On 28 March 2015 at 00:06, Quentin Anciaux <[email protected]> wrote:
> 1- It is assumed you have a machinery/program that is conscious. (a real
> conscious AI)
> 2- You have (for example) a conversation with it.
> 3- While doing that conversation, you record all inputs fed to the machine.
> 4- You replay those inputs to the machine.
>
To make sure I have this right - you reboot it, or whatever - this is a
machine that starts from the same starting state as the one you talked to
originally. It doesn't remember the first conversation, and hence by
hypothesis goes through the same states as before.
> 5- Assuming in 3 the machine was conscious, replaying the same inputs, the
> machine should still be conscious.
> 6- You remove from the machine all the transistor not in use during that
> particular run (given the recorded input)
> 7- You replay those inputs to the ("crippled") machine.
> 8- Assuming in 3 and 5 the machine was conscious, replaying the same
> inputs, the machine should still be conscious as in 5 (because what you
> removed wasn't in use anyway).
>
OK
> 9- You break one transistor, but you make a device (in the MGA it's the
> projection of the record on the graph) that permits (even if the transistor
> is broke) to mimic the output at the exact moment it should have happen if
> the transistor wasn't broken (like the lucky cosmic ray replacing the
> firing of a neuron).
>
OK
> 10- Assuming in 3,5 and 8 the machine was conscious, replaying the same
> inputs, the machine should still be conscious as the broken transistor
> while not working did nonetheless gave the correct output thanks to the
> lucky ray/devide/movie projection.
> 11- You do 9 for all the transistor, so as to leave only the mimic...
>
Aha. Yes that makes sense. It's a slippery logical slope ...
> 12- Assuming in 3,5,8 and 10 the machine was conscious, then the machine
> is still conscious while no computation occur anymore.... contradicting
> computationalism.
>
Yes, so you are finally playing just a recording because for every
component you have to know exactly what its outputs were, so you have to
record everything, not just the inputs. At this point you have shown that
either consciousness can supervene on playing back a recording OR that
consciousness doesn't supervene on the original physical substrate that was
supposed to be performing the computation.
>
> From that, either computationalism is false or physical supervenience is
> false.
>
Hmmm....I'm not sure where I sit on that. I do feel like some sleight of
hand has been pulled - not intentionally, of course. Perhaps the broken
version might still be conscious, which means that ... eek. That's like
saying Klara's conscious despite being inert, isn't it?
I think it's the "thinking about what it all means afterwards" part that
ties my brain in knots. I want to just throw my hands up and say "well of
course physical supervenience doesn't work! How can a bunch of atoms do
that, anyway?" But then they do seem to ...
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