I made three videos, 46' together, about consciousness and computation.
In this series in three parts:
Can a computer have its own mind? Is your mind just a computation? We will see what Computer Science has to say. Don't worry, it's beginner level! DIY experiment so that you can verify what I say. The proof appeals to logic and experiment, not to phenomenal experience ("what is like", the "hard problem of consciousness", qualia, the experience of feelings, emotions, pain or pleasure etc) Based on my paper "Does a computer think if no one is around to see it?"
In Episode 1, we will see that what we call computation is a convention, and it can be chosen in numerous ways.
In Episode 2, we will make an experiment to see that what we call computation is a convention, and it can be chosen in numerous ways. We will explore some implications.
In Episode 3, we will see that there is a way to know if your mind is just a computation.
8 comments:
Nice argument. I think you are talking about Searle’s syntactic/semantic gap, adding new probabilistic angle to it.
Namely, the mind cannot just consist of blind syntactic processes, for it would infinitesimally likely that it corresponds to coherent semantics.
I can make a connection with my background, that is mathematics, this actually makes a lot of sense:
In math, if one starts building up theories by syntactic/computational means (i.e. axioms and proof), there is very seldom guarantee that that theory is consistent. Only if we can fathom the structures that give rise to certain theory, that we believe the theory is consistent.
(In fact mathematicians today are not sure whether someday someone may derives contradiction from for example ZFC set theory axioms, because to argue about the structures of set theory one necessarily need to use set theory.)
Thanks!
Yes, a consistent model is enough (and necessary) to show the consistency of the axioms. And indeed, a model is made of sets and relations, so set theory needs to be consistent. I'd take it a step further: even if an infinite-length proof can show an inconsistency, the theory can't be true. But just like I have to trust my senses and my mind, at least enough to be able to make any move or have any thought, I also trust set theory, at least enough to be able to make any proof :)
Hello, its very interesting and surprising. I wonder what grounds conventions in that case? Or in different words what grounds that computers works in coherent unambiguous way. If everything would be relative all the way down there would be nothing to start with, nothing to build on.
Ultimately it is the user interface. This claim can be tested with the open source program in part 2, and also there are some thought experiments in part 2 demonstrating how all possible conventions can be accessed by different user interfaces at once for the same process of the computer.
Thank you for your response, and user interface is not reducible to computation? I watched your video about sentience and it shows that sentience cannot be computational, and here I guess sentience or qualia are an integral part of user interface?
The user interface interfaces the computation with our senses, which interfaces it with the internal representations from our minds. So ultimately it's all in our minds. Now, if you want to ask if mind isn't just a computation, let's assume it is. Then the same ambiguity extends to mind, so this doesn't resolve the ambiguity, it makes it much larger. But then what if we accept that the ambiguity applies to our minds too? This is discussed in part 3.
Yes I should rewatch these parts and follow every step with pen and paper. No, I dont want to ask if mind is just a computation, its not - I already know this from your second movie about sentience, and for me its good news because it means we dont live in simulation, but it also means mind is difficult to fathom. It reminds me Donald Hoffman's perception interface theory in which it is hard to look behind veil of interface while all we can sense is mediated by this interface.
Thank you for the careful analysis and the follow-up questions, Lucjan!
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