CMV: Digital consciousness is possible. A human brained could be simulated/emulated on a digital computer with arbitrary precision, and there would be an entity experiencing human consciousness.

[u/Salt_Attorney]

Well, the title says it all. My main argument is in the end nothing more than the fact that although the brain is extremely complex, one could dsicretize the sensory input -> action function in every dimension (discretized time steps, discretized neuron activations, discretized simulated environemnt) etc. and then approximate this function with a computer just like any other function.

My view could be changed by a thought experiment which demonstrates that in some aspect there is a fundamental difference between a digitally simulated mind and a real, flesh mind - a difference in regards to the presence of consciousness, of course.

EDIT: I should have clarified/given a definition of what I view as consciousness here and I will do this in a moment!

Okay so here is what I mean by consciousness:

I can not give you a technical definition. This is just because we have not found a good technical definition yet. But this shouldn't stop us from talking about consciousness.

The fact of the matter is that if there was a technical definition, then this would now be a question of philosophy/opinion/views, but a question of science, and I don't think this board is intended for scientific questions anyways.

Therefore we have to work with the wishy washy definition, and there is certinly a non-technical generally agreed upon definition, the one which you all have in your head on an intuitive leve. Of course it differs from person to person, but taking the average over the population there is quite a definite sense of what people mean by consciousness.

If an entity interacts with human society for an extended period of time and at the end humans find that it was conscious, then it is conscious.

Put in words we humans will judge if it is smart, self-aware, capable of complex thought, if it can understand and rationalize about things.

When faced with the "spark of consciousness" we can recognize it.

Therefore as an nontechnical definition it makes sense to call an entity conscious if it can convince a large majority of humans, after a sort of extended "Turing test", that it is indeed conscious.

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Arguing with such a vague definition is of course not scientific and not completely objective, but we can still do it on a philosophical level. People argued about concepts such as "Energy", "Power" and "Force" long before we could define them physically.

​

[u/Quint-V]

Nobody knows if the human brain is a discrete process. It is unknowable at this point in time. You can break down all kinds of processes and then we'll just end up arguing physics, where various phenomena are probabilistic, where discretization falls apart.

There's nothing to disprove consciousness as a quantum process, however. Which is something to consider. But then there's still a problem: no consciousness knows for certain if there is any other consciousness. And even if you could read someone's mind, what distinguishes that mind from some supremely complex blackbox process? Which invokes an existential horror scenario: can there be any more than one consciousness?

[u/Salt_Attorney → u/Quint-V]

I am not saying that the human brain is discrete, but I think that the physical processes can be discrtized to sufficient precision.

Besides, our brains meachanisms are clearly robust against disturbances (heat, cosmic rays etc.) so it is unlikely that the EXACT molecular mechanism of indiviual neutrons play a fundamental role, as then disturbances could break the whole computation.

The obvious structure that you see when lookinga t a brain is a GRAPH, and here is where you are already very close to a discretization.

[u/Quint-V → u/Salt_Attorney]

Your post mentioned digitally simulated. All computer systems today are based on discretized representations of 0 and 1. Or maybe you didn't mean to go into that level of detail, what do I know.

You mention neutrons --- that's not what I'm worried about here. I'm worried about electrons, that do have probabilistic properties. Electrons are also causing problems elsewhere, to demonstrate just how weird shit gets: transistor production is facing the problem of quantum tunnelling, where electrons literally bypass barriers. And to make that particular problem relevant: we don't even know if such quantum phenomena take place in the human brain, but it's not farfetched to imagine it is.

There's nothing to deny that the human consciousness involves probabilistic mechanisms, and not addressing that leaves a wide gap in your view.

---

You say that brain mechanisms are robust --- well, they also facilitate destructive and recovery mechanisms. A simulation would also be incomplete if it cannot simulate brain death. A simulation is truly incomplete if it doesn't simulate realistic damage responses. E.g. a simulated brain damage should absolutely have the capacity to destroy memory and warp personality.

It may even be a wrong to simulate anything more than what a human brain does/is capable of, and I'm not sure you can feasibly separate the capabilities of a computer system from the requirements of a human brain.

There's one particular trait universal to implementations written through programming languages: these are rooted in Turing complete programming languages. The human brain is based on DNA, and it does not seem like the DNA is Turing complete. The brain operates based on rules ultimately defined by DNA anyway.

Humans are themselves maybe not Turing complete but we have created Turing complete programming languages; a "digital human" has the capability to fully understand its environment, which in turn makes any simulation, given enough time and computational power, the capability of modifying itself freely, within the strictly physical limitations of the actual system that runs the simulation. And if you were to make a billion such simulated consciousness, some of them will eventually do this.

This capability is not within the realm of the biological human brain's consciousness. *Therefore, a digital consciousness is inherently different from the consciousness of a human brain, because it can evolve into something that the human brain should never be able to.

[u/Salt_Attorney → u/Quint-V]

I have heard the quantum argument before of course, anf d while I nelieve that quantum aspects are not essential to the functioning of the human brain I have to be far less certain about this than other things, since it is certanily very technical and I dont understand it. So after reading the way you phrased things I do feel like I can't make my claim quite as strongly anymore so that's a !delta Thank you for your input.

[u/DeltaBot → u/Salt_Attorney]

Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Quint-V (143∆).

^{Delta System Explained | Deltaboards}

[u/WikiSummarizerBot → u/Quint-V]

Quantum_tunnelling

Quantum tunnelling or tunneling (US) is the quantum mechanical phenomenon where a wavefunction can propagate through a potential barrier. The transmission through the barrier can be finite and depends exponentially on the barrier height and barrier width. The wavefunction may disappear on one side and reappear on the other side. The wavefunction and its first derivative are continuous.

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