[somenameforme]

Consciousness is an issue. If you write a program to add 2+2, you probably do not believe some entity poofs into existence, perceives itself as independently adding 2+2, and then poofs out of existence. Yet somehow, the idea of an emergent consciousness is that if you instead get it to do 100 basic operations, or perhaps 2^100 then suddenly this becomes true? The reason one might believe this is not because it's logical or reasonable - or even supported in any way, but because people assume their own conclusion. In particular if one takes a physicalist view of the universe then consciousness must be a physical process and so it simply must emerge at some sufficient degree of complexity.

But if you don't simply assume physicalism then this logic falls flat. And the more we discover about the universe, the weirder things become. How insane would you sound not that long ago to suggest that time itself would move at different rates for different people at the same "time", just to maintain a perceived constancy of the speed of light? It's nonsense, but it's real. So I'm quite reluctant to assume my own conclusion on anything with regards to the nature of the universe. Even relatively 'simple' things like quantum entanglement are already posing very difficult issues for a physicalist view of the universe.

[pixl97]

>Yet somehow, the idea of an emergent consciousness is that if you instead get it to do 100 basic operations, or perhaps 2^100 then suddenly this becomes true

Why not? You can do a simple add with assembly language in a few operations. But if you put millions and millions of operations together you can get a video game with emergent behaviors. If you're just looking at the additions, where does the game come from? Is it still a game if it's not output to a monitor but an internal screen buffer?

[somenameforme]

You're not speaking of a behavior but of a "thing." Your consciousness sits idly inside your body, feeling as thought it's the driving all actions of its free will. There's no necessity, reason, or logical explanation for this thing to exist, let alone why or where it comes from.

No matter how many instructions you might use to create the most compelling simulation of a dragon in a video game, neither that dragon or any part of it is going to poof into existence. I'm sure this is something everybody would agree with. Yet with consciousness you want to claim 'well except its consciousness, yeah that'll poof into existence.' The assumption of physicalism ends up requiring people to make statements that they themselves would certainly call absurd if not for the fact that they are forced to make such statements because of said assumption!

And what is the justification for said assumption? There is none! As mentioned already quantum entanglement is posing major issues for physicalism, and I suspect we're really only just beginning to delve into the bizarro nature of our universe. So people embrace physicalism purely on faith.

[pixl97]

>There's no necessity, reason, or logical explanation for this thing

I mean, I disagree. It's a internal virtual 'playground' you can bounce ideas off of and reason against. Obviously it imparts some survival benefits to creatures that have one at this point in evolution.

[somenameforme]

This gets to the issue. What is bouncing ideas off of yourself and reasoning against such? Well it's nothing particularly complex. A conditional is its most fundamental incarnation - add some variables and weights and you have just what you described in a few lines of code. Of course you don't think this poofs a consciousness into existence.

For consciousness to be emergent at some point there has to be wild hand-waving of 'well you see, it just needs to be more complex.' But any program is fundamentally nothing more than a simple set of instructions, so it all comes down to this issue. And if I hit a breakpoint and pause, and then start stepping through the assembly - ADD, MUL, CMP. Is the consciousness still imagining itself doing those things? Or does it just somehow disappear when I start stepping through instructions?

For even the most complex visual or behavior, you can stair step, quite rapidly, down to a very simple set of instructions. And no where in these steps is there any logical room for a consciousness to just suddenly appear.

[kevin42]

My issue is that from a scientific point of view, physicalism is all we have. Everything else is belief, or some form of faith.

Your example about relativity is good. It might have sounded insane at some point, but it turns out, it is physics, which nicely falls into the physicalism concept.

If there is a falsifiable scientific theory that there is something other than a physical mechanism behind consciousness and intelligence, I haven't seen it.

[somenameforme]

I don't think science and consciousness go together quite well at this point. I'll claim consciousness doesn't exist. Try to prove me wrong. Of course I know I'm wrong because I am conscious, but that's literally impossible to prove, and it may very well be that way forever. You have no way of knowing I'm conscious - you could very well be the only conscious entity in existence. This is not the case because I can strongly assure you I'm conscious as well, but a philosophical zombie would say the same thing, so that assurance means nothing.

[kevin42]

There are more than one theories, as well as some evidence that consciousness may not exist in the way we'd like to think.

It may be a trick our mind plays on us. The Global Workspace Theory addresses this, and some of the predictions this theory made have been supported by multiple experiments. If GWT is correct, it's very plausible, likely even, that an artificial intelligence could have the same type of consciousness.

[somenameforme]

That again requires assuming your own conclusion. Once again I have no way of knowing you are conscious. In order for any of this to not be nonsense I have to make a large number of assumptions including that you are conscious, that it is a physical process, that is an emergent process, and so on.

I am unwilling to accept any of the required assumptions because they are essentially based on faith.

[ben_w]

Boltzmann brains and A. J. Ayer's "There is a thought now".

Ages ago, it occurred to me that the only thing that seemed to exist without needing a creator, was maths. That 2+2 was always 4, and it still would be even if there were not 4 things to count.

Basically, I independently arrived at similar conclusion as Max Tegmark, only simpler and without his level of rigour: https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2018/08/26-08.28.24.html

(From the quotation's date stamp, 2007, I had only finished university 6 months earlier, so don't expect anything good).

But as you'll see from my final paragraph, I no longer take this idea seriously, because anything that leads to most minds being free to believe untruths, is cognitively unstable by the same argument that applies to Boltzmann brains.

MUH leads to Aleph-1 infinite number of brains*. I'd need a reason for the probability distribution over minds to be zero almost everywhere in order for it to avoid the cognitively instability argument.

* if there is a bigger infinity, then more; but I have only basic knowledge of transfinites and am unclear if the "bigger" ones I've heard about are considered "real" or more along the lines of "if there was an infinite sequence of infinities, then…"

[eru]

Human minds are fairly free to believe untruths. At least to a certain extent: it's rather hard to _really_ believe things that contradict your lived experience.

You can _say_ that you believe them, but you won't behave as if you believe them.

[ben_w]

Yeah, that's fair, I phrased that part wrong.

The problem with Boltzmann brains is that, by construction, they're going to have incorrect beliefs about almost everything.

Like, imagine watching a TV tuned to a dead station and somehow the random background noise looked and sounded like someone telling you the history of the world, and it really was just random noise doing this — that level of being wrong about almost everything.

Not even just errors like believing 1+1=3, but that this is equally likely as believing incoherent statements like 1+^Ω[fox emoji].

[eru]

Yes, that makes sense.