is that different than saying there is a “true essence” of a thing, over and above its properties? This is what greek philosophers asked about.
“It is the sense of identity. Integrating into one experience.”
Ok so what about Theseus’ ship? If all the cells are being replaced? What about your gut brain? Coukd it have a separate consciousness living in the same body?
“These are interesting questions”.
Here is a statement I will make:
If you are careful to define your words unambgiously, in terms of RICH connections to other concepts, you will find that you won’t be able to ask a single question about the following subjects without having a straightforward and simple reductionist-sounding answer:
I'm not really sure what you're arguing here. I would certainly say consciousness is 'something more', and that this something more has to be something non-material (or at least using 'materials' that have wildly different properties than what we observe using the scientific method).
Theseus' ship is a problem for a purely materialistic explanation of consciousness, for, by that account, consciousness should be a function of your material makeup, and yet, it remains constant despite change in both what makes up your cells and the specific configuration of those cells.
Theseus' ship is not a problem for materialistic explanations of anything; it's a problem for anybody who thinks the nature of a thing is governed by the words used to describe it.
The fact that you would continue to call a ship the same after exchanging all its parts is not an ontological problem, it is a problem arising from the imprecise use of language or intention to use an approximate/aggregate notion of identity. (I would recommend studying topology for a more modern understanding of this.)
And yet, consciousness is something that remains, regardless of whether we name it as such, and regardless of the specific cells that make up our brains. So it's as if it is the only thing that is not named 'by us' and yet remains 'something' independent of its makeup.
> I would certainly say consciousness is 'something more', and that this something more has to be something non-material (or at least using 'materials' that have wildly different properties than what we observe using the scientific method).
If you're interested in having that idea challenged, I heartily recommend reading "Godel, Escher, Bach" - the book explains how complexity (perhaps to the point of consciousness) can emerge from "simple" systems.
I certainly am interested in this, but I also would like to note that this is not just a matter of something 'more complex' arising and that I lack the imagination necessary to see how something very very complex can arise. Rather, subjective experience is a phenomenon that, no matter how complex your system is, is qualitatively different.
It's not like this is a trivial problem that philosophers of mind have figured out long ago. As someone else mentioned in this thread, it is a very deep problem. If you want to have your view challenged I encourage you to read any introductory book to philosophy of mind.
> Theseus' ship is a problem for a purely materialistic explanation of consciousness,
Theseus's ship is not a problem for materialistic views at all. A function of matter configuration is not the same as a function of matter. In the same way, a wave on water is constantly changing its material makeup, and yet you can still call it "the same wave".
> As for RICH I don't know what that means.
Rich, i.e. non-trivial. That is, no tautologies or something slightly above tautology in the depth of information.
That's one of the uses of thinking, yes, but it's hardly the only one, unless by some procrustean method you force all my thoughts to 'really' be about the future. In which case I'd say the statement is close to devoid of meaning.
Furthermore, thinking and consciousness is not the same thing.
Well, that's a bold claim, and it doesn't really say anything substantial, in my opinion. What does it mean to see yourself? Are the electrical impulses of your brain somehow registering themselves and then reflecting them to yet another part of the brain which.. does what exactly?
Believing that consciousness can be explained in terms of material processes is certainly a valid belief, but it is just that: a belief. Believing that a certain configuration of atoms, no matter how involved, can give rise to subjective experience is not far from believing in some kind of magic.
And before you retort that a lot of phenomena in nature are 'emergent', I will say:all those phenomena are ultimately explicable in terms of their basic atomic constituents. Consciousness is qualitatively different. You cannot start with the experience of being hungry and then somehow explain the whole process from your stomach being empty to that qualitative experience and how it feels for you.
> Believing that consciousness can be explained in terms of material processes is certainly a valid belief, but it is just that: a belief.
It's a belief, true, but it's kind of a privileged one, since it's so successful at explaining literally every other thing we observe about the universe. Why brains would be different?
> Believing that a certain configuration of atoms, no matter how involved, can give rise to subjective experience is not far from believing in some kind of magic.
This argument would be stronger 500 years ago, but I don't know how one can consider this "not far from believing in magic" after seeing a computer. Or, after observing brains of different animals - from insects to simians. Or, after discovering circuit-bending and realizing how similar it is to prodding a brain. There's ample evidence against the hypothesis that the human brain is the only magical object in the universe and that it somehow transcends physics.
> And before you retort that a lot of phenomena in nature are 'emergent', I will say:all those phenomena are ultimately explicable in terms of their basic atomic constituents. Consciousness is qualitatively different. You cannot start with the experience of being hungry and then somehow explain the whole process from your stomach being empty to that qualitative experience and how it feels for you.
Why? If I gave you a device that could trace the state of every molecule and charge in my brain to the extent allowed by uncertainty principle, would you still be confident in believing that? Just because we don't have a device like this doesn't mean consciousness is magic.
> It's a belief, true, but it's kind of a privileged one, since it's so successful at explaining literally every other thing we observe about the universe. Why brains would be different?
It's successful at explaining everything that can be explained in material terms, yes! Science is really good at it.
>This argument would be stronger 500 years ago, but I don't know how one can consider this "not far from believing in magic" after seeing a computer. Or, after observing brains of different animals - from insects to simians. Or, after discovering circuit-bending and realizing how similar it is to prodding a brain. There's ample evidence against the hypothesis that the human brain is the only magical object in the universe and that it somehow transcends physics.
I cannot see how any one of those things you mentioned have to do with the utter strangeness that is subjective experience? I'm not saying a brain cannot perform computations, if that's what you're getting out of this. Why you mention a computer I don't know - there is nothing that indicates a computer has subjective experience and nothing about a computer makes me believe that creating subjective states is something that can be done with atoms alone. And that is what is 'magical' about this line of reasoning.
>Why? If I gave you a device that could trace the state of every molecule and charge in my brain to the extent allowed by uncertainty principle, would you still be confident in believing that? Just because we don't have a device like this doesn't mean consciousness is magic.
See above. Even if you were to trace every molecule in my brain, you would be no closer to really explaining a subjective experience. You would be able to show correlations, yes! 'Now he's angry, look at this cluster of atoms'. But that's not an explanation of the experience as such. That's the unbridgeable gap I'm talking about.
The problem with that line of reasoning is you're assuming the brain is a computer, or that it merely computes.
But that's just an assumption and there are many reasons a person, let alone a brain, is not a machine or a computer or an algorithm. That it is like it? Sure, in some insignificant ways, we have the ability to compute things. But is it an algorithm? No.
The idea that consciousness is an algorithm or a computer or a machine is an assumption that is extremely popular among people in the tech industry because it confirms their assumptions, and it makes them feel like they have extremely transferable knowledge. "I know about computers. Let's assume the brain is a computer and consciousness is an algorithm. I can now comment on the brain and consciousness."
> The problem with that line of reasoning is you're assuming the brain is a computer, or that it merely computes.
The brain can compute. That's extraordinary. I say one type of thing does that, computers. You say no, two things, computers and then also brains. But when pressed to explain what is a brain if not a computer you'll just sputter (probably at length) without offering any substance.
In a sense that's the wrong way up to explain it. Church-Turing intuitively defines computation (the things computers can do) in terms of what our brains can do, so the match is not a coincidence but it also isn't there for the reason you probably expect. Because it's an intuition Church-Turing isn't provable, but you may notice that we subsequently built an _entire world-changing industry_ upon it in a lifetime.
You pointed to a review, others have written entire books, always they can be summarised as simply arguments from incredulity. "What? Nonsense, the brain can't be a computer, I simply won't believe that". It's unfortunate that we have woken such people from their daydreaming, I have no doubt that if similarly aroused they'd give the mathematicians what for too, "What? Nonsense, how can there be numbers which aren't ratios of whole numbers, I simply won't believe it".
You'll see in my comment and your quote that I don't say the brain can't compute. I agree, the brain can compute. But that doesn't mean it is a computer, because computing is an ability. People can do many other things aside from computing, none of which rely on computation, for instance they can imagine, which is the ability to think new thoughts. Computers can't imagine because all they do is compute: that's their programming. No amount of programming can produce imagination. Computation and imagination are categorically distinct as different intellectual powers and abilities.
You are conflating an ability with ontology. We know what a brain is. It's a collection of fatty material with neurons that do not explicitly fire exactly like a computer. Key word there is like. Church-Turing built a model of computational logic off of intuitions about the brain and formal mathematical logic. That's it's not provable doesn't prove your point; it removes any distinction between it being right or wrong: because it is a model (lets make something like the brain).
That an industry was built on computation doesn't prove anything. We know computation is an ability. For instance it's also something we can do with abacuses. We could have built an enormous industry on building elaborate abacuses. We built computers do be extremely fast at computation. We didn't build computers to be brains.
You'll notice, if you read the review, that the author of the review repeatedly cites cognitive neuroscientists, even evangelists of the singularity, philosophers, psychologists, and zoologists, who have published at length on this topic and repeatedly critcise and disrupt the simple idea that the brain is a computer or an algorithm or even a machine. An entire branch of philosophy developed off of Ludwig Wittgenstein to counter the computational model of consciousness. Numerous books in the Philosophy of Mind argue that the assumption that the brain is a computer is not just unsupported, it is logically nonsensical.
Not so extraordinary. What's extraordinary isn't that brains can compute, it's that anything else can. Brains computing is ordinary. What's extraordinary about the brain isn't that it can compute. What's extraordinary about the brain is that it can be rational and self-aware, things that computers cannot do. Computers can only be deterministic. Brains can be deterministic, but they can also be non-deterministic
> The idea that consciousness is an algorithm or a computer or a machine is an assumption that is extremely popular among people in the tech industry because it confirms their assumptions
No, it's not because of that. It's because it is effectively a computer. Not in the vague sense of "it has stuffs connected to stuffs and there's electricity involved", but in the more specific sense that it takes inputs, produces complex outputs, has clearly identifiable hardware and indirectly identifiable software. It even has internal structure we're only beginning to understand, but that we know enough about to reasonably infer what computations happen where. There's little reason to assume there's some metaphysical mystery here, as exactly zero other things in the universe that we studied since the dawn of humanity turned out to be magic.
TL;DR: what else could it be? And before someone says "antenna", I don't buy it. "Computer" is a simpler explanation for all known facts than remote consciousness being received by the brain. See my take on this before[0]. See also: Occam's razor.
> "I know about computers. Let's assume the brain is a computer and consciousness is an algorithm. I can now comment on the brain and consciousness."
Yeah, well, sure. If I know the limit of applicability of my computer knowledge, I sure can comment on brain and consciousness. Like, I wouldn't say "it's vulnerable to SQL injection" because that would be an idiotic statement. But I could say "it implements visual processing, audio processing, collects other telemetry, and does sensor fusion in real-time in under 20 Watts, with power to spare". Because that's observation, physics, and modelling reality along a particular perspective of interest.
> It's because it is effectively a computer. Not in the vague sense of "it has stuffs connected to stuffs and there's electricity involved", but in the more specific sense that it takes inputs, produces complex outputs, has clearly identifiable hardware and indirectly identifiable software. It even has internal structure we're only beginning to understand, but that we know enough about to reasonably infer what computations happen where. There's little reason to assume there's some metaphysical mystery here, as exactly zero other things in the universe that we studied since the dawn of humanity turned out to be magic.
You're conflating the ability to compute with ontology. Computers compute. That's all they do. They're programmed to do only that. Humans have other abilities, such as imagination, that are not computational. Computers cannot imagine, not because of limited hardware or software; they can't imagine because they only compute. Imagination isn't computational. All throughout your response you are using the terminology of computers and software as if they are completely intuitive, but we have other terminology to define those things: medical terms define parts as the brain as parts of the brain not as hardware because that's a metaphor; the cerebelum is like this part of the computer. What they are is not the same as what they can do. That's not some magical mystery, or even obscure metaphysics. A car's horsepower is not in its carburetor, or its gas, or its manifold, because the horsepower of a car is what it can do, its an ability, a power. In the same sense the brain can compute, but that doesn't mean it is a computer.
What else could it be? A brain. Animals have them. They are not computers. But they can compute. The field of computer science and software development only slightly aligns with studying the brain.
> If I know the limit of applicability of my computer knowledge, I sure can comment on brain and consciousness.
Yes and when it is no longer applicable it is no longer right or wrong: it's just assumption. That you can fuzzily attach assumptions to arguments about the brain does not mean the brain is a computer. It means you can fuzzily model the brain on a computer, but that model will have glaring gaps. You can build from your assumptions but you have to accept the limitations of that assumption. Assuming the brain is a computer comes with glaring limitations.
> as exactly zero other things in the universe that we studied since the dawn of humanity turned out to be magic.
Rather, the things that seem somehow magical to us we either explain scientifically, or we ignore. I don't know about you, but several of my acquaintances have reported phenomena and experiences that I have no reason to doubt, that are not solely 'in their mind' (because of the external consequences of what happened), and that cannot be explained by mechanistic laws because they involve 'backwards' transfer of information and so on. These are datapoints, they're just unfortunately not datapoints that can be used for scientific inquiry. But then again, there is no a priori reason to believe science can answer all questions we have.
Regardless of this, there is a reason to assume a big metaphysical mystery, simply because consciousness and subjectivity is unlike anything else in the world and bridging the qualitative gap between subjective experience and the mechanistical world is a completely different task than explaining, say, what makes a stone roll the way it does.
I find kabbalah very interesting, because this assertion has been made for a long time without us having something tangible to compare it to. Now we have computers, basic AI, and no signs of slowing down. What if kabbalah, or something similar, is actually how consciousness emerges across different types of observers? I.e., consciousness is a "most likely" pattern that emerges from the initial ability to conceive of time.
Tarot is an example of a more personified version of the same archetypal phenomenon. The first few cards are indicative of susceptibility to experience, concentration of experience, awareness of experience, multiplicity of experience, and mastery of experience.
You can reproduce any algorithm with a sufficient group of people. For example, using a person as a node in a feed-forward neural network doing digit recognition. Suppose each person called the next layer in the network with the results of their calculation, until the last layer spit out a value of a digit between 1 and 9. At what point in that process does qualia arise? What is its shape and texture, and why?
Sure, I suspect "qualia" will be there, though there won't be a definite moment they arise. Imagine a simpler example: using person as a representation of a water molecule, you reproduce fluid behaviour in a crowd. At which point in this process waves arise? I suspect the question about qualia is meaningless in the same sense that asking when do water molecules (or humans) turn into waves is.
Who said our brains _needed_ consciousness to anticipate the future? The only claim I've seen is that it's (part of?) the particular mechanism our brains happen to use. This is akin to asking why birds need to flap their wings to fly when we have airplanes that can fly with fixed wings.
What I'm saying is that consciousness doesn't add anything to the art of 'predicting the future', and plays (as far as I can see) no discernable role in this art.
[citation needed]