[Cogito]

Out of interest, what do you think it would look like if communicating was algorithmic?

I know that it doesn't feel like I am doing anything particularly algorithmic when I communicate but I am not the hommunculus inside me shuffling papers around so how would I know?

[jacquesm]

I think it would end inspiration.

[adastra22]

Inspiration is what a search algorithm feels like from the inside.

[jacquesm]

Can you elaborate?

[adastra22]

This goes far to explain a lot of Chinese room situations. We have an intuition for the way something is. That intuition is an unshakeable belief, because it is something that we feel directly. We know what it feels like to understand Chinese (or French, or English, or whatever), and that little homunculus shuffling papers around doesn't feel like it.

Hopefully we have all experienced what genuine inspiration feels like, and we all know that experience. It sure as hell doesn't feel like a massively parallel search algorithm. If anything it probably feels like a bolt of lightning, out of the blue. But here's the thing. If the conscious loop inside your brain is something like the prefrontal cortex, which integrates and controls deeper processing systems outside of conscious reach, then that is exactly what we should expect a search algorithm to feel like. You -- that strange conscious loop I am talking to -- are doing the mapping (framing the problem) and the reducing (recognizing the solution), but not the actual function application and lower level analysis that generated candidate solutions. It feels like something out of the blue, hardly sought for, which fits all the search requirements. Genuine inspiration.

But that's just what it feels like from the inside, to be that recognizing agent that is merely responding to data being fed up to it from the mess of neural connections we call the brain.

You can take this insight a step further, and recognize that many of the things that seem intuitively "obvious" are actually artifacts of how our thinking brains are constructed. The Chinese room and the above comment about inspiration are only examples.

I cannot emphasize enough how much I dislike linking to LessWrong, and to Yudkowsky in particular, but I first picked up on this from an article there, and credit should be given where credit is due: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yA4gF5KrboK2m2Xu7/how-an-alg...

[jacquesm]

Fascinating, thank you very much, and agreed on Yudkowsky. It's a bit like crediting Wolfram.

[adastra22]

Sure thing.

By the way, the far more impactful application of this principle is as a solution (imho) to the problem of free will.

Most people intuitively hold that free will is incompatible with determinism, because making a choice feels unconstrained. Taken in the extreme, this leads to Penrose and others looking for quantum randomness to save their models of the mind from the Newtonian clockwork universe.

But we should have some unease with this, because choices being a random roll of the dice doesn’t sit right either. When we make decisions, we do so for reasons. We justify the choices we make. This is because so-called “free will” is just what a deterministic decision making process feels like from the inside.

Philosophically this is called the “compatibilist” position, but I object to that term. It’s not that free will is merely compatible with determinism—it requires it! In a totally random universe you wouldn’t be able to experience the qualia of making a free choice.

To experience a “free choice” you need to be able to be presented with alternatives, weight the pro and con factors of each, and then make a decision based on that info. From the outside this is a fully deterministic process. From the inside though, some of the decision making criteria are outside of conscious review, so it doesn’t feel like a deterministic decision. Weighing all the options and then going with your gut in picking a winner feels like unconstrained choice. But why did your gut make you choose the way you did? Cause your “gut” here is an unconscious but nevertheless deterministic neural net evaluation of the options against your core principles and preferences.

“Free will” is just what a deterministic application of decision theory feels like from the inside.