[romeovs]

Obligatory "Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity" by Scott Aaronson[1], one of the best reads I've ever had from a paper. It debunks the kind of arguments this blog article makes quite deftly.

For instance the argument about the hot iron reminds me of section 6 in the paper "Computationalism and Waterfalls". For someone to ascribe consciousness to a piece of hot iron (or a waterfall, or any other random or psuedorandom process), we need to create a mapping of its states onto consciousness, or in this case, as a proxy, the program called consiousness.exe. Aaronson argues if the mapping we create is too complex, it might be doing all of the work of being consious, not the original underlying piece of hot iron. The article does not go into amount this detail, but it seems like the process of creating this mapping is: make enough mappings at random until one works. It would probably take waaay more mappings than atoms in the universe to try before we hit on one that works (something that's also discussed in Aaronsons' paper in section 4), so I'm not sure if the argument is even relevant.

Give the paper a read, it's one of my favourite pieces of text of all time and Aaronson is better at writing down his ideas than I am.

[1 (pdf)]: https://eccc.weizmann.ac.il/report/2011/108/revision/2/downl...

[simonh]

I find this argument completely unconvincing. The mapping in a case like that is entirely ephemeral, pertaining only for an instant. For this argument to be valid you’d have to be able to persistently map the iron bar, or waterfall, to all ongoing transformations of states in the running program, using one single consistent mapping. Otherwise all you have is a snapshot of state, not an ongoing process.

This argument is in the article as well and I’ve seen it from Searl too:

“A simulation of a brain cannot produce consciousness any more than a simulation of the weather can produce rain.”

This is making the assumption that consciousness is not a computation. If it is a computation then conciousness is not like weather itself, it’s like the simulation. Me imagining having a shower doesn’t make anything wet either. So is my imagination more like the weather, or more like the simulation of it?

[cmdli]

I believe the argument is that you can create a more-complex mapping over a course of time, say 1 second. For that 1 second, the mapping shows that the iron bar is conscious. Regardless of what happens after that 1 second, shouldn't the iron bar be considered conscious for that 1 second? If 1 second is not long enough a time to be considered conscious, how long do you need?

[simonh]

At the scale of hot annealing atoms one second is a stupendous amount of time. There's no way a single consistent mapping would hold in a reasonably sized volume for even microseconds.

This whole argument is exactly a rephrasing of the Boltzmann's Brain proposition. But even if we suppose an infinite universe for eternity, sure that means consciousnesses randomly manifest and then disperse. That's vaguely horrific but it doesn't explain or refute anything. So what?