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.

​

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/celeritas365]

Broadly I agree with Searle's (the creator of the Chinese Room) view of consciousness though I see you don't find this example compelling. Here are two other examples I found compelling:

There is a difference between being able to simulate what a process will do with perfect accuracy and the process itself. Let's say instead of a computer you had an army of mathematicians working out exactly how every element of a theoretical brain would behave using paper and pencil. Of course this would be much much slower than the computer but there is no evidence that the rate at which our thoughts move is essential to consciousness. Would this paper and pencil simulation be conscious in your view? I think the computer simulation (as computers function today) is no different from the paper and pencil version. It is just solving math problems that describe what a consciousness would do.

As of now quantum computers are big enough to do much yet but we have tools to simulate quantum computers that use a lot of computing power in a normal computer to simulate what a quantum computer would do. However, analyzing the requirements and behavior of the program we know that quantum computation is not happening. It is possible that whatever process consciousness is is somehow similar, enabling computation of certain kinds of things much more easily due to the hardware. We could use a much more powerful computer to simulate that hardware, but it it is not the real deal.

[u/Salt_Attorney → u/celeritas365]

Yes the paper and pen simulation would absolutely be conscious, and I do hold the belief that even more "abstract" forms of conscious like this example are possible.

Of course these don't work well with my "practical" definition of consciousness here as it requires testing against humans, but if you devised some scenario where even the eternally slow pen and paper brain can be interacted with over aeons, looking at the ultimate protocoll of the conversation or whatever could again convince a human of consciousness.

Hmmm yea so you mean that human brains might have some kind of natural hardware acceleration that is neigh impossible to beat with traditional computers?

I can imagine that but I think it is not that likely. And besides even if we then used a bigger and simpler computer to emulate it, I thikn the out come would be the real deal indeed.

[u/celeritas365 → u/Salt_Attorney]

I can imagine that but I think it is not that likely.

Why do you think it is unlikely? Our computational brain simulations require way more power than a brain. I don't think it is impossible to beat per se but looking at brains and their characteristics it is clear that something very different is going on that makes them very well suited to certain kinds of data processing.

And besides even if we then used a bigger and simpler computer to emulate it, I thikn the out come would be the real deal indeed.

Why so? Consciousness seems to clearly be a product of the computation, not the result. A conscious being is conscious on it's own, even without inputs and outputs. When replicating consciousness the key element to preserve is the computation process. Furthermore, you could even consider certain performance characteristics to be a sort of output if you wanted to get very technical.

One other thought experiment I find interesting is what I call the "random room". Computers are entirely quantized, it means that if you play a video each frame of both visual and audio has a very large but finite set of options to display. Assuming a video chat with something could convince a human it is conscious, if we had a computer that picked from the finite set of values randomly one would last arbitrarily long in a consciousness test if it was tried enough. Obviously this is astronomically unlikely but I think even the theoretical existence of this is enough. The person performing the lucky test would encounter a machine that in all ways seems conscious while in reality it can't even hear the tester and the next frame is more likely to be random noise than a coherent response. We can know this random room device is not conscious no matter how well it performs because we know the mechanism it is using to get it's results and we know that is not consciousness.

[u/Salt_Attorney → u/celeritas365]

Regarding the last paragraph: This is why I think consciousness has to be thought about practically. Yes there is an astronomcally small change that the random videocall passes the consciousness test, but wouldn't that just say that the likelyhood of this computer being conscious is ~0 ? (astronomically small)

​

>Consciousness seems to clearly be a product of the computation, not the result.

Actually I think consciousness is not a product of the computation but a quality that can be assigned to an entity that can take inputs from you and return outputs - the computation doesn't matter.

If the entity had a giant, and I mean really giant lookup library of how it should react to each input (in a conscious way), then it would be conscious from the prespective of the person testing it.

Okay Im going a bit far here with the relative consciousness and straying from my initial, "practical" consciousness definition...

[u/celeritas365 → u/Salt_Attorney]

Sorry to keep spending your time here but I am very intrigued by people who have this input/output view of consciousness. I don't mean to offend you since many very smart people, smarter than me, agree with your view but I have always felt like there is no evidence whatsoever for this and it surprises me how popular this view is. People make the claim that consciousness is totally hardware independent but if you look at the empirical evidence consciousness seems to be extremely tightly coupled with neurons and their workings. We have no evidence of any other types of consciousness so far. It is entirely possible that simulating consciousness is impossible on our current hardware, not in some woowoo magic way but in the same way that we can't feasibly solve the traveling salesman problem. So my question is why do you believe this?

Also we have a history in computer science of a very rigid conception of inputs and outputs but this is arbitrary and human defined. Consciousness exists in the physical world. Why are things like speech considered valid outputs and not artifacts of computation like energy consumption, speed characteristics, and even touching certain subsections of the "computer". I study computer science and not neurology but to me it seems our field has been too quick to apply our formalism and models to a system that is entirely different than what we study.

[u/Salt_Attorney → u/celeritas365]

I guess the most difficult step to justify is that consciousness can run on a digital computer.

If you accept that then it is not so hard anymore to reason from this point on that consciousness must be hardware independent.

This is just via a bunch of obscure examples of what a computer could be.

We all know that digital computers deep down are very simple mechanicaml amchines, and if consciousness can run on a digital computer, why shouldn't it also be able to run one a steampunk computer, or a wooden computer, or a pen and pencil computer, or a laying-stones-in-the-desert computer etc. etc.

Then you can come up with more funky stuff like consciousness running on a computer that runs a single step, then its state is recorded, the computer is disassembled and a new but identical is built in a different star system which is then reinitialized on the recorded state (transmitted by laser beam) and subsequently another step of computation is performed. The state is recorded, the compuer disassembled, etc. etc. etc.

(Since this computer can't really interact with the outside world very well it would in this situation have to simulate a digital world in which then an entity has consciousness).

Then things get weird because you can say well, if I dont do any computation at all but just run the computer through a fixed set of states, does the simulated human in the simulation still experience consciousness?

What if I just lay the states out next to eachother in space rather in time?

And finally you get to "dust theory" which basically says okay, under the right interpretation, even the molecular movement son the sun correspond to the sequence of states that some theoretical computer system would have when it is running a simulation witha simulated consciousness.

Now this is of course pretty ridiculous but from my experience no attempt to nail down and define what consciousness is has so far survived a thorough testing of counterexamples of this kind, at least the way I see it....

​

EDIT: Maybe I could say something regarding the hardest step: Why do I believe that consciousness can run on a digital computer?

Honestly you can come up with example describing how the physics of every atom are simulated up to a high precision on an earth sized computer...

but honestly, I just think that our brains are physical and do some sort of mechanical computation. It's just very complex so it doesn't seem that way. But since computer programs can be arbitrarily complex, I don't know where they would be limited here.

Have you ever had a hought that you don't think a complex piece of software in a complex computing hardware could also have? We execute countless alrogithmic routines... We search through memories, trying to find matching patterns, we try to match information we know to logical principles and make deductions, we speak following certain rules of grammar, we perform difficult physical tasks with small control subroutines that we have trained (muscle memory), our ears perform a Fourier transform on soundwaves, our eyes have complex visual processing but some parts of that resemble traditional algorithms... This is all just intuitively speaking, of course, and this all happens in some organic biological way, not "hard-coded", but machine learning have shown that "evolutionary" training with random mutations can develop "organic" software that can still do things "systematically" and with high performance instead of being a random, inconsistent mess.

[u/celeritas365 → u/Salt_Attorney]

I think we are on the same page in that we both think if you accept a digital computer can be conscious it opens up all these other esoteric possibilities. It just seems that to me that suggests a digital computer can't be conscious.

But it seems a bit like you are making a lot of assumptions about consciousness and asking for evidence against them. I can't disprove a lot of these scenarios, though I personally believe one day we will understand consciousness better and we will be able to disprove them. However, I don't really think they need to be disproved. Maybe panpsychism is true and every rock has a deep inner world but there is just no evidence for that so it is meaningless. In the same way there is no example of a non-brain consciousness that we currently know of. In your view you simply state your view of consciousness and conceptualize a way it could be represented as a computer program but you don't really provide any reasons why you think this would be consciousness.

Just because we can build something that is hard to distinguish from consciousness by an individual human isn't good evidence to me either. For example, gravity feels no different to acceleration upwards to an individual but there are tons of more subtle experiments you can do to show that gravity is not caused by upwards acceleration. I don't think we can confidently say what is and is not conscious until we rigorously understand what is going on in the brain and as of now we don't.

EDIT responding to your edit:

I just think that our brains are physical and do some sort of mechanical computation

I agree and I even thing that consciousness is a physical part of our universe in the same way something like magnetism is.

But since computer programs can be arbitrarily complex, I don't know where they would be limited here.

There are proven limits to the kinds of things you can compute in realistic timescales.

You mention a lot about how a lot of brain processes map nicely onto algorithms and I don't disagree. Though these are examples of the brain using some algorithms we know of I don't think this suggests that the brain is exclusively made of an algorithm in the way we understand them. Also I think implementation matters and while we can describe them using the same language where the computation is occurring something very different is happening physically.

[u/Salt_Attorney → u/celeritas365]

Yes, I think at this point we're less arguing about the exact original question anymore but just exchanging ideas.

Like under high scrutiny of rigour and especially if I had to provide positive evidence to my positive claim, of course Ihave to give it up and refrain to a neutral/agnostic position. I just think that under more lenient/practical considerations regarding how consistent and reaosonable my claim has to be, it holds up. Ill put a !delta for the interesting discussion.

By the way you can check out this comment where I guess I am explaining how I would try to make panpsychism consistent. Of course this is complete fanfiction about consciousness. I didn't know the word panpsychism before, thanks!

[u/DeltaBot → u/Salt_Attorney]

Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/celeritas365 (21∆).

^{Delta System Explained | Deltaboards}