Unless you ascribe to some meta-physical soul - you believe human consciousness is encoded in matter - in the interactions between atoms. Actually at a much higher level of abstraction- neurons - but it’s all simulatable in principle. Thus, yes, it could literally be a bunch of x86 instructions.
1. that artificial neurons are very restrictive model for actual neurons, let alone brain/organism, as there is more going on in neurons than a thresholded 0-1 activation
2. a brain does not function in isolation, but as regulator of the bodily functions (along with even more things). If you look at the brain in isolation to the body you don't really understand fully what it is doing unless you narrow your view a lot. Eg the brain modulates production of hormones, which in turn affects stuff like heart rate which then comes back to the brain as signal, in a feedback loop. Not to mention actual behaviour and interaction with the world. Toy models of organisms are not organisms.
3. "interaction between atoms" (or rather matter in general, as we have to take into account electrons, photons, gravity and a lot of other things that matter) is too general, too big, artificial neurons are a very useful (for applications) abstraction inspired by biological processes, but not modelling said underlying biology fully. Nobody can imo right now know if "computation" is a good model for "atom interactions" as in whether we can adequately enough model "atom interactions" in a computationally tractable way, and surely we do not do that right now except in very narrow scopes, and we have good reasons to believe that the current computational paradigms/turing machines are inadequate in doing that efficiently enough.
I'm going to ask a couple dumb but genuine questions:
Does it matter that neurons are more complex than 0-1? Does the fact that transformer layers don't use purely thresholded 0-1 activation invalidate what you're saying?
How do you know that artificial neurons are less capable of producing consciousness than biological ones? How can other people independently verify this?
How does the embodied nature of human consciousness preclude consciousness emerging from a computational system? What is the definition of consciousness if it is precluded from occurring in a computational system but present in biological systems?
Why do you think exactly modeling interaction between atoms matters for consciousness? And where is the fidelity threshold? Is it the planck length?
Finally, a dumb question: how do we know humans are actually conscious, and where is the threshold between consciousness and unconsciousness? And do these criteria exclude all other forms, or other animals?
Not the person you were asking but IMHO it all reduces to computational complexity, e.g. biological evolution provided the computational efficiencies that ultimately produced conscious minds and beings, whereas it is not obvious what scale of silicon, power or energy, and input data is sufficient for that to happen artificially. But that means my view is it is a matter of it being possible in principle, merely unknown in practice. Also my view is that denying this amounts to violating the Church Turing thesis of computational equivalence ("human brains are not magic, super-Turing, etc."), and I think a lot of talking-past one another in these public disagreements amounts to one side not actually having taken modern CS theory fundamentals enough to be persuaded of these couple of premises.
That's my take on it too, roughly. I think if we get to trillion-parameter models and they don't exhibit what we'd call AGI, however you define it, then the current transformer based systems never will.
But calling them "unconscious" is a pretty high bar. Mice are conscious. The house sparrow pecking in my yard right now is conscious.
>How do you know that artificial neurons are less capable of producing consciousness than biological ones? How can other people independently verify this?
How do you know that toasters or rocks aren't conscious?
The only thing you can do is ask rhetorical questions to make your position seem obvious. Which should tell you how little you understand the thing in question.
My point is it is very difficult to disprove that something has consciousness. What would be sufficient evidence that a rock is not conscious? The onus is on those making extraordinary claims (that a computer program is conscious) to provide evidence for it.
The problem with this is that the word 'hot' only has meaning to a conscious being. And while we don't know what conciousness is, it's extremely hard to argue it's not an emergent property of physics. So if your supernova simulation is complex enough to also model emergent properties like conciousness, the simulated conciousness may well regard the supernova as 'hot'.
Ya and this leads to the point that if the simulation is so complex, which I take to mean is so like the real thing, then the near-perfect simulation and the actual thing must be highly similar physically.
And digital circuits are not physically similar to biological brains yet. So we shouldn’t conclude they have the similar consciousness property.
That would imply that the biological physical substrate is necessary for conciousness, which I don't think you can say with any degree of certainty. It's not an assumption I would personally make. And while I'm speculating, my own view is that whatever the eventual subjective experience of what it's like to be an AI is, it will be nothing like the experience of what it's like to be a human, regardless of the fact we're training them to interact in human-like ways.
Funny you mention simulations. The simulation theory that we all live in simulations doesn’t have any practical consequences for me or any one.
If our world behaves exactly the same, what difference does it make?
The perspective. From within the simulation there is no point in making the distinction, but from the outside it does. For another example - running a program on a virtual machine or a physical computer is the same to the program, but very different to debug when you see hardware errors.