On 3/27/2015 4:53 AM, Bruce Kellett wrote:
LizR wrote:
On 28 March 2015 at 00:06, Quentin Anciaux <[email protected]
<mailto:[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 ...
Computers are just bunches of atoms......
I think it is the all or nothing aspect of computationalism that is a problem. I have no
difficulty in accepting that a simulation run on a computer can be conscious -- silicon
brain rather than wetware. But I have difficult in accepting that a computation can be
run in the required way without a physical substrate of some sort (computer or
whatever). A computation is just calculating a function over the reals. Consciousness
involves memory and I do not think that a memory can be formed in the abstract. Memory
is remembered -- laying down memories increases entropy, and abstract ideas do not have
entropy. (Although thinking abstract ideas does increase the entropy associated with
your brain!) I don't think any of this works without a physical substrate, so, in the
end, all consciousness supervenes on the physical, no matter how indirectly.
But "the physical" in an inference, a model we construct to explain our experiences. So if
you take a Cartesian view that conscious thoughts the epistemological basis of our world
view, to say that they must supervene on the physical is a kind of circular inference.
One I have referred to as a virtuous circle because it encompasses all scientific knowledge.
Brent
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