“To replicate consciousness you just need to replicate the right causal structure.” “What if consciousness is a topological pocket in the electromagnetic field?” “Then we replicate that causal structure.” “So, er, how do you replicate the causal structure of a pocket of the EM field?” “You coarse grain it, identify the computationally relevant variables, and reproduce their interactions.” “Computationally relevant. Okay. How do you know the things you discarded weren't what made it a single experience?” “Because we preserve the causal organization.” “Which causal organization? A continuous field doesn't come with a preferred division into computational components. There isn't even a closest point to any given point. You can describe its dynamics with differential equations, sure, but getting from that to a finite collection of interacting variables involves choices. What tells you those choices preserve the pocket?” “We can make the simulation as accurate as necessary.” “Necessary for what? Predicting what the pocket does to the rest of the brain? Or reproducing what makes it a pocket in the first place?” “Why would those be different? Parsimony.” “Well, suppose the field is doing something that becomes extremely expensive to simulate on your chosen hardware. Maybe some quantum contribution matters, and the cost of evaluating the relevant amplitudes varies enormously depending on what's happening. Whenever you hit the tricky parts you have to slow down the rest of the simulation while you work them out.” “Fine. We slow everything down. The relative timing is preserved.” “Yes, you can do that. But now there's a reason for using that substrate. The physical system realizes dynamics directly that your simulator needs an enormous amount of extra computation to reproduce. Calling both ‘the same computation’ doesn't explain why one is so much more efficient.” “Efficiency doesn't establish consciousness.” “Of course it doesn't. But suppose the physical organization responsible for that advantage also has properties we're trying to explain about experience: holistic causal power (the relevant operation belongs to the whole interacting system), boundedness (there's a physical reason this belongs to one whole rather than several). Now you have a reason to investigate whether the computational advantage and the experience depend on the same physical properties.” “You'd have to establish that.” “Yes! And you'd have to establish that your replacement preserves them. You can't settle that by identifying the input-output function and declaring everything else irrelevant.” “We'd simulate the internal dynamics too.” “Okay, then we're back to slowing everything down whenever the substrate does something your hardware struggles with.” “Or we'd use lookup tables.” “For the outputs of the tricky part?” “Sure. Same inputs, same outputs.” “But then you're no longer replicating its internal causal structure. You've replaced the whole interacting process with a stored answer.” “The rest of the simulation can't tell the difference.” “Okay. Let's keep going. Replace another part with a lookup table. And another. Wherever two parts interact, make a larger table that gives the same answers for the combined system.” “That could become impractically large.” “Sure. Assume we have the storage. Eventually we replace the entire human with one lookup table.” “You can't just replay a recording. It has to respond to different inputs.” “Of course. Include every possible input history at the resolution your simulation uses, with the corresponding next response. Actual inputs, hypothetical inputs, unexpected questions, everything. We keep track of the input history and retrieve the appropriate answer.” “Then it would behave like the human.” “Would it be conscious?” “If it preserves everything relevant, yes.”
1 more tweet in this thread
“Relevant to consciousness or relevant to behavior? Because we've explicitly removed the internal interactions. No simulated visual cortex, no simulated field pocket, no internal process in which different aspects of an experience become bound together. Just an address and the answer stored there.” “But those processes are implicit in the table.” “Their consequences are. We calculated what they'd produce and stored the results. They aren't happening when we retrieve an answer.” “The table still implements the same input-output function.” “Yes. Is that enough for consciousness?” “In this case, yes.” “So when we retrieve ‘I'm seeing a beautiful sunset,’ there's a visual experience? And when we retrieve ‘I'm in unbearable pain,’ there's someone suffering?” “You can't dismiss its experiences just because its implementation is unfamiliar.” “I'm asking whether retrieving a different entry in the table creates a different experience, including an experience of agony, even though none of the internal dynamics you originally said we'd have to preserve are occurring.” “But it would ask you to stop.”
10 top replies
(1) There are a lot of things that are speculative about your position, eg the original “topological pocket” premise. (2) Personally, I think “being conscious” is more of an interpretation than it is a property. I.e. the question “Is X conscious?” isn’t an objective question.
"A continuous field doesn't come with a preferred division into computational components. There isn't even a closest point to any given point." and you only need a classical field for this...
Wait, this is the first time that I had seen somebody points out that topological structure had been weirdly discarded by self-claimed "naturalists" for unclear reasons.
The only tenable conclusion is that any local U(1) phase invariance of charged matter fields is conscious.
Yes, yes and yes. It's in fact, in our universe, apparently also impossible to causally preserve things in a pure computational manner. And that's totally not about consciousness. Using "causal" to mean "Descriptively accurate, predictive simulation", is just not right. If I need the function of a gravity well, I need gravity. No amount of FLOPS will give me that, not intrinsically, apart from, the actual not-consider byproduct of having to run those FLOPS on machines that have mass and accumulating enough of that... which is just a silly artefact of this example... and countless examples exist. As apparently we cannot conjure out of thin air causal structures from physics or chemistry, with digital computaton.
The look up table isn't conscious it is just an index into a causally connected but temporally distant intelligence that produced the look up table.
Exactly right, Andrés. The final nail in the coffin is when we understand that consciousness theories that rely on processes are in fact inconsistent with axioms required for science and physics. osf.io/preprints/psya…
Theres an easier response. No amount of numerical simulation can recreate a physical phenomenon.
Biology has exploited an incredible amount of obscure physical effects over a few billion years. These are all layered up and interwoven in vastly complex systems that don't work like an engineered system. We barely understand all the obscure physical effects biology has exploited. So the idea we can simulate it digitally or even that we are close to understanding the consciousness that arises from it is pure hubris. We are not machines. In fact, we don't really even know what we are. We have a general idea, but even our advanced biology and physics have only begun to explore the massive depth of what we actually are and how it all works. Science has a long history of people being overly confident that we have basically gotten things all figured out, immediately followed by a massive realization of how truly ignorant and naive we were.
👍😁 A field creates non-local interactions. An EM field can entangle two electrons through the field that are not adjacent. While they are entangled it is one system. The objection to entanglement being related to consciousness is that the time scales of how long the entanglement last is so incredibly brief compared to EM waves in the brain to maintain a chain of causality. But this objection has at least two problems: timing and causal direction. EM waves are relatively slow. 10^15x difference. Imagine that the unity of experience related to the unity of entanglement. And the content of the experience related to the EM field. The content only needs to be registered to the unitary state for awareness to happen. Timing here is not an issue. The other direction may be overcome by just the right timing. A “push” from multiple sources can have an effect if there is enough and the timing is just right. Thoughts? 👍Thanks. 😁
