Computers can scale, you can make a computer much larger than a human brain.
Computers really just do binary math. For those who don’t know, it’s basically determining whether or not 1 or 0 should change, or stay the same, based on an algorithm. We don’t know (or at least, I haven’t read that we know) how brains actually store and process information.
Computers are very fast at doing “simple” calculations with definite answers. A pocket calculator can do math faster than you can with 100% accuracy. On the flip side, analyzing and reacting to incomplete information is the forte of the human brain. We still haven’t made a computer than can fit in a car and drive better than some of the dumbest people on the planet manage to do, while fucking around on their phones at the same time.
There may not be proof that LLMs aren’t sentient, but there is some evidence and reason to believe that consciousness is an emergent property of quantum effects, whereas turing machines are relegated to classical mechanics. The same evidence would indicate it is unlikely that a turing machine could replicate the human brain since it uses fundamentally different layers of reality to calculate/think.
Is there evidence or more like philosophical musings that consciousness is an ill-defined weird magical thing and quantum physics is similarly a weird magical thing and thus it’s a kind of fitting assertion that they are related?
At least to the extent I’ve seen the point presented, it seems to feel more like musings than scientific effort.
There is some limited empirical evidence to support the hypothesis, yes.
For example:
Through state-of-the-art spectroscopic techniques, specifically two-dimensional electronic spectroscopy (2DES), we’ve detected quantum coherent processes in the microtubules within neural structures. This provides empirical support to our hypothesis about the role of quantum mechanisms in cognition. Furthermore, we provide substantial empirical evidence for quantum mechanisms underlying cognitive processes, including decision-making and memory recall, and present a quantum model of consciousness.
There is no evidence as of now. There are scientific hypothesis regarding this exact thing that sound plausible as a standalone thing but there hasn’t been any observational evidence regarding it.
They are pretty much equivalent to our hypothesis regarding dark matter. We knowthere must be something we can’t see and them work backwards from there to fill the gaps.
Quantum effects are literally one of the things that computers are designed specifically to avoid. We’re bumping up against the point where we can make conventional computer chips more dense the same ways we have previously since quantum tunneling causes some noticeable errors in computing when things get too much closer together.
it baffles me how many people in here apparently don’t have the reading comprehension to understand your second sentence. I swear Lemmy is even dumber than reddit.
There’s fundamentally not much difference between our brain and a fly’s, at the cellular level. We have fully simulated a fly’s brain already. When given a virtual body, it promptly started acting like a fly.
I don’t think LLMs are conscious or sentient. However, consciousness is likely just an internal illusion. There’s no obvious reason we can’t scale up from a fly to a human brain, other than difficulty. At that point you have a fully virtual brain that believes itself to be conscious, and can demonstrate sentience.
There’s fundamentally not much difference between our brain and a fly’s, at the cellular level.
There’s fundamentally not much difference between the silicon in an n64 and the silicone in a quantum computer… That doesn’t mean you can make a quantum computer out of an old n64.
However, consciousness is likely just an internal illusion.
Internal… as it can only be confirmed by the individual self? Consciousness is an ontological term to define the human condition. There is purposely no exact definition, as an exact definition of consciousness would only be utilized to strip rights away from those who do not fall under the exacting definition. There are however generally agreed upon criteria and criteria that have been hotly debated for hundreds of years.
There’s no obvious reason we can’t scale up from a fly to a human brain, other than difficulty.
To make this claim requires someone to have a limited understanding of what consciousness is, and how it develops. It completely ignores the mind body problem, and treats the human brain as something that can operate outside the body as if it were some sort of computer.
Consciousness in humans develops and sustains itself as we physically interact with the world around us. This is true in both development in childhood and as we continue to age. As we physically interact with phenomena around us we mentally develop, as our senses start to fail us in age we mentally decline. Even if I were to just cut off your arm, there would be a plethora of changes to the physiology of your brain that would alter the way it functions and the way it is shaped.
A person born stripped of all physical phenomena would never develop a conscious to begin with, and a if it were stripped away after consciousness had developed they would lose it. Hell, even sticking someone in an area with restricted physical phenomena for a short period of time can drive them insane.
Consciousness is not purely a metaphysical phenomenon. And from what we currently understand of it can not be recreated purely in a virtual format.
You’re mixing up two different things. One is normal brain development, and the other is consciousness itself. It’s true that a human being needs certain external stimuli for the brain to develop in a healthy way and for mental experience to be normal and stable. But that does not mean that, without those stimuli, consciousness does not exist.
A person can still be conscious and yet suffer severe cognitive, emotional, or behavioral changes because of sensory deprivation or an extremely limited environment. What changes is the quality of development, mental functioning, and maybe the kind of consciousness they have, not necessarily the existence of consciousness itself.
Also, there is no clear way to measure how much, how little, or whether someone has “no” consciousness at all. Because of that, claiming that a lack of stimuli means a lack of consciousness goes beyond what can actually be established.
So your argument seems to confuse “without stimuli, there is no normal development” with “without stimuli, there is no consciousness.” Those are not the same thing.
One is normal brain development, and the other is consciousness itself. It’s true that a human being needs certain external stimuli for the brain to develop in a healthy way and for mental experience to be normal and stable. But that does not mean that, without those stimuli, consciousness does not exist.
Human beings require external stimuli for any higher brain development to happen, not just healthy brain development.
But that does not mean that, without those stimuli, consciousness does not exist.
Yes… It does. Any example you would like to share of a conscious individual who lacks access to any and all external stimuli?
A person can still be conscious and yet suffer severe cognitive, emotional, or behavioral changes because of sensory deprivation or an extremely limited environment.
Yes, but they did not develop in that extreme deprivation. And even if they did develop in a way that was restricted, they did not lack external stimuli completely.
Your body literally need to be experience external stimuli to develop the capacity for consciousness.
Yes, I have to admit that I don’t have any example of consciousness in an individual completely without external stimuli. In fact, I agree with you on the last point you made. My point is that we need to be more precise about what we mean by “external stimuli” exactly.
We could even say that it may be impossible to isolate the mind completely from all stimulation in the first place. That leads to the real issue: perhaps those external stimuli are always present in some form, even if they are extremely minimal, indirect, or invisible to us at first glance.
So I correct myself, the argument is not necessarily that consciousness can exist with literally no input whatsoever, but rather that what we call “external stimuli” may include things so subtle that they are easy to overlook. In that sense, the claim becomes less about the absence of stimulation and more about how little stimulation is actually enough to sustain consciousness or mental activity.
I’ll believe it when it happens. There’s a huge different between simulating 139,000 neurons and 50 billion neurons.
Besides, the authors looked at taste and touch sensory. That’s not exactly predicting the entire behavior of a fly, and the authors (of which there were many), admitted they don’t know if it can actually predict neural activity. Source
I’m not expecting anything any time soon either. Though I can see someone like musk pumping far too much money into it at some point.
My point was however that the difference is just one of scale. We don’t need to predict the firings, just run it and compare it to nature. From what I’ve read, it behaves like a fly, including walking and grooming itself. This means there is no magic mystical difference between a real fly’s brain and a virtualized one.
Projecting further, there is no difference, other than scale, between our brain and the fly. Implying there is nothing mystical about consciousness.
If a human brain can be conscious, then a virtualized human brain can be conscious. If a virtualized brain can be conscious, then so can the computer it runs on.
The question then becomes do we WANT consciousness in an AI, what would it look like, and how can we detect/measure it?
Except if this is the case, free will does not exist. If the world is purely deterministic, you’ve never made a choice. No one has. We are in the middle of a mathematical computation that has been predicted from the start of the universe.
That is pretty much my view on things. I don’t like it, but it’s what the evidence suggests. However, my internal thoughts still assume I have free will. It’s a useful lie.
Discworld’s Death put it quite well, in Hogfather.
All right," said Susan. “I’m not stupid. You’re saying humans need… fantasies to make life bearable.”
REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.
“Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—”
YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
“So we can believe the big ones?”
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
“They’re not the same at all!”
YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME…SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.
“Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what’s the point—”
The difference of scale is in the grey area of the difference of scale of quantum and classical mechanics, though. Conciousness very much could be something that depends on the emergent properties of quantum mechanics and doesn’t reach classical mechanics.
This means there is no magic mystical difference between a real fly’s brain and a virtualized one.
That’s not true. You might simulate fly intelligence, but you aren’t simulating a fly. Flys are an entity driven by their phenomenological experience of the world (as all us nervous systems are). It would be a rather strange thing to say that a fly is only the pattern of behavior you recognize as a fly’s behavior.
Note that flies also have this capacity to self-evolve over generations. There is no single fly that you can point to and say, “that’s the right one. Copy
It.” So, your “fly simulations” are always at best a behavioral approximation. Given enough time, say a decade or century, this ought be obvious by the fact that your simulation no longer accurately resembles the most modern flies.
Projecting further, there is no difference, other than scale, between our brain and the fly.
That’s just not true. Consider “What The Frog Eye Tells The Frog Brain.” Put briefly, the eye encodes and transmits semantic information — as opposed to the more common belief that it transmits raw visual information. That said, there a trillions of differences between how that might work in a human versus in a frog, let alone a fly.
I think you’ve discovered “neurons work similarly across species,” which is like saying “thing does same thing when used in other location.” This doesn’t tell you how neurons work to drive that behavior, it doesn’t tell you what it’s like to experience your neurons firing that way, it doesn’t tell you why the neurons were developed that way topologically over time… At best, it helps you develop a timebound understanding of fly automata to neural architecture. That’s without any understanding of phenomenology to neural architecture, and likely without being able to decompose the neural system into any semblance of semantic information processing.
A human is much more complex than a fly. I can’t believe for a second that this approach would work scale to a human’s brain. If you captured and simulated every neuron in the human brain, you’d be left with a feedforward process simulating a particular neural state of a particular person. No feeling, no reflection, no introspection, no semantic meaning. Just a neat toy.
“If you captured and simulated every neuron in the human brain, you’d be left with a feedforward process simulating a particular neural state of a particular person. No feeling, no reflection, no introspection, no semantic meaning. Just a neat toy.”
Seems to me you think there’s something special about humans, I don’t believe there’s any proof to that.
Yes its orders of magnitude more complex then a fly brain, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to simulate.
There’s no proof to a soul, our whole existence is our meat which evolved naturally over extreme timescales via random forces and natural selection, I see no reason to believe we could not do the same with our intelligence in a much shorter period of time comparatively.
An illusion is a phenomenological experience, for which you must be conscious. Consciousness can not be an illusion. You must be conscious to experience an illusion at all.
It’s a case of running out of terms. I was using it here as apparent, but not a “real” thing.
It’s a bit like a lot of visual illusions, we can often all see them consistently, but they don’t exist in the image itself.
In this case, consciousness is likely related to keeping our own mind functioning coherently. Providing a common virtual ground for the various parts of our brain to interact. There is no seat of consciousness, it’s akin to the operating system on a computer. Not required, but makes a lot of tasks massively easier.
If that’s the case, by calling in an illusion, aren’t you just stating that it’s a misunderstood process?
Consciousness absolutely is something. That might be a procedural “thing,” and I think you’re saying that the notion of an ontological consciousness is a misconception. An Enlightenment Era misconception, if I’m allowed to add that in there…
To call it an illusion comes across as though you’re asserting what it is. I think you’re really just pointing out that it isnt what a lot of people consider it to be (often implicitly).
I read it as consciousness being more of a “side effect”, rather than the thing a controls actions and “making choices”. So consciousness would then be more of a passive effect than driving change.
In that sense the illusion would be that consciousness has any agency, when it is instead a passive experience, a perception of control.
A simulation that isn’t aware that it is a simulation is not self-aware, which is a qualitative difference from what is being simulated. Consciousness isn’t like some rom you can emulate.
You say that with some confidence. What makes being aware of being a simulation a binary criteria for self awareness? You may just as well be in a simulation and probably see yourself as fairly self aware.
Sure, and how do you know your thoughts are your own? Like if you have to defend your position by questioning the nature of reality then you got bigger problems.
You made some absolute statements about consciousness that I don’t think you can back up. But I can’t fault you on not having proof, but at least be open to some thought experiments to challenge the concept.
Being self aware of myself and my surroundings but not aware of the entire world does not make me not self aware.
Same as an entity in a simulation could potentially be self aware but not aware of being in a simulation.
But you disregard the possibility that consciousness could be emulated. But get a sense that it comes from a “gut feeling” or some sort of “common sense” perspective. What nature of reality are you referring to, that I am ignoring?
There’s nothing to indicate the human brain can’t be implemented in a Turing machine too.
That is not true, this is a research branch from computer science and math, it is called Computability theory, it deals with the limits of expressiveness for different types of theoretical machines and expressions, and the most expressive of all is the Turing machine, and a Turing machine cannot do some stuff, the classic example is the Halting problem, a computer cannot definitely say if an algorithm ever stops (mathematica proven that it cannot do it), but a human can do so quite easily.
One may think that maybe a Turing Machine cannot do something but can simulate another machine that does, but that is also proven to be impossible, it cannot simulate something more expressive than itself.
I know computability theory, and I am very familiar with the halting problem. A human cannot solve it either. We made literal mathematical proof of it, and that proof is the halting problem.
The entire point of the halting problem is that if you assume that there is a black box that can answer whether a program halts, you then prove it can’t be the case by a proof of contradiction. You can replace the black box with a human brain and it works just as well, that’s the entire point of a black box.
What a moronic take, we cannot prove consciousness (except our own of course) so it’d be you who must prove it can be implemented in a turing machine. Not me.
Statement: “There is no indication that the human brain cannot be modeled as a turing machine”
To disprove this, evidence to the contrary is required. It’s not at all the same as saying “The human brain can be modeled as a turing machine”. In that case they would need to prove that.
We simply do not know. Humans cling to their idea of somehow being “special” very hard with thought experiments like chinese room, and at all points neglect that there is no evidence that a human brain is actually different.
Generally I’d argue that the continuous nature of animal brains makes them quite fundamentally different from the very much discrete states of anything we program, but that still doesn’t mean it’d be impossible to simulate.
Many abilities and properties we thought to be exclusive to human consciousness were later proven in animals. Such as the capacity for empathy, thinking ahead, and recognizing yourself in a mirror.
Does that mean animals are partially conscious? Or can we accept that the definition is fuzzy at best, making this a moving target?
LLMs are not sentient, but this gimmick doesn’t prove that.
There’s nothing to indicate the human brain can’t be implemented in a Turing machine too.
Aren’t brains like orders of magnitude faster and more “powerful” than even the strongest supercomputers?
It’s complicated.
Computers can scale, you can make a computer much larger than a human brain.
Computers really just do binary math. For those who don’t know, it’s basically determining whether or not 1 or 0 should change, or stay the same, based on an algorithm. We don’t know (or at least, I haven’t read that we know) how brains actually store and process information.
Computers are very fast at doing “simple” calculations with definite answers. A pocket calculator can do math faster than you can with 100% accuracy. On the flip side, analyzing and reacting to incomplete information is the forte of the human brain. We still haven’t made a computer than can fit in a car and drive better than some of the dumbest people on the planet manage to do, while fucking around on their phones at the same time.
There may not be proof that LLMs aren’t sentient, but there is some evidence and reason to believe that consciousness is an emergent property of quantum effects, whereas turing machines are relegated to classical mechanics. The same evidence would indicate it is unlikely that a turing machine could replicate the human brain since it uses fundamentally different layers of reality to calculate/think.
Is there evidence or more like philosophical musings that consciousness is an ill-defined weird magical thing and quantum physics is similarly a weird magical thing and thus it’s a kind of fitting assertion that they are related?
At least to the extent I’ve seen the point presented, it seems to feel more like musings than scientific effort.
There is some limited empirical evidence to support the hypothesis, yes.
For example:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/374724769_Quantum_Consciousness_Empirical_Evidence_for_Quantum_Mechanisms_in_Human_Cognition_and_Consciousness
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2025.1676585/full
There is no evidence as of now. There are scientific hypothesis regarding this exact thing that sound plausible as a standalone thing but there hasn’t been any observational evidence regarding it.
They are pretty much equivalent to our hypothesis regarding dark matter. We knowthere must be something we can’t see and them work backwards from there to fill the gaps.
I always forget that computers use those special non-quantum electrons. Thanks!
Quantum effects are literally one of the things that computers are designed specifically to avoid. We’re bumping up against the point where we can make conventional computer chips more dense the same ways we have previously since quantum tunneling causes some noticeable errors in computing when things get too much closer together.
What evidence
it baffles me how many people in here apparently don’t have the reading comprehension to understand your second sentence. I swear Lemmy is even dumber than reddit.
I don’t think that is the case.
There’s nothing that indicates the human brain has super-turing computation
Except that we’ve never done it, and we struggle to even define what consciousness is. But, other than that, sure.
There’s fundamentally not much difference between our brain and a fly’s, at the cellular level. We have fully simulated a fly’s brain already. When given a virtual body, it promptly started acting like a fly.
I don’t think LLMs are conscious or sentient. However, consciousness is likely just an internal illusion. There’s no obvious reason we can’t scale up from a fly to a human brain, other than difficulty. At that point you have a fully virtual brain that believes itself to be conscious, and can demonstrate sentience.
There’s fundamentally not much difference between the silicon in an n64 and the silicone in a quantum computer… That doesn’t mean you can make a quantum computer out of an old n64.
Internal… as it can only be confirmed by the individual self? Consciousness is an ontological term to define the human condition. There is purposely no exact definition, as an exact definition of consciousness would only be utilized to strip rights away from those who do not fall under the exacting definition. There are however generally agreed upon criteria and criteria that have been hotly debated for hundreds of years.
To make this claim requires someone to have a limited understanding of what consciousness is, and how it develops. It completely ignores the mind body problem, and treats the human brain as something that can operate outside the body as if it were some sort of computer.
Consciousness in humans develops and sustains itself as we physically interact with the world around us. This is true in both development in childhood and as we continue to age. As we physically interact with phenomena around us we mentally develop, as our senses start to fail us in age we mentally decline. Even if I were to just cut off your arm, there would be a plethora of changes to the physiology of your brain that would alter the way it functions and the way it is shaped.
A person born stripped of all physical phenomena would never develop a conscious to begin with, and a if it were stripped away after consciousness had developed they would lose it. Hell, even sticking someone in an area with restricted physical phenomena for a short period of time can drive them insane.
Consciousness is not purely a metaphysical phenomenon. And from what we currently understand of it can not be recreated purely in a virtual format.
You’re mixing up two different things. One is normal brain development, and the other is consciousness itself. It’s true that a human being needs certain external stimuli for the brain to develop in a healthy way and for mental experience to be normal and stable. But that does not mean that, without those stimuli, consciousness does not exist.
A person can still be conscious and yet suffer severe cognitive, emotional, or behavioral changes because of sensory deprivation or an extremely limited environment. What changes is the quality of development, mental functioning, and maybe the kind of consciousness they have, not necessarily the existence of consciousness itself.
Also, there is no clear way to measure how much, how little, or whether someone has “no” consciousness at all. Because of that, claiming that a lack of stimuli means a lack of consciousness goes beyond what can actually be established.
So your argument seems to confuse “without stimuli, there is no normal development” with “without stimuli, there is no consciousness.” Those are not the same thing.
Human beings require external stimuli for any higher brain development to happen, not just healthy brain development.
Yes… It does. Any example you would like to share of a conscious individual who lacks access to any and all external stimuli?
Yes, but they did not develop in that extreme deprivation. And even if they did develop in a way that was restricted, they did not lack external stimuli completely.
Your body literally need to be experience external stimuli to develop the capacity for consciousness.
Yes, I have to admit that I don’t have any example of consciousness in an individual completely without external stimuli. In fact, I agree with you on the last point you made. My point is that we need to be more precise about what we mean by “external stimuli” exactly.
We could even say that it may be impossible to isolate the mind completely from all stimulation in the first place. That leads to the real issue: perhaps those external stimuli are always present in some form, even if they are extremely minimal, indirect, or invisible to us at first glance.
So I correct myself, the argument is not necessarily that consciousness can exist with literally no input whatsoever, but rather that what we call “external stimuli” may include things so subtle that they are easy to overlook. In that sense, the claim becomes less about the absence of stimulation and more about how little stimulation is actually enough to sustain consciousness or mental activity.
I’ll believe it when it happens. There’s a huge different between simulating 139,000 neurons and 50 billion neurons.
Besides, the authors looked at taste and touch sensory. That’s not exactly predicting the entire behavior of a fly, and the authors (of which there were many), admitted they don’t know if it can actually predict neural activity. Source
I’m not expecting anything any time soon either. Though I can see someone like musk pumping far too much money into it at some point.
My point was however that the difference is just one of scale. We don’t need to predict the firings, just run it and compare it to nature. From what I’ve read, it behaves like a fly, including walking and grooming itself. This means there is no magic mystical difference between a real fly’s brain and a virtualized one.
Projecting further, there is no difference, other than scale, between our brain and the fly. Implying there is nothing mystical about consciousness.
If a human brain can be conscious, then a virtualized human brain can be conscious. If a virtualized brain can be conscious, then so can the computer it runs on.
The question then becomes do we WANT consciousness in an AI, what would it look like, and how can we detect/measure it?
Except if this is the case, free will does not exist. If the world is purely deterministic, you’ve never made a choice. No one has. We are in the middle of a mathematical computation that has been predicted from the start of the universe.
That is pretty much my view on things. I don’t like it, but it’s what the evidence suggests. However, my internal thoughts still assume I have free will. It’s a useful lie.
Discworld’s Death put it quite well, in Hogfather.
All right," said Susan. “I’m not stupid. You’re saying humans need… fantasies to make life bearable.”
REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.
“Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—”
YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
“So we can believe the big ones?”
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
“They’re not the same at all!”
YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME…SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.
“Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what’s the point—”
MY POINT EXACTLY.
The difference of scale is in the grey area of the difference of scale of quantum and classical mechanics, though. Conciousness very much could be something that depends on the emergent properties of quantum mechanics and doesn’t reach classical mechanics.
That’s not true. You might simulate fly intelligence, but you aren’t simulating a fly. Flys are an entity driven by their phenomenological experience of the world (as all us nervous systems are). It would be a rather strange thing to say that a fly is only the pattern of behavior you recognize as a fly’s behavior.
Note that flies also have this capacity to self-evolve over generations. There is no single fly that you can point to and say, “that’s the right one. Copy It.” So, your “fly simulations” are always at best a behavioral approximation. Given enough time, say a decade or century, this ought be obvious by the fact that your simulation no longer accurately resembles the most modern flies.
That’s just not true. Consider “What The Frog Eye Tells The Frog Brain.” Put briefly, the eye encodes and transmits semantic information — as opposed to the more common belief that it transmits raw visual information. That said, there a trillions of differences between how that might work in a human versus in a frog, let alone a fly.
I think you’ve discovered “neurons work similarly across species,” which is like saying “thing does same thing when used in other location.” This doesn’t tell you how neurons work to drive that behavior, it doesn’t tell you what it’s like to experience your neurons firing that way, it doesn’t tell you why the neurons were developed that way topologically over time… At best, it helps you develop a timebound understanding of fly automata to neural architecture. That’s without any understanding of phenomenology to neural architecture, and likely without being able to decompose the neural system into any semblance of semantic information processing.
A human is much more complex than a fly. I can’t believe for a second that this approach would work scale to a human’s brain. If you captured and simulated every neuron in the human brain, you’d be left with a feedforward process simulating a particular neural state of a particular person. No feeling, no reflection, no introspection, no semantic meaning. Just a neat toy.
“If you captured and simulated every neuron in the human brain, you’d be left with a feedforward process simulating a particular neural state of a particular person. No feeling, no reflection, no introspection, no semantic meaning. Just a neat toy.”
Seems to me you think there’s something special about humans, I don’t believe there’s any proof to that.
Yes its orders of magnitude more complex then a fly brain, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to simulate.
There’s no proof to a soul, our whole existence is our meat which evolved naturally over extreme timescales via random forces and natural selection, I see no reason to believe we could not do the same with our intelligence in a much shorter period of time comparatively.
An illusion is a phenomenological experience, for which you must be conscious. Consciousness can not be an illusion. You must be conscious to experience an illusion at all.
It’s a case of running out of terms. I was using it here as apparent, but not a “real” thing.
It’s a bit like a lot of visual illusions, we can often all see them consistently, but they don’t exist in the image itself.
In this case, consciousness is likely related to keeping our own mind functioning coherently. Providing a common virtual ground for the various parts of our brain to interact. There is no seat of consciousness, it’s akin to the operating system on a computer. Not required, but makes a lot of tasks massively easier.
If that’s the case, by calling in an illusion, aren’t you just stating that it’s a misunderstood process?
Consciousness absolutely is something. That might be a procedural “thing,” and I think you’re saying that the notion of an ontological consciousness is a misconception. An Enlightenment Era misconception, if I’m allowed to add that in there…
To call it an illusion comes across as though you’re asserting what it is. I think you’re really just pointing out that it isnt what a lot of people consider it to be (often implicitly).
Is that fair?
I read it as consciousness being more of a “side effect”, rather than the thing a controls actions and “making choices”. So consciousness would then be more of a passive effect than driving change.
In that sense the illusion would be that consciousness has any agency, when it is instead a passive experience, a perception of control.
Buddy, I barely think humans are sentient
Whenever people talk about human sentience, I always think back to the opening scene of Shaun of the Dead…
A simulation that isn’t aware that it is a simulation is not self-aware, which is a qualitative difference from what is being simulated. Consciousness isn’t like some rom you can emulate.
You say that with some confidence. What makes being aware of being a simulation a binary criteria for self awareness? You may just as well be in a simulation and probably see yourself as fairly self aware.
Sure, and how do you know your thoughts are your own? Like if you have to defend your position by questioning the nature of reality then you got bigger problems.
You made some absolute statements about consciousness that I don’t think you can back up. But I can’t fault you on not having proof, but at least be open to some thought experiments to challenge the concept.
Being self aware of myself and my surroundings but not aware of the entire world does not make me not self aware.
Same as an entity in a simulation could potentially be self aware but not aware of being in a simulation.
But you disregard the possibility that consciousness could be emulated. But get a sense that it comes from a “gut feeling” or some sort of “common sense” perspective. What nature of reality are you referring to, that I am ignoring?
It is. There is limitations to a Turing machine that a human brain does not have. I expand on that on this other comment here.
That is not true, this is a research branch from computer science and math, it is called Computability theory, it deals with the limits of expressiveness for different types of theoretical machines and expressions, and the most expressive of all is the Turing machine, and a Turing machine cannot do some stuff, the classic example is the Halting problem, a computer cannot definitely say if an algorithm ever stops (mathematica proven that it cannot do it), but a human can do so quite easily.
One may think that maybe a Turing Machine cannot do something but can simulate another machine that does, but that is also proven to be impossible, it cannot simulate something more expressive than itself.
I know computability theory, and I am very familiar with the halting problem. A human cannot solve it either. We made literal mathematical proof of it, and that proof is the halting problem.
The entire point of the halting problem is that if you assume that there is a black box that can answer whether a program halts, you then prove it can’t be the case by a proof of contradiction. You can replace the black box with a human brain and it works just as well, that’s the entire point of a black box.
You’re misunderstanding the halting problem.
You are refuting something that wasn’t said. of course Turing machines cannot compute everything.
Except … consciousness!
Which you can precisely define, right?
What a moronic take, we cannot prove consciousness (except our own of course) so it’d be you who must prove it can be implemented in a turing machine. Not me.
Statement: “There is no indication that the human brain cannot be modeled as a turing machine”
To disprove this, evidence to the contrary is required. It’s not at all the same as saying “The human brain can be modeled as a turing machine”. In that case they would need to prove that.
We simply do not know. Humans cling to their idea of somehow being “special” very hard with thought experiments like chinese room, and at all points neglect that there is no evidence that a human brain is actually different.
Generally I’d argue that the continuous nature of animal brains makes them quite fundamentally different from the very much discrete states of anything we program, but that still doesn’t mean it’d be impossible to simulate.
Except we have quala, consciousness. That’s a well recognised fact. How do you model something we cannot explain?
So yeah there are “indications” we cannot do it. Maybe we can and emerging properties is the way to go, but it might also not be that.
Do you believe we can?
Edit: the chinese room is a farce IMO, and won’t push anything either way.
Many abilities and properties we thought to be exclusive to human consciousness were later proven in animals. Such as the capacity for empathy, thinking ahead, and recognizing yourself in a mirror.
Does that mean animals are partially conscious? Or can we accept that the definition is fuzzy at best, making this a moving target?
That makes it probable I guess, but it absolutely does not prove it. We cannot prove humans are conscious (except ourselves).
I was clearly asking from the position of recognising consciousness in other humans. Or is that not your position?
Solipsism is pointless and boring. By that logic, nothing at all can be proven or disproven.